[Local-chapters] what chapters and OSMF can do for each other

[Jaak Laineste]

On 16.01.2013, at 16:15, Richard Welty wrote:

> On 1/16/13 9:05 AM, Richard Welty wrote:
>> 
>> it may be that the agreement doesn't need to talk about what the chapters
>> and OSMF do for each other, but it would be nice to see some discussion
>> about what such things might be, whether they're incorporated into the
>> agreement or not.
> having brought it up, i'll now throw a few things out there:
> 
> 1) permission to organize SOTM <locale> conferences in their <locale>, with
> support from OSMF as needed/desired
> 
> 2) permission to run servers that provide various OSM related functions
> for their <locale>, again with support from OSMF as needed/desired
> 
> 3) permission to support mapping in adjacent locales that don't have their
> own chapters yet (e.g., US support for Canadian mappers until the Canadians
> decide they want to form their own chapter.)


 I think also others can do all these things, it could be also local opendata, GIS, wikipedia etc organisation, not neccessarily OSM local chapter. Only thing where formal agreement could be useful would be to use registered trademarks, OpenStreetMap name.  So basically only permission what a local chapter needs would be right to call himself OpenStreetMap local chapter, and that's it. All the other things would be just guidelines and ideas what nice things local people (chapter) could do to support and have fun with the project: run events, servers, mapping parties etc

 It could be that the whole idea of local chapters comes from Wikipedia - they have them, lets have them too. Wikipedia does centralised funding and shares funds via local chapters, OSM does not  do this and I think this is mostly good. Also Wikipedia has strong censorship rules (culture) which is good fit with more hierarchical/formal setup. We do not need this either.

 So my suggestion would be to have very light local chapter approach:
 - If someone wants to call their group as OSM local chapter, let them do it without much hard rules. Rules to follow would be same as normal contributors (do not copy data etc), act in good faith etc. No much formal obligations, fees etc.
 - If some local chapter spoils something really hard, then OSMF can expell them.
 - if there are competing chapters which want same thing (like local domain name), then discuss them case by case.

Jaak at openstreetmap.ee