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

Tom MacWright tom at macwright.org
Tue Oct 28 17:54:02 UTC 2014


In a comparison between human costs and technology costs, human costs
almost always win out, as you might find if you look at the back-end of
business accounting. It's usually accepted that this is okay, because
people are organizations, not computers.

Of course, it is impressive how cheaply and efficiently OSM's
infrastructure is structured.


On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 1:40 PM, Oliver Kühn <oliver at osmfoundation.org>
wrote:

> Dear Roland,
>
> did we need to make any compromise because of the F2F meeting? Did we have
> to shutdown the infrastructure for a month? Did we need to restrict the
> usage of Nominatim, Taginfo or the Overpass API?
>
> No, we did not! This bean-counter mentality does not lead to progress of
> OSM or the OSMF.
>
> We need people who spend the money. If we go fund-raising people will ask
> us what we need the money for. We don't have an answer to that as we don't
> need money right now. Nobodoy will give us money to fill up our bank
> accounts.
>
> We need to bring people together that jointly decide a direction, go for
> this and spend the money. And spending money is a learning process: you
> only know if it is well spent after it is gone.
>
> There is no money problem in OSMF. There is a mindset problem.
>
> Regards,
> Oliver
>
> Am 28.10.2014 um 18:08 schrieb Roland Olbricht:
>
>  Hi all,
>>
>>  The budget for the meeting was $8,200 USD.
>>>
>> Thank you for the precise figure. This would confirm the estimation of
>> GPB 5000 for the Berlin meeting.
>>
>> Hence, having a face to face meeting for the board is
>>
>> - roughly as expensive as running our complete infrastructure for four
>> month
>>
>> or
>>
>> - more expensive than running Nominatim, Taginfo, and Overpass API and
>> probably more secondary services together for a full year.
>>
>> or
>>
>> - as much money as the membership fees of all OSMF members (the last
>> known to me number has been about 300).
>>
>> Best regards,
>>
>> Roland
>>
>>
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>
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