[Osmf-talk] Closed board meeting again

[Christoph Hormann]

Nice to see some grassroots discussion developing on practical measures
to address the problems.

You have a valid point here but i think Roland's focus was more that you
could build a quite effective deterrents against corporate takeovers
into the practical organization of OSM because OSM as a social project
consists of various projects, platforms and channels that are
relatively independent of each other - yet are all quite important for
a functioning project as a whole.

In other words:  The deterrent would not necessarily be that a viable
competing project would emerge immediately in reaction to a takeover,
it would be more that they would not be able to take over and control a
working OSM but would essentially have to cripple it in the process.

Part of this would be going in the opposite direction of what has to
some extent been done in the past trying to unify logins into various
OSM platforms (wiki, forum) but instead deliberately separating those
and putting control of these into separate hands.

And even the main database situation is not as bleak as it might look
from your comment.  A fork could at least for the moment use OAuth to
authenticate existing OSM users for editing.  Email notifications would
not be possible with that and a corporate controlled OSMF could
immediately remove this possibility of course.

As Roland also indicated we could separate key elements that do not
require much active decision making and dynamic adjustment like legal
ownership of trademarks and control over the login data of users to a
separate entity that is under shared control of the OSMF and the local
chapters hardening it against outside influences.

--
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/