## Chairperson’s Report for 2025
This report is a summary of the work we did as a Board in late 2024 and throughout 2025, and along with reflections on where we still have work to do.

### Financial Highlights
#### Corporate members
Our corporate membership continues to expand, with 56 members across all tiers: four Platinum members (TomTom, Microsoft, ESRI, and Meta), plus 4 Gold, 13 Silver, 18 Bronze, and 17 Supporter members. Niantic came onboard as a Silver Member and is sponsoring both the OSMF and SotM conferences.

We're processing applications from new partners including Line Yahoo Corporation of Japan and Micware Corporation of Japan who have expressed interest and, Clutch Engineering, developers of “Sidecar” have applied for corporate membership and their application is being processed. We have also received interest from and started conversations with Kontur who are interested to build a relationship with OSMF – but have not yet applied for corporate membership.

#### Donations
We've been incredibly fortunate with some donations that will support what we can accomplish.

In January, we received a donation of 1 Bitcoin - worth around 80,000 Euros! While this generous gift highlighted that our Bitcoin donation process needs some work, it represents a large part of our income this year.

Grant Slater, our Senior Site Reliability Engineer, secured a major hosting sponsorship from Equinix that will save us significant money on infrastructure costs.

We also received 50,000 Euros from Proton, the Internet privacy company, and secured a massive two-year contract with the Sovereign Tech Agency GmbH within the German government.

The STA contract focuses on improving our core infrastructure - the behind-the-scenes systems that keep OSM running smoothly for the community. Through the Personnel Committee, we apointed Minh Nguyễn, as the Core Infrastructure Investment Project Co-ordinator to manage volunteer community contributions and we are in the process of appointing a Developer to assist with the work. While the start was delayed due to an unexpected change during the hiring process, the work is progressing well and will strengthen the foundation that supports all our mapping efforts.

We have access to global satellite coverage from Bing Maps. Despite a short crisis, we renewed our sponsorship of services from Microsoft and arranged for sponsorship to continue for a year while internal re-arrangements within Microsoft are happening.

We continue to receive valuable sponsorship of services from ESRI, the global GIS company, who provide us with two separate global satellite image coverages. We also appreciate that Mapbox also provides us with free global satellite image coverage.

We continue to benefit from valuable in-kind donation by Fastly, who provides us with free access to their global Content Delivery Network (CDN). This service buffers requests for map data and global satellite imagery from Bing Maps, ESRI, and Mapbox. This greatly reduces the work that comes through to our servers. This allows us to deliver content far more quickly than possible using our own equipment.

### Operational Updates
#### Moving the OSMF into the EU
The Board has been working on the Foundation’s move to the EU, but progress has been slower than we hoped. Following Board discussions, we sought advice on two proposed plans from the Licensing Working Group (LWG). Their feedback highlighted flaws and raised questions that needed to be addressed before proceeding.

It is important that the plan we adopt achieves the original goals of the move, avoids creating an excessive administrative burden, and has the confidence of the LWG. To support this, the Board is moving forward with recommendations from LWG to appoint new attorneys to guide the relocation process. The LWG has started conversations with legal firms and will begin interviews of candidate firms soon.

#### Finances
I won’t duplicate the Treasurer’s report but one thing is of general concern. We have agreed to be a fiscal agent for larger donors so that they don’t have to do the administrative work of distributing funds to multiple small OSM organisations globally. Our first attempt at doing this was distributing funds for ESRI and for Meta. We struggled with doing the due diligence of verifying that the recipients are truly the people who are meant to receive the money and then making the international transfers to their accounts. The process was slow and difficult. We hope we have learned a lot from this process and have resolved to continue offering the service.

#### Problem with Donations
We have been trying to sign up with Benevity, a Canadian company that sources charitable donations from company payrolls in wealthy countries. The process became stuck once it was was thought that OSMF does not have an active bank account in the UK. We will need to align our country of registration and our country of banking before we can use Benevity as a funding partner. We are not abandoning this work, as we do have three UK bank accounts, at Triodos, Fire and Bank of Ireland through their Belfast branch)

#### Human Resources
There is a separate Human Resources report from the Personnel Committee so I will say little on that topic. The Board really appreciates the work done by volunteers: your work serving as managers on several projects and appointing the co-ordinator and developer for the big Sovereign Tech Agency project is very much appreciated.

#### Strategic Planning
Working on the Strategic Plan was raised in February, and some responsibility was assigned but the Board has not been able to create any momentum on the project. For the moment, the existing strategic plan will be our guidance. We hope to run a plan revision process in the term of the next Board.

#### 2025 Board Face-to-Face Meeting
The Board met face-to-face in Milan in June, facilitated by longtime OSM supporter Allen Gunn. The annual Face-to-Face meeting is a chance for Board members to build relationships by working co-operatively on important and pending topics. We tackled big questions about improving services for mappers, enhancing the OSM.org website, building local communities, and addressing human resources needs. We also talked about the crisis in Bing imagery (which since has been resolved), the Executive Director post, Communications and the Advisory Board.
We emerged with a long list of action items which are slowly being worked through. As always with volunteer organizations, finding time to work through our action items remains our biggest challenge.

#### Executive Director
The appointment of an Executive Director was raised in the Board meeting in June and discussed at the Face-to-Face. Some documents were circulated but the process needs to be given priority. The issue of employing a new systems administrator is competing with the proposal for an Executive Director.
A big obstacle is caution about committing to pay a large salary package. Our facilitator at the Face to Face meeting advised that we are in fact fortunate to have reserve funds and that an Executive Director will support fundraising.

