Each year at our annual conference, we celebrate our GIS person of the year through our Summit Award. The Summit Award represents a Washington State GIS professional who has made a lifelong impact on our local GIS community through their contributions to the field and incredible quality of their work. The winner of this award represents the ‘peak’ of what Washington’s GIS community has to offer.
This year’s winner is… Clifford Snow! Clifford is unique among our recent award winners, having spent his career in the telecom industry and only getting involved with GIS as an OpenStreetMaps (OSM) volunteer contributor in his retirement. But his impact on GIS far outweighs his relatively brief time with GIS. And he’s done it all while using only open source software!
Clifford with 2025 Summit Award winner, Stephen Beimborn
We got to sit down with Clifford to talk about his journey with GIS and the impacts of his work.
After a career in Telecom, how did you find the field of GIS? How did you find your way to OpenStreetMaps? What is your current role with OSM?
I have always been a big Linux user and spent my career with AT&T, who developed Linux. After AT&T, I got into consulting work and even spent considerable time watching glassblowing at Dale Chihuly's studio on Lake Union, where my wife worked as an accountant. As a consultant, I attended LinuxFest up in Bellingham and came across OSM’s booth. I actually met Hurricane Coast, the wife of the founder of OSM, Steve Coast. She introduced me to OSM got me interested in contributing.
With OSM, I started off the same as most other volunteers, contributing basic details of what was around me. At the time, I lived near Gasworks Park in Seattle, so there were plenty of local landmarks and details to add and validate to OSM’s maps.
Over time, I became involved in our Pedestrian and Data Working Groups. With the Pedestrian Group, we were inspired by the University of Washington’s Tasker Center, which focuses on accessible technology for people. Specifically, the Pedestrian Group mapped the sidewalks of Seattle and created pedestrian maps for people with wheelchairs, routing them around obstacles like Seattle’s many hills and even into buildings to access elevators and reach different elevation roads. I have always been a big walker myself and have mapped out most of the pedestrian paths in Skagit County, where I currently live for OSM. We get very detailed, recording crossing patterns, the presence of tactile surfaces and surface types, to give users as good of a picture as we can.
With the Data Working Group, I help with data validation and dealing with ‘digital vandalism’ on OSM. Given anyone can add to OSM, there are plenty of bad actors wanting to make a mess of things or push their own agendas. For example, the City of Los Angeles once had its name changed to something very crude. In another case, with the Ukraine-Russian conflict, borders were shifted to something that did not reflect reality. Given OSM serves as the foundation of many other mapping applications, including Esri, you could imagine the cascading effects of digital vandalism. But our team of volunteers was able to go in and undo the work of these bad actors.
Are there any particularly challenging or memorable OSM projects you have worked on?
The one that comes to mind is a project where we groundtruthed every single building in Seattle. We obtained open source building and address data files from the City and combined the data in OSM. After training up our team of volunteers in groups, the City was divided into different sections or neighborhoods and assigned to an individual import team volunteer.
Each volunteer was asked to work through the data for their assigned section, block by block, street by street, however worked best for them. They copied the address and building data from teh CIty of Seattle files into OSM and would add/remove data as necessary based on the satellite imagery. While planning for this project started in Late 2012 and we did complete much of the work following, you can imagine this project is still ongoing as Seattle continues to grow and develop.
What GIS software or tools do you use as you contribute to OSM?
When I add to OSM, I use a combination of: Java OpenStreetMap (JOSM), QGIS, and PostgreSQL. JOSM is used to contribute directly to OSM while QGIS supports the editing and visualization of OSM's and other geospatial data. PostgreSQL is the relational database management system that underlies OSM’s central database.
This software is purely open-source, meaning anyone with enough technical knowledge can not only add to OSM, but help make it even better!
Given that you are a volunteer, what keeps you contributing to OSM? What keeps you in the realm of GIS?
That’s a tough question, but I would say it is as simple as I enjoy it and get a lot of satisfaction out of it.
A while back, I was looking at old golf courses and how some of them were redone or redeveloped. I found one out in Lincoln County that looked like it had been redone on satellite imagery, but the OSM road data surrounding the course did not reflect it, so I corrected them. Then I noticed the nearby buildings were not right too, so I corrected them as well. Eventually, I corrected the roads and building footprints for the whole county! Basically, I really enjoy finding problems and solving them.
This speaks to a data problem for rural areas, where they often are overlooked and aren’t mapped or their data updated. OSM US’s president, Matthew Wilden, has personally published maps of small towns that previously weren’t on OSM. Both of us share a common interest in these rural communities and are fascinated by what information isn’t being shared with everyone. I encourage OSM mappers to look around and help fill in those data gaps for rural areas near them.
What was your initial reaction to receiving the award, did you think you were in the running?
Stunned, I really wasn’t expecting it, you all definitely maintained the secret well! And I actually thank Heather for accidentally moving the slides too far forward and revealing that I was the winner. It gave me a moment to myself to process the surprise before going on stage to accept the award.
Where do you keep your plaque?
I picked out a spot on my office wall right next to a photo of all of the attendees from OSM’s State of the Map US back in 2016.
Given you made a major pivot into GIS later in your life, what thought do you have for aspiring/rising GIS professionals, especially those coming from other industries?
Throughout my career, I’ve spent a lot of time with new technology, figuring it out and how to work with it better. For example, when I first started with AT&T, they were still using card punching for data processing, which was cutting edge at the time. By learning the technology, I was able to resolve some major problems they were having with some of their telecom centers.
Later on, I was always looking for new technology, even in fields I wasn’t involved in. By seeking these new technologies out, I got to meet many incredibly smart people that I in turn learned a lot from. Though many technologies were distant and felt unrelated to my work, there were times where that knowledge and those connections did come in handy throughout my career.
Which is especially relevant for GIS. It is such a wide reaching field across so many industries, you never know what technologies or knowledge will become important. I got to witness the rise of drone technology and how quickly GIS took up the tools and is now something every GIS user has at least put some thought into.
Outside of GIS, what do you do for fun?
I really enjoy simply going out to eat with friends and trying new wines. There are a couple of wineries down in Prosser that I love to tour and sample what they have.
Any Final Thoughts?
I really love that Washington State and its local governments have such a fantastic open data policy. Being able to obtain such rich, high quality data has been incredibly helpful in supporting OSM’s efforts!
As you can read, it is obvious why Clifford was recognized as our Summit Award Winner for 2026. His countless contributions to OSM, dedication to making the world more safe and accessible, and commitment to data quality and openness will leave a lifelong impact to our field.
Clifford, congratulations again and thank you for all you have done for mapping!
