[Osmf-talk] Financing the OSMF

[Gregory Marler]

Hi,
This discussion is moving very fast, so my appologies for not replying 
properly to the right people. I have some comments to make.

There's a lot of thoughts being made comparing to international events 
(marthons and paragliding). I appreciate people using their experience 
of such capacities, but the discussion is about income that is NOT 
reliant on events(donation drives and conferences). As such, it's not a 
great comparison.

There are a lot of people that get upset if OpenStreetMap sells itself 
out. I think that's the majority, and personally think it's an important 
thing to remember. Renaming an event or adverts on the homepage are 
unlikely to be acceptable. Some will remember when the map itself had 
markers on it displaying advertisments, that didn't last long and was 
decided never to be repeated. There was even issue and debate this year 
in advertising SotM US (not an OSMF event, albeit a friend of OSMF). I'm 
not sure the policy for that has been fully ironed out yet. However 
advertising OSMF Membership might be a reasonable suggestion, and that 
could be a link to a page with corporate membership.

We are discussing the potential income for OSMF. However, the AGM has a 
vote on the Articles of Association that covers whether or not 
corporations can become members. I think it is worth waiting to see the 
result on that, and if we were to be open for corporate/associate 
members then we should be discussing a price to set. A question on this 
matter was even asked to those standing for election to the OSMF board(I 
am one such candidate).
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Foundation/AGM13

I'm grateful Ed Freyfogel has placed in his views. It would be good to 
talk more about that, and for those who have dealed with corporate 
donators to collate knowledge on the situation. I believe all those 
people are currently quite busy with SotM or other life commitments. The 
organising team of SotM13 are planning to write a "lessons learnt" 
report on this, which will include sponsorship and will be important for 
bringing into this discussion.

Kate, you made a good point that OSMF isn't making use of foundations 
that can be approached for funding. It makes me think of the Mapbox and 
Knight Foundation as an example. 
http://www.mapbox.com/blog/knight-invests-openstreetmap/ But I think 
this was initiated very much from the Mapbox side, it shows we can get 
such funding and it's something worth perusing.

People new to OpenStreetMap, and then new to OSMF, seem to have a gap in 
understanding where OSM is in structure and organisational running. For 
me I think this understanding has come from (besides being with OSM for 
most of it's time) attending the SotM conferences and the OSMF AGMs. I 
understand not everyone can attend the AGMs in person, do we need a 
better way to connect and update those that don't attend SotM?

As an ending remark on this e-mail, Simon is doing a great job of 
summarising the response ever so often. This is helpful for both OSMF 
members, and I'm sure the OSMF board too, in making sure the trends and 
conclusions aren't lost amongst the mailing list archive. Cheers Simon.


Gregory Marler


On 27/08/13 21:10, Michael Kugelmann wrote:
> Am 27.08.2013 11:09, schrieb Roland Olbricht:
>> We lose this best-reputation-funding once we start advertising. So I 
>> strongly oppose that idea.
> +10
>
>
> Best regards,
> Michael.
>
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