[Osmf-talk] OSGeo Oceania Local Chapter application

Christoph Hormann chris_hormann at gmx.de
Wed Aug 12 08:49:53 UTC 2020


On Tuesday 11 August 2020, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> [...] -- then again, we'd be asking more of the
> chapter than we're doing ourselves.

Yes, i had noticed when writing that i am probably a bit naive here
asking the OSMF to hold the local chapters to standards it does not
require from itself.  Anyway - those are what would be my standards and
as such they are what i natually recommend.

But you also point to another issue i have not mentioned yet because it
is a bit more complex and abstract.  The thing is the OSMF has so far
claimed sovereignty over OSM in a manner of speaking not by virtue of
representation but by virtue of need.  The idea is *someone* needs to
take care of running the basic infrastructure and hold the rights to
the data and that legitimizes the creation of such an entity top down
in the absence of alternatives.

The local chapters have not been created in a similar fashion in most
cases, they are bottom-up creations by the mappers and the local OSM
communities in free association.  OSGeo Oceania as a local chapter
however would be more alike a mini-OSMF with a justification as Edoardo
indicated more in an OSMF-like fashion based on a perceived need for it
than from representation.

The OSMF has so far had very little success in gaining more substantial
legitimicy by achieving better proportional representation itself (and
it therefore is fairly unrealistic to expect more from OSGeo Oceania by
the way).  It has in its mission the requirement not to bootstrap local
community but it has not so far adopted a clear subsidarity principle
as i have suggested in the past.  It seems that through supranational
local chapters claiming a scope beyond what they actually represent we
could easily run into the OSMF outsourcing bootstrapping of local
community the OSMF is not allowed to do itself to supranational local
chapters.

My impression is - and this is one of the reasons i brought this matter
up here - that this could lead to a fundamental re-framing of the whole
idea of local chapters from a well legitimized bottom-up counterweight
contrasting the poorly legitimized top-down nature of the OSMF to a
hierarchical extension of the top-down nature of the OSMF into the
domain of the local chapters through organizations with a supranational
scope being modeled after the OSMF rather than being created bottom-up
by the local communities.  This could pave the way for re-shaping the
OSM community itself in a more top-down fashion.

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



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