Bart Louwers
Bart Louwers is the maintainer of MapLibre Native. Bart has become quite passionate about open source geospatial in which he found a home. Although he now deals with C++ on a day-to-day basis, he is secretly a JavaScript developer in his heart. Bart likes to argue that LLMs and AI are overhyped, or that they are in fact not, depending on who he is talking to. Bart is Dutch and somehow (still) lives in Germany.
Sessions
Your FOSS project is useful to people, and it gets integrated in more and more systems by upstarts, hobbyists, large corporations, and everything in between. Inevitably this will lead to bug reports as well as wishes for new features from your growing community. Some users will start to participate in discussions, others will also start to make real investments into development. More users, more wishes, more development. At some point you will need to start thinking about how to scale the development efforts and decisionmaking process.
MapLibre Native is a map rendering toolkit fortunate enough to have this problem. The maintainer will share how we are dealing with this challenge so far and the ways we still have to go. What are the (sometimes conflicting) needs of our diverse user base? How do we come together to drive innovations, such as support for the new MapLibre Tile format, 3D Models and non-Western writing systems?