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

[john whelan]

Question who or what is WMF?

OSM is evolving and there are many vested interests at play.  Once upon a
time there were "gentlemen of leisure" who would dabble in such things as
the board.  The gifted amateur if you will.  These days they are out of
their depth.  No one has the in-depth knowledge required to keep up with
all the should I say niches?

The internet is not a safe paddling pool.  Internet security is a major
problem.

Some tasks are better dealt with by taking a more overview approach than
doing it piecemeal.  I recall a meeting not OSM once where I asked the
question but won't it be better to transfer the data directly by
linking the databases
rather than using  flat files?  But we've always done it with flat files.
When they realised they could transfer metadata as well the idea was
adopted but it took outside specialist knowledge to know it could be done.

Currently I understand only one board member does not either work for a
company who use OSM's maps or makes their living out of their knowledge and
for transparency's sake it would be better to pay them a small sum rather
than relying on people working in the industry.

I think we need specialist knowledge occasionally.  Considering the value
added by OSM making a sub optimum choice has a huge impact.

The working groups are very effective but they are volunteers.  For
robustness I think somehow we need to be a little more professional on the
operational side.

On a historical note in the early 1800's various geographical societies had
agreed to work together in principle but due to regional differences and
local areas saying they wanted to do things differently things didn't work
out to well in practice.  There were differences of opinion, some people
loathed others.

Perhaps we need an historian who studied the period to help us find
solutions to our modern day problems.

By the way I have retired and hate traveling just in case anyone is
thinking I might be looking for a source of income.

Cheerio John

On 25 Nov 2017 3:53 pm, "Simon Poole" <simon at poole.ch> wrote:

> 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> 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> 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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