[Osmf-talk] Next OSMF board meeting this Thursday, 16th of August, at 21:00 London time

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 20.08.2018 10:11, Christoph Hormann wrote:
> Maybe since the open board meetings are now well established we could 
> discuss the possibility to publish recordings of the meetings.

There's a danger of this contributing to making board meetings more a
show for the public than an actual board meeting. I think what we have
now is a good compromise.

Remember, just a few years ago, the board was against making meetings
public or even publishing which board member voted/argued for what, on
the grounds of opening board members to potential harassment over their
work on the board.

I think that public scrutiny is good, but over-reaching can also lead to
future boards withdrawing again. For example, it would be easy to hold
the important discussions on the board-internal mailing list and only
check off previously discussed items during the board meeting. This
pseudo-transparency is what the board would gravitate towards if the
meetings were *too* public.

> I know this is surely a controversial topic and there are valid 
> arguments against it but i also wonder if there ultimately would be so 
> much difference between having a large number of guests in the meeting 
> listening in (which happened a few times in the past) and having a 
> recording being made available.

Personally, I feel it's a big difference. We haven't checked in the
past, but our current rules say that the meeting is open to OSMF
members, which excludes anonymous listeners. This means I usually know
the people who are listening in. That's wholly different from speaking
into a microphone to an unknown audience and making a recording for
eternity. Next thing you ask is a video chat and I can't even do board
meetings in my Pyjamas any more ;)

> I have no definitive opinion about this but i recognize Eugene's 
> argument as a very valid point and i also noticed that the guests at 
> the meetings are almost exclusively from Europe (probably >80-90%, the 
> rest mostly from North America).

I think the ideal way to solve this in the long run is devolution, where
regional boards that are in a suitable time zone get more powers, and
the global board that is always in a bad time zone for some members
becomes less important. The alternative is spending bucketloads of money
on ferrying people across the globe for frequent in-person meetings, or
going fully asynchronous.

> By the way Michael Reichert (Nakaner) has frequently published his own 
> notes from the meeting in German which nicely supplement the official 
> minutes for those who were not there

This is a great service for the German community, and I wish we had at
least someone from France and someone from Russia (being the two largest
language groups apart from English and German in OSM) doing the same in
their language. Of course Michael has his own take on many things and
his German synopses are anything else than a mere translation of
official minutes - but I think that's actually what we want. Someone
from the French or Russian community would certainly view some things as
more important and some as less, and be able to connect stuff the board
discusses with stuff discussed in their community.

I thought about board actually paying someone to create translated
minutes, but that would really not be the same. A "biased" reporting
from the point of view of the community being reported to is much
better, but it would be difficult to provide that through a paid service.

Bye
Frederik

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