[Osmf-talk] "Legitimacy from an election process to direct attention" – Your response to the question regarding Working Groups

[Michal Migurski]

Great reply Christoph, I appreciate the conversation. We might have opposing points of view on what makes up the community, and that may be the heart of why we're talking about different interpretations of OSMF’s legitimacy.

I agree with you that OSMF voting members are insufficiently representative of a free wiki world map. I got curious last month and made a chart of membership by country: our potential electorate is roughly 1/3rd US, 1/3rd Germany-France-UK, and 1/3rd everywhere else, clearly biased toward “WEIRD” (western, educated, industrialized, rich democracies). However, OSMF is also the only explicit decision-making body we’ve got! I’m excited about efforts to increase the size of the voting community through fee waivers.

Your assertions about community values may or may not be true; we don't really have a way of knowing whether “local, verifiable geographic knowledge through global egalitarian cooperation of individuals” is an accurate picture of the broader community’s values. We don't know whether that community is mostly craft mappers, or if the basic and everyday experiences we should value most should be centered on fiddling with GPS units or JOSM. I’ve seen good academic work from people like Jennings Anderson trying to quantify these patterns, hopefully we’ll see more.

I imagine that if you wanted to argue in bad faith, you could circularly define the community as craft mappers in order to preempt the legitimacy of robot, crisis, armchair, and other mappers but my response would return to the election: we have one binding process to decide who runs the Foundation that supports OSM. Voting’s open right now!

Based on my own observations from the past decade+, I see a vocal traditionalist community defending an artisinal approach to mapping while the demands placed upon OSM are shifting toward the global east and south where craft mapping does not succeed at growing the map. The craft-mapper t-shirts are funny and I even own one, but they downplay the stated goal of OSM – “free, editable map of the whole world” – in favor of yesterday’s crowdsourcing techniques.

For many places around the world the need is for *maps* and not for *craft*.

-mike.

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michal migurski- contact info and pgp key:
sf/ca            http://mike.teczno.com/contact.html

> On Dec 12, 2019, at 12:11 PM, Christoph Hormann <chris_hormann at gmx.de> wrote:
> 
> On Thursday 12 December 2019, Michal Migurski wrote:
>> 
>> The annual board election is OSMF’s only way to gather binding
>> feedback from the community.
> 
> The board elections do not gather feedback from the OSM community, they 
> gather opinions/preferences on candidates from *the OSMF members* who 
> are - as it has been discussed plenty of times - not representative in 
> their composition for the OSM community. (in short: geographically 
> membership is massively biased towards wealthy countries and also 
> massively biased towards native English speaking countries - biases in 
> other aspects probably exist as well but are harder to measure).
> 
> I would be very careful in trying to derive legitimacy of the OSMF board 
> in speaking for the OSM community from the democratic process within 
> the OSMF only but disconnected from the world outside the OSMF.  The 
> OSMF (and its board) is only legitimately speaking for and acting in 
> the name of the OSM community if and when it represents its values 
> (which is still foremost the collection of local, verifiable geographic 
> knowledge through global egalitarian cooperation of individuals) and 
> its active members (which are still mostly local craft mappers, most of 
> which don't speak English as their native language).
> 
> This is at least partly why many people in this and previous elections 
> put so much emphasis on how much practical experience and references 
> candidates have with the basic everyday acticities in the OSM community 
> and how close they are to the pulse of the mappers world wide so to 
> speak.  Because that is quite essential to ensure the OSMF stays true 
> to its purpose of supporting the OSM project and community.
> 
> -- 
> Christoph Hormann
> http://www.imagico.de/
> 
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