[Osmf-talk] The role of face-to-face meetings in the future of the OSMF board

[Kate Chapman]

Certainly communicating virtually would be the majority of board
communications, but it really doesn't replace meeting in person. As for our
employer paying for us to attend F2F, that certainly wouldn't happen with
my situation. I am not attending SotM this year and cost is the major
reason, I'm attending the CrisisMappers Conference instead. The simple
reason is my travel is being covered by another organization at the same
time as the CrisisMappers Conference because I serve on an advisory board
that has a meeting the day before. This is fairly typical of HOT I travel
for HOT.

One thing that has frustrated me in thinking about budgets is I think we
think too small, especially for fundraising.  It is really hard to
fundraise $10k, basically the same amount of work at $200k or even more.
The money is out there, there seems to be an anti-corporation streak at
least in some parts of the OSMF. Why wouldn't we approach foundations then?
HOT has certainly talked to foundations previously that were not interested
in supporting OSM for humanitarian purposes, but would love to support the
overall OSM community. This doesn't mean we just fundraise and spend for
the sake of it, but we don't need to be afraid of taking on large projects.
For example we had downtime this weekend, according to a tweet from the OSM
Tech team to add redundancy so that wouldn't happen would cost $150k. Why
don't we aspire to do that?

I can certainly help with this. The first year HOT was in existence in 2010
our budget was under $50k, in 2012 it was $400k, for 2015 we are looking at
a budget of $1 million. Fundraising is possible if we want it. The OSMF is
certainly not the same as HOT, but money does allow different decision
making processes. Rather than "what can we afford?" the conversation
instead is "what do we want/need?"

On Mon, Oct 27, 2014 at 6:08 AM, Steve Coast <steve at asklater.com> wrote:

> I agree there are ways to meet efficiently using various technologies. I'd
> say that yes, flying people around is more expensive but a) the benefit
> outweighs the cost and b) finding money isn't hard, we just need to think
> bigger than a $10k budget. What could we achieve with $500k or $5 million?
> There are plenty of foundations out there that would love to fund a great
> cause like ours, we just need a rational set of people on the board who'd
> be accountable for it.
>
> Steve
>
> > On Oct 27, 2014, at 12:35 AM, <Marek.Strassenburg-Kleciak at elektrobit.com>
> <Marek.Strassenburg-Kleciak at elektrobit.com> wrote:
> >
> > +1 and -1 as well:
> > +1: Costs. I have been working for years as a manager in an
> internationally active company. Teleconferences are daily bread. Use
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VSee if you don´t like other commercial
> products. We do it also here: http://www.i-locate.eu/advisory-board/
> because of members from different parts of the world.
> > -1: Not everything is done with Telco. Sometimes it is important to see
> people face to face and discuss things directly. If the discussion is to
> short and you need to achieve results, make longer meetings. I would say, 2
> two-day meetings  each year should be ok.
> >
> > BR,
> > Marek Strassenburg-Kleciak
> >
>
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