[Osmf-talk] Fwd: Dorothea's hours for SotM WG

[Christoph Hormann]

On Monday 23 December 2019, Guillaume Rischard wrote:
> [...]
> >
> > The breakdown of Dorothea's hours for 2019 was:
> > Scholarship support: 208 hours
> > Sponsors: 55 hours
> > Other: 120 hours
> >
> > It is very likely that we don't need as many as last year. So we
> > would like to ask you to approve 200 hours of Dorothea's help for
> > the SotM working group.

Thanks for the heads up.

Since the hours are nearly halved compared to 2019 that does not look
too bad but generally speaking i think all paid work within the OSMF
should be subject to a strict review if the work can and should be
performed by volunteers.

In case of last year's implementation of the scholarship program a major
part of Dorothea's work seems to have been after-the-fact documentation
of the selection process:

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/State_of_the_Map_2019/Scholarships

If transparency of significant money spending of the OSMF cannot be
provided by volunteers that IMO is a serious issue and should put into
question the OSMFs engagement in such efforts.  Note this is a self
emphasizing problem:  If community members see that this kind of work
is tasked to paid contractors as needed they are likely less motivated
to do it as volunteers.  Transparency and public documentation of
volunteer work should inherently be connected to the volunteer work
itself, it should not be outsourced to paid staff since that would
support people with an inherently intransparent work culture in
volunteer positions compared to volunteers with high transparency
standards and would in the long term lead to the OSMF drifting into a
more intransparent work practice with only superficial transparency
being maintained by paid staff.

Related to SotM scholarships i also wonder if the board intends to
exercise oversight over the SotM WG w.r.t.:

* the scholarship programs compliance with FOSS policy (use of Google
forms for scholarship applications),
* GDPR compliance (lack of a privacy policy on submission form, lack of
a GDPR conforming data processing contract with the service provider),
* conflict of interest handling (self reproducing closed club and
revolving door risks in recruitment of the selection committee),
* massive language and cultural bias in the selection process since
scholars are not only assessed w.r.t. their English language ability,
they are assessed exclusively for past activities in English language
and based on criteria that depend on cultural commonality between
applicant and reviewer and
* lack of separation between objective and subjective selection
criteria, lack of auditability of the ensemble optimization.

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