[Osmf-talk] statistics from the membership drive

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 12/03/2017 05:17 PM, Jean-Guilhem Cailton wrote:
> Tyler Radford, Executive Director of HOT US Inc., made a call to members
> of HOT US Inc to become members of the OSMF before November 8 to be
> eligible to vote.

Generally, we should welcome any and all calls for people to become OSMF
members - having more of them will hopefully lead to more scrutiny,
better transparency, and overall a better democratic culture.

While there is a theoretical danger of a large organisation subverting
OSMF through mass-membership (imagine, say, Google having one of their
maps team stand for election and "recommending" in an internal memo that
everyone join the OSMF...), I'm not too concerned - we already have
quite a few members and it becomes more and more difficult to pull
something like that off. With the membership list now being public (you
can't download it on a web page but members can ask for it) this would
also be easy to spot.

There was a time when this was different - when the membership list was
not open to inspection, and at one time someone at Cloudmade (the
company started by OSM founder Steve Coast together with Nick Black)
recommended their employees all become OSMF members; the result was (if
I remember correctly) almost one in three members coming from Cloudmade.
I was very alarmed at the time, but it later turned out to have been a
fairly innocent attempt at supporting and strenghtening the OSMF, not
manipulating it. (That was before we had corporate memberships; nowadays
Cloudmade would probably just join as a corporate member to show their
support.)

Bye
Frederik

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