[HOT] Board Members

[Om G]

An Advisory Committee of members that represent other organizations sounds like a great idea.

Many of these networks exist informally, but OSM's real benefit I think has been worldwide access+focus & I really hope that continues to be a major priority in the selection of representative input.

The Board actually sounds like 'business-functionary' the way it has been described, mostly policy guidelines and the like. There are however, important decisions and directions that are made inadvertently when the 'inner circle' is meeting and things 'need to be done' out of a perception of time constraints. Without care, philosophical openness can be compromised, and the sense of community lost.

In addition to a more global demographic, I would like to see some very open process (dashboard?) created to allow at least the main priorities and direction of the board's thinking to always be visible. Even like a little vision statement coming out of their regular meetings that provides guidance until the next meeting would be helpful.

In terms of other communities.. wikimapia has an impressive crowd and the whole SBTF just found out that we will only deploy for "Natural Disasters" leaving quite a few people very interested to help in other ways.

Perhaps something like an "organizational API" can be brainstormed facilitating other groups to jump in more easily. I'm sure it would be trivial to include an RSS feed of the latest active projects over on the SBTF main Ning site. I have been trying to coordinate some similar type of collaboration with the wikimapia environment.

The biggest risk I see will be inadvertent ethnocentrism. It is worth taking fundamental steps to avoid this development IMO.

Steady on!  :)

Om