Lately I’ve been assisting with the in-progress New Orleans building import. So far I’ve imported several sections to finish out East New Orleans, and had minimal issues getting everything loaded. That part of town had maybe 3 existing buildings to deal with conflating during the process.

Now that I’ve reached the navigation channel, I’ve moved on to verifying some of the hundreds of other sections imported by other mappers. Some of the central city segments look like they had some significant overlap with existing data, so could use a second set of eyes. Many of those will require local expertise to officially confirm, though.

My name is Coleman McCormick, a geographer and software developer based in St. Petersburg, Florida.

I discovered OpenStreetMap sometime back in 2008 or 9, and have been an active contributor ever since. I run our local Tampa Bay-area mapping parties, mapathons, and other efforts through OSM Tampa Bay - trying to grow our community of contributors in the southeast. After over 4 years as a contributor, I still edit the map almost every day, gradually refining data all over, but focusing mostly on Florida and the southeast US. I’ve also contributed to response efforts through HOT since 2010.

Over the past few years I’ve given numerous talks on the subject of OpenStreetMap, working to outreach to tangent communities that may have an interest in mapping - but don’t come from the traditional developer/tech background. I’m particularly interested in exposing OSM to lower education (K-12), fostering more contributors from related industries (not necessarily software or GIS), and promoting the use of OSM data in the commercial space. The company for which I work is composed of many OpenStreetMap devotees, and we’ve used our time and resources to build tools like Pushpin to make mapping simultaneously more fun and more accessible.

I’m running for the OSM US board because we have a fantastic base community, with tremendous growth potential over the next few years. The project has come so far even in the last 2 or 3 years, with an ever-increasing and diversifying range of side projects and interest groups collectively mapping the country together. I see tons of opportunity for growth and diversification, and hope to help increase both.