I have finally bitten the bullet and acquired a GoPro Hero 5 Black as well as a windshield mount for it, and tomorrow will test it out for collection of Mapillary imagery. Until now I have used smartphones and the Mapillary app exclusively, but that only works if someone else is driving and I can restart the video when the app invariably either crashes or locks up at some point. Since retiring from the ambassadorship, I am now my own chauffeur and no longer enjoy the luxury of being a passenger who can serve as the photographer. Mrs. Mustard kindly granted permission to splurge on a dedicated camera for collecting ground-level imagery.

The OSMF Board decided in August to bite another bullet and resolved to finance a full-time developer of iD, the OSM default editor, plus a full-time system reliability engineer position to ensure maximum reliability of the hardware. The Potlatch maintainer also received a grant for porting Potlatch, since Flash is soon to be deprecated, and some mappers are still using Potlatch very heavily. The Board expressed a strong desire to maintain diversity in the editor ecosystem despite the dominance of JOSM and iD. JOSM maintainers were pinged but indicated that financial support for JOSM is not needed. These decisions were not taken lightly, were discussed with the community, debated within the Board itself, and in the end adopted unanimously because maintenance and support of core infrastructure are crucial to the OSM project, and demands on that infrastructure are only growing.