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

Randy Meech randy.meech at gmail.com
Mon Oct 27 16:59:11 UTC 2014


On Mon, Oct 27, 2014 at 10:42 AM, Kate Chapman <kate at maploser.com> wrote:

> 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 think it was £150k, either way it's an entirely reasonable amount of
money and not difficult to raise.

I remember giving significant funds to the OSMF when I was at MapQuest (not
sure if it's continuing), I don't remember there being an anti-corporate
streak so strong that it was rejected, but this was a while ago.

Also, there may be a misunderstanding about how & why corporations give
money. In the case of tax-deductible contributions, corporations are not
allowed to expect anything in return, or else it's not tax-deductible.
While the OSMF is not a registered charity, these types of gifts are viewed
more as marketing. No one on the giving end (that I'm aware of) expects
strings to be attached, beyond competence in deploying the funds.

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?"
>

I would love to help with this too. Turmoil at the board level doesn't
help, so some work needs to be done first. But we could be doing a lot more.

-Randy
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