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

[Christoph Hormann]

On Sunday 26 November 2017, john whelan wrote:
>
> 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.

The question you need to ask yourself if you believe that is if you 
think the same applies to the OSM community as a whole.

If that is the case it would mean we would essentially be on the same 
path as Wikipedia - which would be a fairly bleak perspective.

If not you would have to ask yourself how the OSMF could function with 
the board not even approximately representing the OSM community.  Note 
the OSMF has no parliament like representative body.  We have the OSMF 
members but they are not representative for the OSM community and they 
have no real legislative or budgetary power.  The only real power the 
members have is electing the board and if you professionalize the board 
this would of course be further limited.

Lets not forget: The source of this topic coming up again (it is not 
that this has not been discussed in the past) is that there are 
relatively few volunteers willing to do OSMF work.  Paying people would 
be an attempt to work around this problem, not solving it.

The question apparently no one dares to ask is why there are so few 
volunteers (i.e. why is OSMF work unattractive for the volunteers in 
the OSM community of which we evidently have quite a few).

I see the fact that the OSMF depends on volunteers from the OSM 
community for any other than relatively trivial generic work (like 
accounting and basic administrative stuff) as a big plus because it 
keeps everyone on the OSMF reliably grounded and prevents people from 
encapsulating themselves within their own small world separated from 
the reality and mundane problems of everyday life in OSM.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/