[Osmf-talk] Death and evolution

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 09/26/2014 11:29 AM, Ilya Zverev wrote:
> Every year with the Board elections we hope for change. We wish to
> elect somebody who will be active, who will take the OSM governing
> structure and evolve it into something greater

I don't know who the "we" is in that but I don't think I am part of it.

> The only way we can evade that fate is to evolve. Not like before,
> but aggressively, fast and visibly. We have 3 to 6 years, in which we
> either build a massive, large-scale and well-funded structure like
> Wikimedia Foundation

I am not sure if that future OSM project of which you speak, which is
controlled by massive foundation with a massive budget and therefore
massively dependent on donors and sponsors of all kinds, is really one
worth striving for. There's lots of people in OSM whom I don't agree
with and it's fine, it's not like we have to fight over control of the
massive central body that defines the project. We can "agree to
disagree". Would this still be so in your scenario?

One thing I love about OSM is that, to a large degree, these are human
beings who have decided to do something that improves their life in one
way or another. Sure, we can collect money from Western governments to
lobby the Chinese government to allow us to spread the idea of open
geodata to potential users in China - this being just one of myriad
things that a massive OSM foundation would likely start doing - but is
that really at the core of OSM?

Don't get me wrong, I love it when individual OSMers become OSM
advocates and infect their social circles with the OSM idea. But does
that mean that I want to found an advocacy organisation whose role it is
to spread the gospel of OSM to non-believers around the planet? Not
really. But that's exactly what such organisations are bound to do, and
what WMF does, among tons of other things.

Do I want a large foundation where power and control are concentrated,
where professional power people vie for control of the board, and where
the board in turn is responsible for the livelihood of hundreds or
thousands of employees? Where decisions that we can now afford to leave
to the community have to be elevated to whatever executive level because
suddenly a large donor might disagree with our childcare tagging? Where
hundreds of thousands of $$$ are spent for a developing a new editor
that has exactly the kinds of features the board wants? (And while we're
at it, maybe we need to slap on some DRM so that people cannot simply
add plugins that circumvent our official tagging rules...?)

I can see your concerns but I think your call for building a "massive,
large-scale and well-funded structure" are un-imaginative; even if doing
so would ensure the survival of something, that something might not be
OpenStreetMap any more.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"