<div>(automatic translation from French by <a href="http://www.DeepL.com/Translator" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer nofollow noopener">www.DeepL.com/Translator</a>)<br></div><div><br></div><div>The
latest blog post [1] by Christoph Hormann (Imagico) on the OSMF was
mentioned in #531 of WeeklyOSM, but was not the subject of a thread on
the OSMF's talk list. With two months to go before the end of the year
and a new election to the board, it deserves to be shared and commented
on.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Personally, I share the same concerns and
disappointment, as well as a certain discouragement. I generally had the
same perception, with nuances, regarding the different candidacies
submitted during the last election. How could one imagine that a change
of 3 people out of a total of 7 would produce such radical mutations in
the conduct of the board, something that the demonstrations of some and
others did not allow us to perceive at the time?<br></div><div><br></div><div>The
introduction of non-public meetings, which had not been held since 2016,
is indeed regrettable and unexpected, when the only candidate who
wanted them to return at the time of the elections was not elected, and
at the same time two people who might have wanted to put an end to it
were leaving the board. Respect for the transparency of exchanges and
decisions is a point that should not be overlooked for supposed
advantages in terms of efficiency or ease of speech. Apart from the loss
of the members' ability to control the decisions made by the
Foundation's board, it is also the best way to demotivate those who wish
to follow, comment on and actively accompany its work. For my part, I
would add the new tendency to create restricted committees whose members
are chosen directly by the board (or whose selection is made through
the caudal forks of one of the board members), which differs
significantly from the practice of working groups open to any member who
wants to get involved. However, even within the framework of these
designated committees, the board can overrule the decisions, as
evidenced by the selection of the Microgrants select committee, some of
whose unsuccessful candidates were finally selected, which was not
without surprise.<br></div><div><br></div><div>We are touching here on another strong
and worrying trend of the OSMF 2020 board: that of freeing itself from
the frameworks built in the past, the absence of willingness to put in
place new, well-argued and well-defined frameworks, and the refusal to
consider the implications of potentially far-reaching actions in terms
of governance or financial management. In the absence of a visible
history in the wiki (which would obviously be interesting here again in
terms of transparency), it is difficult to say when exactly the
sentence: "Is responsible for allocating $$ to diverse worthwhile
software projects with grants and microgrants was added. "in the Mission
statement page [2]. Apart from the fact that it is rather curious to
mention US dollars when, unless I am mistaken, OSMF funds are not held
in this currency but in EUR and GBP, this sentence seems particularly
vague as to the scope of these funds and leaves room for all
interpretations, while many exchanges between OSMF members have taken
place on the definition of different perimeters, notably around another
blog post also published by Imagico [3]. Unless I'm mistaken, only one
member of the board is involved, but the exchange is particularly
enlightening: Rory McCann summarizes the board's approach to funding
decisions in terms of what "sounds good" and he fails to understand the
expectations summarized by Imagico in the sentence "document and publish
the key parts of the decision making process, in particular risk
analysis that has been made on social implications and economic risk".<br></div><div>In
a thread on the talk list [4], Rory draws a parallel between this mode
of decision making and OSM tagging, as if it were possible to compare
flexible, reversible semantic choices without any consequence on the
future of the OSM project with decisions, especially financial
decisions, which are not.<br></div><div><br></div><div>This propensity to (much)
finance represents another trend of the OSM 2020 board. It is the most
spectacular and visible from the outside. Only one of these financings
falls within the Foundation's scope of action: the function of Senior
site reliability engineer to ensure the continuity of service of the OSM
servers, which is part of the Foundation's Mission statements, is
difficult to circumvent if the volunteers who have been providing it
until now do not wish to or can no longer maintain it and will represent
an important item of expenditure in the Foundation's budget.<br></div><div><br></div><div>On
the other hand, the decision to finance an additional four software
products from the OSM ecosystem now makes the OSMF a de facto economic
player with all the new stakes and interests that this brings with it.
And apart from these crucial aspects of governance, this choice further
explodes the cumulative amount of the Foundation's expenditures over the
past 12 months. 300,000, of which 130,000 were devoted to simple iD
maintenance, compared to 75,000 for the year 2019, out of the total
available funds of 613,000 euros [5]. Half of the available funds will
thus have been spent in a single year, practically the equivalent of the
Pineapple Fund donation spent on software projects outside the OSMF's
perimeter. The sustainability of this approach would be based on a
fundraising strategy that has yet to be fully defined, given that the
future economic context is particularly gloomy, that there has so far
only ever been a single donation in excess of 100,000 Euros, and that
the physical SotMs, a source of income for the Foundation, may not be
organized in the coming years.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Moreover, this action
focused solely on technical needs completely ignores other major issues,
such as the one at the heart of the last two board elections since the
GlobalLogic episode: the fragility of the board's ability to take
control. Two years later, the OSMF does not seem to be better armed to
counter this danger, and rather less so, having less cash and greater
financial needs to maintain its servers. Draft solutions had been
proposed, but were not taken up and implemented, such as increasing the
number of seats on the board to reduce the risk of a radical change
following a simple renewal. The search for other means to strengthen the
structure of the OSMF could, for example, require legal support, which
would probably be costly: inventing or consolidating a legal form that
guarantees the independence of the Foundation, the maintenance of its
objectives and certain of its values (for example, a free license that
necessarily includes attribution and Share Alike), in the same way that
the media The Guardian or Mediapart have been able to find original
forms to perpetuate their independence.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Séverin<br></div><div>(also published on <a href="https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/SeverinGeo/diary/394528" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer nofollow noopener">https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/SeverinGeo/diary/394528</a>)<br></div><div><br></div><div>[1] <a href="http://blog.imagico.de/osmf-general-meeting-and-board-elections/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer nofollow noopener">http://blog.imagico.de/osmf-general-meeting-and-board-elections/</a><br></div><div>[2] <a href="https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Mission_Statement" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer nofollow noopener">https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Mission_Statement</a><br></div><div>[3] <a href="https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/imagico/diary/393808" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer nofollow noopener">https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/imagico/diary/393808</a><br></div><div>[4] <a href="https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/2020-August/007018.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer nofollow noopener">https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/2020-August/007018.html</a><br></div><div>[5] <a href="https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/2020-August/007003.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer nofollow noopener">https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/2020-August/007003.html</a><br></div><div class="protonmail_signature_block protonmail_signature_block-empty"><div class="protonmail_signature_block-user protonmail_signature_block-empty"><br></div><div class="protonmail_signature_block-proton protonmail_signature_block-empty"><br></div></div><div><br></div>