[HOT] Some thoughts about HOT Inc. (long)

[Jean-Guilhem Cailton]

Hi,

Here is an email that I had sent to the members of the HOT Board on June
2nd.

Kate had replied. Netiquette would make it inappropriate for me to send
her answer to a public mailing list, but she can do it herself if she
wishes, of course.

As it appears that I may be censored soon, I'd like to share this with
you while (and if) I still can.


----------


Hi,

A while ago, input has been asked from members of the HOT mailing list
about the strategy of HOT. I've put together a few thoughts about HOT,
that I have had for a while - for some of them.

I've followed HOT since before it was created. Mostly remotely.
Recently, I am grateful to have been able to attend the internship in
Saint Marc in March, which has given me an opportunity to witness
directly and appreciate the work done in the field.

I have a lot of respect and appreciation for the individuals in the HOT
Board, and what they have done. I don't know much about the inner
workings of the Board. Yet there are things that I think could be
improved in what I could perceive of the Board's way of working.

I think that the potential of OSM for humanitarian action and
development is very important, and that it might be useful to share my
views on these things, in an attempt to try to raise some hindrances to
this potential.


        Commons-Based Peer Production and HOT


What is the fundamental organizational principle that explains how
OpenStreetMap in general, and the remote mobilization after the 2010
Haiti earthquake as an example in particular, work ? Yochai Benkler had
described it as "commons-based peer production" (CBPP) in his paper
"Coase's penguin" (http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.html), that
Schuyler mentioned in his talk at Where 2.0 2010.

Why do I feel the need to recall this? Because in this same enlightening
paper, Yochai Benkler opposes this mode of production to hierarchical
management based organizations and to market prices based organizations.

So these are fundamentally different modes of organization.

In practice, for some of the activities of HOT, a mixture of these types
of organizations may be appropriate. For example, for the mapping
project in Saint Marc, a dimension of top-down managerial organization
was probably appropriate to organize the logistics, training and
coordination work of 30 young local mappers, and to satisfy the
requirements of the sponsor USAID.

Yet, for the broad spectrum of OSM activities related in some way to
humanitarian action and development, this mix should be done carefully.
Otherwise, the risk is to sterilize the huge potential of CBPP for the
humanitarian dimension of OSM.

Let me quote Yochai Benkler (p. 47):
"The point here is qualitative. It is not only, or even primarily, that
more
people can participate in production. The widely distributed model of
information production will better identify who is the best person to
produce a specific component of a project, all abilities and
availability to
work on the specific module within a specific time frame considered. With
enough uncertainty as to the value of various productive activities and
enough variability in the quality of information inputs and human creative
talent vis-à-vis any set of production opportunities, coordination and
continuous communications among the pool of potential producers and
consumers can generate better information about the most valuable
productive actions and the best human agents available at a given time.
Although markets and firm incentive schemes are aimed at producing
precisely this form of self-identification, the rigidities associated with
collecting and comprehending bids from individuals through these systems
(i.e., transaction costs) limit the efficacy of self-identification,
relative to
peer production."

and (p. 50):
"This initial statement is a simplification and understatement of the
potential value of the function by which the sizes of the sets of agents
and
resources increase productivity. There are two additional components: the
range of projects that might be pursued with different talent applied to a
given set of resources and the potential for valuable collaboration.
First, a
more diverse set of talents looking at a set of resources may reveal
available
projects that would not be apparent when one only considers the set of
resources as usable by a bounded set of agents. In other words, one of the
advantages may be not the ability of A1 to pursue a given project with r2
better than A2 could have but the ability to see that a more valuable
project
is possible.

Second, the initial statement does not take into consideration the
possible ways in which cooperating individuals can make each other
creative in different ways than they otherwise would have been. Once one
takes into consideration these diverse effects on the increased
possibilities
for relationships among individuals and between individuals and resources,
it becomes even more likely that there are increasing returns to scale to
increases in the number of agents and resources involved in a production
process."

You can also refer to figures near these pages that show how the
potential of positive interactions increase when restrictions are reduced.

