[Osmf-talk] Draft New Corporate Membership Tiers

[Simon Poole]

In general tiering the corporate membership is a difficult topic and
there is a reason that at the time we introduced the corporate
membership class we punted on tiers and went for a super simple model
that everybody could agree on, which however is clearly a bit unfair wrt
larger vs. smaller players.

On the one hand if there is too much exchange of goods/services the
membership fees will become taxable (at 30% rate). On the other hand
given the nature of OSMFs business there just aren't that many perks
that could be made available to "higher class" members. 

Am 27.04.2016 um 18:29 schrieb Christoph Hormann:
>
> - 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.
Given that there is only one non-geo-business affiliated board member
I'm not quite sure if there can be "more" corporate influence and
somehow I doubt that  Mapbox will pay to talk to Mikel, mail.ru to talk
to Zverik, Telenav to talk to Martijn and so on. And if other companies
will feel particularly at ease airing their issues with their
competitors needs to be proven.

> - 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?

Well from a legal counsel point of view I can't see it working, it would
just create endless amount of CoI, but obviously, the OSMF (regulations
permitting) could operate a legal consulting branch at arms length,
however that would need to -not- be the 'OSMF General Counsel'.

Further (playing devils advocate here), outside of the actual data
distribution licence, there are naturally things in which the OSMF has a
lot more leeway wrt terms and conditions, essentially for all services
the OSMF provides (tiles, search, and so on).

>
> 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.
>

Consulting, training and so on, all have the problem that they require
infrastructure and paid staff and are more or less the last thing you
want to give a significant discount on.

At the time my favourite model for tiers would have been a self declared
company size which however has the problem that it breaks "on the
Internet nobody knows you are a dog", or put differently would work to
the disadvantage of smaller players in the market.

Simon

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