[Osmf-talk] Remarks and question regarding board meeting minutes and circulars
Christoph Hormann
chris_hormann at gmx.de
Tue Dec 18 12:04:35 UTC 2018
On Tuesday 18 December 2018, Kate Chapman wrote:
> What is so amazing?
As said there are multiple levels. But the most obvious one is the from
my perspective very condescending approach to not actually acknowledge
and reason with my remarks by asking a bunch of questions and answering
those in a monologue like fashion.
For example the first question Mikel asks himself is:
"What is the benefit of this arrangement?"
I know exactly what the benefit of this arrangement is - it is a
circular, the decision the board made is written in the minutes and i
can read up exactly what this decision is in those minutes and i don't
need Mikel to interpret it for me. And incidentally i also know the
request from the corporate AB members that led to this decision.
By putting a question like this into my mouth Mikel essentially seems to
say: I would prefer if you would not make up your own mind about
things and instead rely on me to step this out for you so i would not
be confronted with having to deal with a different, independent
interpretation of the matter that inconveniently clashes with my own
view of things. If that was not as blunt and transparent as it is that
would be pretty insulting.
I will leave it at that - but as indicated there are also other
remarkable aspects of this question-answer monologue.
> That it is difficult to get sponsorship money to
> local communities and there was a request for the OSMF to help? To
> me, it seems like one of the main reasons the OSMF exists to support
> local communities.
For that i would need to go into the details of what i wrote on the AB
and as said for that i wanted to first give the board the opportunity
to move to a more comprehensive and transparent minuting of the
communication with the AB.
> Regarding the Advisory Board finding out first, they were the ones
> who asked for it. It was also noted in the minutes. Yes, we probably
> should have posted on OSMF-talk, I think that was simply an
> oversight.
I don't think so. Mikel's announcement to the AB was not simply the
announcement of a board decision, it contained further interpretations
and procedural details - interpretations by the way of which it is not
clear if they are just Mikel's personal views (along the lines of 'this
is how i would like to see things implemented even though this is not
actually what the board has decided') or if this is a confidential part
of the board decision that is not publicly minuted.
> Related to the conflict of interest, to me that isn't any different
> than the Conflict of Interest related to the Organized Editing
> Policy. Only Mikel and Martijn did not vote in that case because they
> worked for companies with organized editing teams. In this case,
> nobody was making use of the option being voted on.
If this is the collective position of the board the problem is indeed
much worse than it seemed to me at first. The idea that you can remove
a CoI by declaring yourself to be unaffected seems preposterous to me.
This would be the same as in a case where you decide on hiring someone
and one of the applicants is a relative of a board member and the board
members in question says: Does not matter, i don't like my brother
anyway so i won't be affected by a CoI.
The board decision says all corporate members are eligible for the
service that has been decided on - including the employers of Mikel and
Martijn and the company of Frederik. The fact that one or more of them
state they won't make use of this does not matter. As Michael already
indicated a CoI does not require an undue influence of a secondary
interest to take place, the existence of a secondary interest that
could unduly affect the decision from an objective outside perspective
is sufficient.
If the board is not able to see that - as said, then i think we have a
big problem.
--
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/
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