[Osmf-talk] Losing faith

[Simon Poole]

This is my personal opinion on the matter, it hasn't been discussed at a
board level yet, but undoubtedly will be.

Over the years the OSMF board has tried to delegate more power to the
working groups and with it more responsibility. The hope is that by
giving them authority in their respective areas that we create more
ownership of the issues at hand and enable them to move without having
to get everything decided by a handful of people on the board.  The
concept of the management team takes this one step further.

This is tricky even in more structured commercial environments, in a
rather unstructured volunteer organisation like OSM it is very
difficult. But in both scenarios it is clear that you cannot give
authority with one hand and immediately take it back with the other if
you want people to take their responsibility serious.

Back to the twitter account, I don't know what Mikel intended when he
created the account, but the way it has developed is that it has the
nature of our "official" channel and not the channel that contains
everything OSM related that is tweeted anywhere on the planet. Maybe
that is a mistake, but the correct way to change it is to engage
yourself in the CWG and not to expect the board to fiddle with things it
has clearly delegated to that group.

Simon