An area that I see as having a potential for improvement from this point
of view in the context of HOT is the exchange of information (I'll use
this term instead of "communication", which tends to be ambiguous with
"public relations"), between, on one the one hand, the needs and
existing data resources of ("traditional") humanitarian actors, and, on
the other hand, the volunteers that could help.

HOT Inc. present itself as a "bridge" between the two. It should be more
careful not to be a bottleneck.

Let us illustrate this with a very simplified model, that should yet be
sufficient to give an idea of the orders of magnitude involved. If N is
the number of NGOs, international, governmental or local organizations
that could interact in a positive way with the humanitarian OSM
community, and V is the number of volunteers or potential volunteers in
this community, the number of potential interactions, matching needs
with volunteer resources to act on them, is of the order N x V, (O(N.V)
in computer science notation), IF all volunteers can be aware of all the
needs, and decide to allocate their time and competence to them if they
think it can useful.

If all the potential interactions have to go through a central point,
such as the Board of HOT Inc., for example, the number of potential
interactions is limited by the processing capability of this center,
which is a constant C (small relative to V - currently C is no more than
7). The number of potential interactions "with the outside" is O(NC).
And the number of potential interactions "with the inside" is O(CV). The
total number of potential interactions is not more than O(CN + CV).
Which is in general very small relative to O(NV).

If we plug in example numbers, to give a concrete idea, and, to be
conservative, set N to the order of 100 and V to 1000, the number of
potential interactions if information flows freely is of the order of
100 000, but only of 7700 if they have to go through a center point.
That is to say that more than 90 % of potential interactions does not
even have any chance to happen. (And nobody knows about it).

Basically we fall back to the limitation of the hierarchical management
model, where allocation of "resources" relies on the limited knowledge
of management hierarchy.

Whatever the quality and talent of the members of the Board, the actions
that can be understood, approved and controlled by them is only a very
small subset of all the potentially positive actions that could be
carried out by the community at large. The Board should thus be careful
not to reduce this potential by limiting information exchange.

Some external organizations may be happy to find interlocutors with whom
they can interact in the traditional way they are used to. But if this
were the only way to interact with the community, the true potential of
CBPP would essentially be lost.

"Center does not scale."

CBPP cannot really scale to its full potential without more transparency
in the interactions with the outside. And it should be accepted that not
everything that can happen in the interactions between the "traditional"
humanitarian community and the OSM community be controlled by the HOT
Board.

There are already so many things to do in support functions. And there
will be even much more if these interactions are left to grow naturally.


It is not easy to define a priori exactly how this new paradigm of CBPP
should best be organized. But at least,organization types that go
against its core principles should be avoided as much as possible.

Good intentions are not enough. (It is not difficult to find examples of
good intentions that had bad results). "The road to hell is paved with
good intentions".

So please be careful, and take this into consideration. It is a
fundamental problem, and a lot of damage could be done if it is not
taken into account.

"We do not know what we ignore, until we know it."


        Financial Tranparency


After this fundamental organizational question, I think there is more
specifically a governance question.

Actually, it depends upon what HOT Inc. intends to be.

If it wants to help support the humanitarian OSM community, there are
some governance principles that should be appropriate. For example,
those that apply to non-profit organizations. The intention to get this
status formally in the US has been stated. Given the international
status of the community, some international considerations could be
taken into account as well.

For example, in France, it is a basic fiscal principle that people who
receive a remuneration from a non-profit association cannot be on its
board. The reason is probably that if there are divergences between the
particular interests of the employees and the general interest, it would
be too much to ask from the employees on the board to systematically
make choices against their own interests. (Thus the non-profit status
would be endangered.) I think this also applies to people who are
professionally active in the field.

The proposed status rule that a member of the Board should abstain when
his or her direct personal interests are at stake is not really
satisfying, as in practice it is known that in organizations where this
is the rule, people can easily work around it with behaviors that can be
summarized by "you are nice to me, so I'll be nice to you". It is also
quite possible that there be a kind of corporatist interest for the
"professional" members of the Board, distinct from the general interest.

