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

Frederik Ramm frederik at remote.org
Sun Nov 26 12:57:25 UTC 2017


Hi,

On 11/26/2017 01:12 PM, Christoph Hormann wrote:
> But i think the flaw in your argument is that you assume that a large 
> community needs to be managed by a central authority.  I would question 
> this assumption.  At the moment the OSMF and the OSM community are 
> built on the assumption that no such central management is necessary 
> and the OSMF does only support, external representation and a few other 
> things - see
> 
> http://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Mission_Statement
> 
> If this can work in the long term is an open question.  To my knowledge 
> nothing like that has every been tried on this scale.

And that's the problem here. In my opinion, real vision means helping
OSM to continue to break new ground, by growing the community and the
project and proving that we can do that without falling back on standard
governance models (central authority, ever-larger funding, ever-more
employees, etc.)

Most people only know one type of growth in the non-profit sector. First
there's a group of people with a dream, then they start working on it,
then they attract funding, then they set up a permanent office, hire
employees, attract more funding from the government, start opening
regional offices, with more employees, print four-colour monthly
newsletters, etc.etc.

Because this seems to be the "natural course" of growth for many people,
competing models aren't given enough thought, and someone who cautions
against *that* type of growth is often seen as "standing in the way of
progress" altogether.

But other ways of progress exist, and we could be the ones defining and
proving them if we allow ourselves to think outside of the box of
traditional growth - just as we've been thinking outside of the box of
traditional surveying and map-making for over a decade now.

Bye
Frederik

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



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