My name is Frank, and I work at the TU Munich, where I focus on geospatial and open-source projects. I am at the start of my career and have much to learn. While I’m early in my career, I bring fresh energy and a strong commitment to connecting MapLibre with two communities I know well: research and governments. I believe these connections can unlock new opportunities for funding, collaboration, and long-term sustainability.

My Contributions This Year

I have been a maintainer of maplibre/martin starting at v0.15.0.

Implemented Features

• Developed a frontend interface (demo) for easier exploration of tiles.
• Add ETag Headers for better caching
• Integrate serving MapLibre styles, simplifying deployments and laying the groundwork for deeper integrations
• SDF icons enabling SVG-like rendering of scalable symbols

Maintenance

• Reworked Martin’s CI, saving 30% of runtime and sped up contributor feedback cycles
• Reworked Martin’s documentation to make us more approachable for new contributors/users
• Answered/reviewed issues, discussions, PRs, … ⇒ regular maintainer things
• Reworked smaller parts of maplibre.org like news or about us to be better fitting

Community engagement:

• Regularly attend TSC meetings to stay aligned with project direction
• I attended the following conferences this year so far:
  • FOSDEM to become a better OSS maintainer
  • FOSSGIS to get a feel for the geo community
  • FOSS4G Europe to advertise Martin and talk to other developers

My goals as a board member

R&D / Funding

• Build a more solid foundation with academia
  • A clear offer statement (⇒ thesis, but also general papers) and
  • in the research-outreach direction
• Revisit governmental funding. There are a few ongoing initiatives in Europe where participating might be interesting and where I think we should at least apply. There are other initiatives on route to make governmental OSS contracting less painful, where we should likely contribute as well.

Making MapLibre a stronger community

• Improve relationships with our integrations. Both in our official wording being less dismissive and in small gestures, I want to see some appreciation towards their maintainers. I would advocate for supporting maintainers to advertise their work at local (tool-specific) conferences or via special merch.

• At Open Source @ TUM, I introduced small, dual-purpose “Christmas” gifts for contributions past a semi-arbitrary bar with great effect. Sending a bit of merch and a handwritten card goes a long way. Being an international community, we would need to be more diverse in the concrete messaging (Christmas, Hanukkah, …), but the idea should be transferable.

  Mockup (click to expand)

  

• Apply more of “isovalents learnings” around building communities.

My goals unrelated to the board

• Rework the roadmap at https://maplibre.org/roadmap to be clearer and more visually appealing
  • Explain what the roadmap is (how items get added, what being on the roadmap eans)
  • Propose a less strict option for non-core projects like martin to have a roadmap, but communicate that this is volunteer-driven
• Release Martin v1.0
• Make maplibre-native-rs production-ready and usable in more than just Martin’s context
• Experiment with bringing cheaper MLT conversion into Martin
• Help in the MLT pushdown/onboarding effort in the tooling we rely on
• Help to present Maplibre at FOSDEM, FOSSGIS, IAA and other more local conferences not already covered by @nyurik to gain/keep mind share

A little more about me

In my spare time, I contribute to open-source projects. My journey in the community started with a local student club, Open Source @ TUM e.V., I helped revive it from just one active alumnus into a hub with €5k/year in funding.

As part of this club, I started a Roomfinder which gradually began to replace the three different legacy Roomfinders our university had accrued at this point. Initially built on Mapbox, this choice quickly outgrew our budget, leading to a migration to a self-hosted solution. Originally, we migrated to TileServer GL and then used Martin after contributing SDF sprites support.

Work wise, I am employed by the TU Munich as a student assistant to work on our Roomfinder. We use MapLibre GL JS and Martin.

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Articles

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