[Osmf-talk] AoA Discussion

[Nic Roets]

Hello Frederik,

I agree with your first point (see below).

Regarding your second point: Firstly I believe that board members
should be chosen based on their loyalty and good judgement. The "hard
work" should be delegated. Secondly, I believe prospective board
members should inform members about their employment contracts and /
or alliances and the concerns you raise, but then it should be up to
the members to decide.

My opinion is that the contributors are the cornerstone of
OpenStreetMap. Contributors give something very valuable*  and receive
very little in return. The least we can do is give them a voice in
OSMF. Then they will have a sense of ownership. They will contribute
more data and it will be of a higher quality.

In my model, non contributors can still participate e.g. by sponsoring
Sotm, hardware and / or code development. The board must be free to
delegate these negotiations and responsibilities as they see fit.

Who are the contributors ? In the narrowest sense, we could do
something like count nodes and ways contributed to the database. In
the broadest sense, it includes companies and governments who are
upstream sources (i.e. the US Federal government gave us TIGER and  MS
gave us aerial images).

Should all contributors automatically qualify for membership ? I don't
know if there is a legal requirement that all members should have paid
a membership contribution (under UK law). There may also be legal
problems with making the US Federal government a member. So one
solution will be to reward contributors with votes instead of
membership.

Should every contributor get a vote ? There are a lot of registered
users who are not editing enough to keep their local neighbourhood up
to date. Such users will also lack knowledge of tagging standards. So
it's only fair to exclude them from the voting using a simple formula.
The CTs and the Wikimedia voting system contain formulas that we can
adapt. (A minimum number of changesets during the last year(s)
touching a minimum number objects, possibly changing a minimum number
of tags. Add a clause or two to prevent sock puppets.)

Should some contributors get more than one vote ? I don't think so,
but it can be debated.

*: The transport cost to and from the area being surveyed and
equipment (GPSs) are quite significant. Add the income people forgo
when editing. These costs are vastly greater than any anticipated
"corporate membership" fees.

On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 2:28 PM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
> "Next to the current individual membership also corporate membership will be
> introduced. The rights of corporate members are the same as the individual
> members, only the membership fee will be different (= higher)."
>
> While I think that it is a good idea to avoid OSM-affine companies to sign
> up all their programmers as individual members on the corporate credit card,
> I would like to remove any rights from corporate members.
>
> This is quite common in Germany, where many organisations take "normal
> members" (an individual with full voting rights and all), and what we call a
> "Foerdermitglied", a "sponsoring member". These pay more and have no rights,
> but they can proudly claim to be a "Foerdermitglied" everywhere, and for
> most of them that is what counts.
>
> So instead of having corporate members and normal members, I'd say: Only
> natural persons can become normal members with full rights; but everyone,
> including corporate entities, can become a sponsoring member (or whatever
> other name we choose).
>
> I think it is ok if the commercial world has an influence on OSM but I
> wouldn't want this as part of OSMF. Commercial entities can never be part of
> our community because they are not human beings; I would much prefer the
> commercial players to found their own thing - say, the "OSM business
> alliance" or whatever - and then the OSMF board could every now and again
> invite a speaker for the business alliance to their meetings if they find it
> appropriate.
>
> Secondly, board members.
>
> I'm well known for always saying I don't want people from a commercial OSM
> background on the board, and I have often been criticised for that.
>
> In the discussion at SOTM-EU, Henk hinted at the idea that there could be
> specific places on the board elected by corporate members only. That may
> just have been a glitch; the Wiki only says
>
> "Are all positions on the board elected by members? Or can different groups
> of members/voters elect certain boardmembers. E.g. 4 boardmembers are
> elected by members, 2 boardmembers are elected by local chapters, 2 board
> members are appointed by board (e.g. for specific knowledge)"
>
> But if deep down inside the AoA working group someone really thinks that
> there should be such a thing like a special representative of the corporate
> members on the board, I vehemently object to that.
>
> The main fear I have is not that members of OSM-related commercial
> organisations are evil or that there might be conflicts of interest (even
> though I'm sure there will be); it is that the organisation for whom they
> work gives them more backing and more power and so they will outperform and
> outweigh the other board members.
>
> Imagine a board consisting of 6 hobbyists with a full-time, OSM-unrelated
> job, plus one person working for, say, Google. Imagine that Google allows
> this person to spend a notable amount of their paid working day on OSMF
> matters, or maybe even occasionally use Google resources for legal advice or
> a quick research job. Now everyone knows we're a doocracy; he who does the
> work gets to say how it is done. If one person on the board can do four
> times as much work as everyone else, then that one person will automatically
> be four times as important; and with that person, their employer.
>
> There might be some who say "good for us if Google sponsors OSMF work", but
> I wouldn't see it that way. It would be too near the core for my taste.
>
> This is a very difficult subject because of course not everyone who is
> employed by someone automatically represents them on the board. All board
> members are likely to have a full-time job, and who are we to decide who of
> them is on the board for themselves and who is there as a representative of
> their company? Do we have to ask people for their corporate hierarchy level
> to make a decision, or probe their brains to find out if their career is
> more important to them than OSM? I have no good answer to that, and that's
> why I'd prefer to give all commercial OSM use a wide berth when it comes to
> OSMF board members, just to be on the safe side.
>
> Bye
> Frederik
>
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