[Osmf-talk] Board decision on recent OSMF membership registrations

[Rihards]

On 24.11.18 22:08, Heather Leson wrote:
> Hi Christoph thank you for your questions. The board really spent much
> time discussing. Comments inline.
> 
> Heather
...
>     > > There had been a mass sign-up of 100 new accounts on 15.11.2018
>     > > from India, most coming from one single IP address from a company
>     > > "well known" to OpenStreetMap. There had been a larger amount of
>     > > complaints regarding edits from that company, who provide "mapping
>     > > services" to other companies.
> 
>     What is the reason for not disclosing the name of the company? 
>     Since it
>     apparently was identified without any help of them i see no problem
>     with disclosing that.  Apart from that who did identify said company?
> 
> The important factor is that 100 members joined from India, a country
> with 1 BILLION people. This is exciting and I welcome them to be fully
> engaged and meet the community. I hope that they can get to know each of
> you and be part of the the community going forward.
> 
> Members are members. I don't think that we should focus on where they
> work. I am not personally defined by my workplace.
Heather, I would disagree that the important factor is ratio of new
members against the population of their home country, and I would also
disagree that employee should be ignored.
Especially so when the registrations happen 4 days before the voting
deadline, on the same day.

What I consider important is that this is a 14.5% increase in OSMF
vote-eligible membership[1].

As an individual mapper I find this highly worrying, and I find
concentrating on the country population dishonest.

[1] Based on the latest value from
https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Membership/Statistics

...
-- 
 Rihards