[Osmf-talk] My November 2018 email to the board about the GlobalLogic signups

[Mikel Maron]

And btw there has been a few references to the situation with mass sign up situation Skobbler back in 2011, when I was previously on the Board.
> There is a historical precedent at https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/2011-August/001139.html. The minutes don’t say much, but Mikel, who was on the board then too, can maybe remember?
The Skobbler situation was much more straightforward in that everything about it was known to the Board up front. One Board Member worked for Skobbler, and had tried to openly pay en mass for those sign ups directly to the Membership Secretary (before we had the MWG, this was a board position). It was heated and messy, but everyone on the Board quickly agreed that mass sign ups are not the intention of membership. The membership payment was withdrawn, and the OSMF notified the membership within one day of it being raised as a Board issue.
I checked my email and this was my initial response. I still stick by this view today.
> I think a collective sign up or renewal is a problem. That's what a corporate/organizational membership would be for. Why not sign up as individuals? If they each really really want this, they'll go to the small bother of registering as individuals. I don't care who ultimately pays for it. Their company can encourage them. But it really should be an individual decision. The whole point of memberships process is to have a small barrier, so they really do want to be a part. Otherwise, it would be just as simple as signing up for an osm.org account.
And here's an interesting note from SteveC from the time.
> I can see an arms race with companies signing everyone up. CloudMade, skobbler. What if someone with 100 employees does this? Or 1,000? It doesn't work going forward. What if I signed up the 10,000 people from bing mobile, or 300 people in maps (I don't know the figures, but you get the point).
We've known the membership model in OSMF was not perfect the first day we opened membership in 2006 for 5 GBP. This was 2006 -- osm.org was a wildly ambitious but absurd and not really functional idea by a very small collection of folks mainly in the UK and northern Europe. We knew on that very day that it was vulnerable and not going to be adequate in the future for our governance. But we did the simplest thing at the time. This governance model worked remarkably well for all its haphazard weakness. 
13 years on, it's time to figure out what kind of governance we need for a project of global scope and world changing impact.

-Mikel
* Mikel Maron * +14152835207 @mikel s:mikelmaron

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