[Osmf-talk] Hiring help for OSMF administrative tasks

[Simon Poole]

Am 12.03.2015 um 13:27 schrieb Michael Maier:
.......
> 
> I would strongly prefer do employ not one, but many people, e.g.:
> 
> • A real cartographer working on an "official" mapstyle, in terms of
> design and another developer for taking off the burden of merging pull
> requests from Andy et al.
> • Community coordinators/moderators for the most important mailing
> lists/Forums
> • A lawyer going through the list of license violation in the Wiki doing
> all the "paperwork" required
> • Designers for "official" advertising material like Stickers, Flyers
> • Set up a web shop for T-shirts, mugs and printed maps for OSMF fundraising
> • Some interns for Wiki cleanup tasks noone cares about - e.g.
> translating and syncing the different "How to Map a" pages.
> • Someone to address the "diary spam" problem
> • Someone for worldwide news-gathering. The German "Wochennotiz"-People
> do a great job, but are struggling hard to find more people supporting.
> 
........

Actually while I don't necessarily agree with the above, you do
illustrate what is wrong with the maximum diminutive named
"administrative assistant" position, that it doesn't make very much
sense from a what needs to be done pov, but if the board wants to try
the experiment ...

Back to your topic, it is actually a bit of mis-characterisation to say
that nobody is employed in OSM. There is a large number of companies in
the the OSM eco-system which all tend to have paid staff and which
contribute to various aspects of running the project. Matter fact all
except one of the current board members are employed by companies that
have some relationship with OSM, if not derive their income directly
from it.

The other aspect is that wikipedia/wikimedia is in a completely
different competitive market position, essentially all their direct
competitors vanished very early on and they are the only game in town.
The case of OSM is very different, there are the three direct global
competitors and numerous smaller players that are providing geodata to
third parties.

So now you just spent at least $2M annually, probably more like $4M, not
a gigantic sum but "somebody" has to provide it, I don't see any of the
smaller commercial players in OSM-space being able to shoulder that
without fundamentally changing the economics of their businesses (aka
making it cheaper to get data from the commercial providers) and up to
now we've not been able to get any support from companies that could
easily afford the extra expense (Apple comes to mind).

As to dominations from charitable organisations, as I've pointed out
before, while funds could clearly be obtained for projects (except that
nobody has actually ever asked the OSMF for such support). I have big
doubts if a significant part of operating costs could come from such a
source, given that we are talking about subsidizing commercial
organisations in a competitive environment.

the tl;dr version: beware of increasing the cost of obtaining OSM data
too much ...

Simon

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