[Osmf-talk] Draft New Corporate Membership Tiers

[Christoph Hormann]

On Wednesday 27 April 2016, Kate Chapman wrote:
> Dear Members,
>
> The OSMF Board has put together a draft update to the Corporate
> Membership(1). We are interested in feedback regarding the tiers and
> the specific benefits.

First thanks for opening up discussion on this.

My thoughts:

- the marketing and sponsorship offers are without problems i think - 
making public these terms and having them open with equal opportunity 
to any company is a good thing.
- 'Attend OSMF general meetings' should be clarified as through a single 
representative (or a specified higher number) and should emphasize that 
this does not entail any formal rights in those meetings (i.e. just 
attendance).
- the 'call with OSMF board member' looks extremely hairy to me.  
Although this is of course not said it clearly implies the corporate 
member is being give special influence on the board and its decisions.  
The appearance that by soliciting corporate financing on a regular 
basis in significant volume the OSMF moves away from representing the 
OSM community and towards representing business interests around OSM 
would be unavoidable to some extent but with elements like this you'd 
significantly emphasize that impression.
- the 'Legal access to OSMF General Counsel' is completely unclear at 
this point.  What is meant to be the purpose of this?  Legal advise on 
questions of use of OSM data by the corporate member?  Negotiation of 
special terms for OSM data outside the scope of the ODbL?

Overall my suggestion is: if you want to offer additional benefits 
beyond basic publicity and sponsorship aspects it would be best to 
concentrate on elements of advise, training and help in things like 
using OSM data and interacting with the OSM community.  The aim with 
such benefits should be to get OSM into those corporations, not to get 
those corporations and their interests into OSM.  Organizing business 
workshops is certainly a way to do this but of course there are also 
other options.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/