I feel it is important to show what I did so far, and explain how I see MapLibre’s future. I have served on the Board since MapLibre’s inception, so here it goes…
- I kick-started MapLibre via a Twitter post. There are some good replies including the one from the Mapbox CEO just eight minutes after my initial tweet…
- Created the MapLibre GitHub organization, set up OpenCollective banking and distributed donations acting as the organization treasurer
- Coordinated and worked on initial code rebranding, CI work, and initial NPM publishing, lots of work on charter (thanks Oliver for drafting it!), …
- Presented MapLibre at conferences like State of the Map US and the upcoming FOSS4G
- Engaged in numerous coordination and sponsorship talks with organizations like the OSM board, Amazon, Meta (FB), Microsoft, and others, including those at the conferences. The recent large donation from Meta, and hopefully a few more upcoming ones are due in part to the SOTM-US conference hallway talks.
- Convinced several important repositories to join MapLibre: MapLibre-RS, Martin, mbtileserver-rs, and hopefully soon – Planetiler.
- As a developer, I mostly hack on the backend tooling like Martin - the tile server framework that should eventually serve from PG, mbtiles, and other formats, as well as support server side rendering.
Going forward, here is my vision and how I see my role…
- Listen to the community. Mediate between the needs of all contributors and supporters, large and small. Make sure we all align on the roadmap of the projects, both near and long term.
- Make sure MapLibre stays independent from any one company, and provides value to everyone who wants to do maps.
- I think MapLibre should supply the whole stack of features for developers, to go from the raw data like OSM and Natural Earth to the interactive map in a browser or apps. This means MapLibre should encourage innovation at all levels of the stack, provide tools to create and serve tiles, engage with new standards for 3D, projections, globe to flat zooms, experiment with joining native and javascript stacks (e.g. try Rust web assemblies), … . The more interesting ideas we try, the more likely we will find the good ones bringing even more value (and fun) to everyone involved.
- No money for the Board - I believe it would create too much conflict of interest if the Board is allowed to decide on money allocation, and later turn around and receive that money. We all should decide for ourselves - do we want to represent the community and steer the projects forward, or do we want to receive payments for our efforts? I feel having both may put too much power in too few hands.