[Osmf-talk] What if....

[Michael Kugelmann]

Hello Heather,

> What if we took pause to consider how we might move forward?
I am glad that after the election to the board you take the initiative 
to bring something forward. And I somehow agree that we need to move on.
But on the other side, the OSMF has always been "just the official 
representation of the OSM community" => it always was suppoprting the 
community to have the project being running (e.g. by operating the 
servers) in opposite of "controling the project". Some might think this 
is a weakness which in one sense might be true. On the other side it is 
one of the bigh strengths of the project resulting in an organic growth 
of the project and the mappers feel as "this is my project". In the long 
term this clearly is more beneficial for a non commerially oriented Open 
Source project as people feel being a part of the project instead being 
contolled.
With your past experience in HOT: please keep in mind that OSM/OSMF is 
not HOT/HOT Inc. This habit within HOT has maybe the goal to achieve a 
lot of good things for the word, but it also caused quite some problems 
within the OSM project. And I guess that a very wide amount of people 
involved in the project are in favour of this "loose organisation" => 
please try not to turn the world arround!

And please always keep in mind: OSMF memers are (unfortunately) just a 
very small fraction of the OSM community => maybe this special mailing 
list is not the best place to discuss this topic.
BTW: yes I really would appreciate if more mapper would join the OSMF.


Merry XMas and a happy new year,
MichaelK.