#### Board Presence at Regional SotM Conferences
State of the Map (SotM) conferences, are important as they are gatherings of our mapper communities around the world. During the 2025 Board year we have seen regional SotM conferences held in France, the USA and Latin America. There are upcoming SotM conferences in the UK, Africa, Japan and Italy that will happen before the end of 2025.
In April, the Board discussed having a board member present at regional SotM meetings around the world. This would be expensive, but the previous sponsorship of Dani Waltersdorfer (Director) to attend SotM Latam 2024 was highly productive so the Board is in favour of some degree of board presence but is, at the same time, cautious to not become a travel club for Board members. We're providing partial support for Héctor Ochoa Ortiz (Director) to attend SotM Latam 2025 and Laura Mugeha to attend SotM Africa 2025.

#### Diversity and Inclusion
We are always aware that we need to represent the interests of our diverse membership. We did receive a letter challenging the Board on its diversity and the prominence of English in our work. We responded that we have only one native born English speaker in our Board of seven and that our use of English is a convenience. We represent three continents. We have women and men, old and young and a range of skin tones on the Board. The incoming Board members will add Asia as a fourth continent and some new languages to the mix.

#### Community Presentations
We were fortunate to have presentation at two Board meetings by the Federation of French OSM Professionals and by OSM Rwanda.

### Working Groups and Committees
#### Engineering Working Group
The Engineering Working Group had a Microgrants programme in 2025 with funding set at 30 thousand Pounds. Applications for the projects closed on July 31st. Projects are currently being evaluated and will soon be announced.

#### Operations Working Group
There was a three day outage of OSM in December 2024. It was caused by failure of equipment owned by our Internet Service Provider. We were lucky that our Operations team was already in the process of adding a second provider, which let us restore service faster. The lesson learned was to not trust one ISP to provide continuous service. We have continued to buy bandwidth from the provider that failed, but only in a secondary or backup capacity in case the new provider has a failure. Increasing our resiliency against outages will keep being a focus of our SSRE's work.
We sponsored travel costs for operations specialists Tom Hughes, Grant Slater and Andy Allan to attend the Karlsruhe Hack Week End in February 2025.

#### Communications Working Group
Communications Working Group is responsible for preparing and posting news and information about the OSM project to social media. The Group purchased a subscription to the “Buffer” software to speed up posting to multiple social media accounts.

#### Local Chapters and Communities Working Group
The Group has been working on Local Chapter applications from Brazil, The Gambia, Nigeria, Indonesia, Kenya, Colombia, Spain and the Middle East.
Financial intermediary transfers of Meta and ESRI Sponsorships were approved for FOSS4GIT-OSMIT 2024 FOSS4G/SotM Oceania 2024, SotM Rwanda 2024, SotM Kerala 2024, SotM Asia 2024, Sotm Latam 2024, SotM Bangladesh SotM Japan 2025 and SotM DRC 2025.
We were approached by the French Federation of OSM Professionals to ask for an extension of the licence to use our trademarks. This was granted.

#### Membership Working Group
The Membership Working Group struggles to get volunteers. If anyone wants to assist the group please contact MWG.
During this Board term we approved 8 Active Contributor memberships for non-mapping contributions. These are memberships for people who are not active mappers but who assist the OSM movement in other ways, for example by organising conferences or mapping parties.
The primary tool of the Membership Group is CiviCRM. We have had a few problems with it and with our custom plugin to validate active memberships, and we do not have in-house skills to get it working properly. In July, we began looking at getting professional help with our CiviCRM application. This has not progressed satisfactorily.

#### Moderation Team
The Moderation Team manages conflicts and problems that arise among our mappers on our Foundation controlled chat forums. This is largely unseen work and we thank them for their dedication to doing this important work.

#### Other Activities
We had to deal with the UK Online Safety Act during the year. The requirements are onerous and costly to implement. Fortunately, our small scale operation is not fully in their sights, and we have been able to perform a basic version of their safety controls.
We had to deal with the DCMA regulations as well. Getting our agent registration renewal done was a nightmare of multiple emails between the Legal Working Group, the DCMA office, our Operations team and our Treasurer. Thanks very much to the team that managed that.
We endorsed the United Nations Open Source Principles in April. These are guidelines to promote collaboration and the adoption of open source technologies within the UN and globally.
The OSMF registers our board directors with the UK Companies House but now have a new hoop to jump through. Verification of Board members' identities is now a requirement of Companies House. They are implementing a more stringent “Know your Directors” policy, so OSMF Board members will have to submit copies of their passports to Companies House for positive identification. This process begins soon.

#### Looking to the Future
In the next year we expect to have the OSM Foundation running in the European Union. We will be working on the Executive Director position and the Systems Administrator position. We will be ramping up fundraising to see if we can afford those positions. We will be catching up on delivery of our action items out of the Milan Face to Face conference and we will be reviewing our strategic plan.

#### Thanks
It is appropriate to end with thanks for everyone who has supported the OSM project in 2025. First of all we thank the mappers around the world – thank you for giving of your time with such enthusiasm. We also thank the many individual donors who sent in many small donations. We thank the tech people who volunteer to keep our servers running and who write the software.
We thank our Corporate Members, who provide important services for free and who contribute a large chunk of our funds. We thank the German Government for the large core-software development contract, and we thank Proton and the person who kindly gave us a Bitcoin.
We especially thank our employees and contractors: Dorothea Kazazi, Grant Slater, Michelle Heydon, Martin Raifer, Paul Norman and Minh Nguyễn.
And I thank the Board members for their year of service and for maintaining a positive, hard working attitude throughout.

That is all I have to report for this year.