[Osmf-talk] Paying Board/WG was: Standing for board election

[Simon Poole]

There are all kinds of issues that would have to be thought through if
you wanted to keep the volunteer aspect of the OSMF WGs, but I suspect
that essentially everything time consuming would need to then be done by
paid staff regardless of how things are organised.

Further I don't quite believe that bit with that it is easy to get,
non-trivial, sums for operations.  I simply doubt that there is a big
interest in subsidizing M., TeleNav and all of the smaller players by
philanthropic funders (why not HERE, Tomtom and google then?). So we
will likely need to turn to the organisations using our data which I
doubt will be so easy. Essentially there is one other org, the WMF, that
is similar and they killed off their competition early on, removing the
market forces we are subject to.

The other issue is that you create a powerful further stake holder in
the project, the employees (see, again, the WMF), which might have
unexpected consequences.

Simon

Am 25.11.2017 um 18:47 schrieb Martijn van Exel:
> Paying people in key positions in OSM could be a big step forward but
> is not without its challenges. What positions are 'key'? How do you
> evaluate new candidates against incumbents? Who gets to do this? And
> practically, where does the money come from? If you ask me, the money
> is the easiest hurdle to cross. Creating an organization and culture
> that has a transparent process to hiring the best people for the job
> who work side by side with volunteers, is more difficult. But if we
> want to go that way I think the board could play a role to set the
> stage. The board positions should remain unpaid.
>
> Martijn
>
> On Sat, Nov 25, 2017 at 10:33 AM, Kate Chapman <kate at maploser.com
> <mailto:kate at maploser.com>> wrote:
>
>     I thought this was worth having its own discussion. 
>
>     On Sat, Nov 25, 2017 at 7:46 AM, Simon Poole <simon at poole.ch
>     <mailto:simon at poole.ch>> wrote
>
>
>         Simon
>
>         PS: there is the other problem that why on earth would you
>         want to pay the board first? Surely you would want to pay the
>         people on the OWG, DWG and LWG before the directors, given
>         they are actually core to operations not the board, unluckily
>         that would probably amount to a couple of million just for
>         starters.
>
>
>      Yes, I'd pay quite a few people prior to paying the board. Some
>     of the things the board does are much more operational items than
>     what a truely strategic board would do. To me if we were to start
>     paying people to do those things we would hire someone to do it
>     rather than pay ourselves. Dorothea over the past year has helped
>     immensely in this way, so there already is a precedent. 
>
>     -Kate
>
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