So it seems that having at least one level of independence in the
decision process would be a good thing.

Given the current situation and history of HOT, I don't know what would
be the best way to improve the situation in this respect. Maybe
introduce a kind of "surveillance council" (similar to what was
envisioned, e.g., for Ayiti Living Lab), that could be composed of
independent personalities, both from the "traditional" humanitarian
community, from OSM volunteers or even more independent.

Or, at least, a first step would be to be much more transparent.

OSGeo, that was mentioned as an example for HOT structure, has monthly
open board meetings on IRC. This is also the case for OSM France, where
the board meetings were weekly on IRC, and open to all those interested.
These organizations also have board mailing lists, open to the
interested members. (The current HOT communication efforts - mailing
list, blog, IRC - are commendable, but it feels like they go through a
PR filter, and that the real issues are not there).

Also, if you look at HOT Inc. as a company, in the traditional
capitalist sense, it would be fair to consider that a part of its
founding capital was contributed by the OSM contributors, for Haiti and
elsewhere before that, mappers and developers, whose contribution "in
kind" gave it its value. This virtual debt should not be forgotten. And
in traditional capitalist companies, shareholders are entitled to
information, including financial information. Given the specific context
and philosophy of the OSM community, open information would seem to be
an appropriate analogy.

Another thing about associations in France is that they inform their
members of their financial accounting. Especially if they are
non-profit, and especially if they are humanitarian and make public
calls for donations, they must inform the public. So this has come to be
considered as a minimum standard (and it is likely the same in the US).


          Full financial transparency


While on this subject, I would even suggest to take into account the
fact that we are in 2012, and promoting open data, and to go further
than traditional financial reporting. The inspiration for this comes
from the founder of an associative ISP (Tetaneutral.net). In a
presentation to a local FOSS user group, after explaining the technical
and legal aspects of setting up an ISP, he detailed every expense
incurred in running it. His vision, as a former finance professional, is
that it is all too easy to hide things in traditional summary financial
statements. And that the day when open data will include all detailed
public finances, for example, corruption will be much easier to detect.
Corruption is a major plague in today's World. HOT is, or might be,
involved in countries where it may have some of the worst presence at
all levels. Thus there is an opportunity to show an example of open
detailed financial data, as a practical mean to fight corruption.

While we show the benefits of open data in the cartographic field, we
could as an added benefit show its advantages in the governance field.

This could actually be rather easy to implement in practice. Since
accounting must already be done, it is only a matter of taking the
decision to open it.

So these are minimum or desirable ethical standards that I'd suggest for
HOT if it wants to better support the humanitarian OSM community.

In a word, _transparency_ would bring both scaling capacity and ethical
benefits.

It could also be a way to get interested people really involved, as the
wish has been expressed at the last strategic meeting.


Financial transparency could also be instrumental in finding a proper
balance between CBPP and market prices driven production. If an
organization financially supports a HOT project, the modalities of this
support should be transparent, so that volunteers can knowingly choose
to allocate their time to this project. Otherwise, in a worst case
scenario, we could imagine that financially influential actors could
manipulate behind the scenes the mobilization of volunteers, by
orienting it based on hidden price signals. For a sound CBPP, the
information about these price signals, which may be justified and even
necessary to carry on some projects, should be transparently available
among the other elements of information available to volunteers. And
projects should be able to be considered even if they are not financed.


Alternatively, it is also possible that HOT Inc. would rather be a
consulting or humanitarian business around OSM, as there are others. But
then this should be clear, and HOT should not let itself be perceived as
representing the humanitarian OSM community, from the outside as well as
from the inside. (By the way, it is unfortunate that the process by
which the initial HOT Board nominated itself, and then chose or approved
the electoral body cannot be, in my humble opinion, adequate to be
considered a legitimate democratic representative of the OSM community
interested in humanitarian action and development).


Thank you for reading this far. I'd be curious to know if any of you
agrees with anything expressed here, however awkwardly.

Best wishes,

Jean-Guilhem

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