[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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