[Osmf-talk] Remarks and question regarding board meeting minutes and circulars
Christoph Hormann
chris_hormann at gmx.de
Mon Dec 17 14:42:38 UTC 2018
Now that the board election matters are through i would like to make a
number of remarks and ask a question to the board regarding recent
decisions and board meeting minutes documenting them.
My first point is:
* 2018/Res14 Decide for OSMF to administer payments to regional SotMs
This decision is for the benefit of corporate OSMF members and
explicitly mentions corporate OSMF members as beneficiaries - yet it
seems all three board members who work for corporate OSMF members
participated in the vote despite the obvious conflict of interest.
This decision was also revealed by the board to the advisory board
(through Mikel) on November 28 while it was only made public through
the minutes on December 6. This is quite disrespectful of the OSMF
members whose role by law is to superwise the work of the board and who
therefore should be the first to be informed about decisions - the need
for which is fittingly illustrated by the CoI problem mentioned before.
My second and somewhat related point is the documentation of the work of
the advisory board. This is performed in two places, the board meeting
minutes - like
https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Board/Minutes/2018-10-18#Advisory_Board_-_monthly_update
and a separate list on
https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Advisory_Board/Communication
The second one is an aggregation of the first but the first one seems to
only contain subjects that have been reported in the board meetings.
The board's decision regarding the advisory board was, see:
https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Advisory_Board
"However, to ensure transparency, the OSMF Board of Directors will
publicly minute, in their board meeting minutes, any communication sent
to, or received from, the Advisory Board."
which does not really work if minuting happens only if and once the
board acknowledges the communication received in a board meeting. This
becomes visible in particular in cases like the one above when the
board makes decisions based on input received from the advisory board
without this input having been communicated to the OSMF members before
the decision is made. Such a process is then the opposite of
transparency because it deprives the OSMF members and the OSM community
in general from the opportunity to provide input on and participate in
the decision making process and fulfil their supervising function (see
above).
My question here is if the board is going to change that in a way that
ensures timely transparency of the advisory board input before it goes
into decisions of the board. Because otherwise i would start
separately reporting on advise from the advisory board. I don't think
this would be a good solution because it would inevitably provide a
subjective perspective but with the current practice i think this would
be necessary.
--
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/
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