[Osmf-talk] Non-functional status links to local chapter applications

[Allan Mustard]

Christoph,

My two cents' worth:

No deliberative body, including the OSMF Board, opens all discussions to
the public.  There are sensitive issues that need to be discussed, there
are privacy considerations (with force of law, at least in the United
States), there is of course the need for Board members to be open and
honest with each other in ways that, if exposed to public ridicule,
would feed the flame wars. 

You do not, for example, have a right to listen in on my telephone
conversations with other community members.  That under U.S. (and other
countries' laws) is privileged communication and can only be
eavesdropped legally by a court order or warrant.  You do not have the
right to read my e-mail or other written communications with other
community members, including Board members, for the same reason and
under the same conditions.  Some Board communications are via an online
bulletin board and enjoy the same treatment as phone calls and e-mails. 
Does the Board have an obligation to share with the community its logic
in reaching conclusions?  Absolutely, yes.  Does the Board have an
obligation to reveal every datum examined in the process of reaching
such conclusions?  No, it does not, and cannot, because a promise to
hold certain conversations confidential is a promise that cannot be
broken if we want our interlocutors to continue to be open and honest to us.

You said yourself in my OSM diary, responding to posting of the SWOT,

> if you’d condense these interests and use them as a basis for decision
> making or as a todo list *without first having a discussion* on the
> viability and sustainability of these ideas and if the interests they
> are based on are even compatible with the basic goals and values of
> the project you would be very likely to clash with the mission of the
> OSMF.
The Board recognizes the need for discussion, and to get honest, frank,
and open answers, *SOME* of that discussion must be kept private.  Not
all, and not even the majority--but some.  The SWOT, for example, is
publicly posted for comment and editing, and has been tweeted and
propagated via other social media.  However, my private conversations
with community members on some of the points raised in the SWOT are just
that, private, and will remain so.

There is also the question of competent handling of business before the
Board.  In the U.S. government, which I served for just short of 38
years, this is called "deliberative process privilege".  The Wikipedia
article is here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deliberative_process_privilege.  The
theory is that "by guaranteeing confidentiality, the government will
receive better or more candid advice, recommendations and opinions,
resulting in better decisions for society as a whole."  That is our
goal.  We want better Board decisions for the OSM community as a whole.
And yes, this Board will begin making decisions.  If there is one
consistent thing I have heard in my first month as chairperson of the
Board in my outreach calls to community members, it is that the majority
of the community sees challenges ahead the Board needs to address, and
is tired of the Board's paralysis. 

I am well aware that some members of the community disagree with this,
and believe the Board should remain a paper tiger with no authority. 
However, every person with whom I have communicated directly so far,
including people involved in OSM when it was founded in 2004, sees the
need for action and has urged me to galvanize the Board to action.  This
sentiment is loud and clear in the SWOT, as well.  The Board is going to
start making decisions, quite often in consultation with the Foundation
membership and the broader community, sometimes after polling the
community, and it cannot conduct fruitful consultations if every word,
thought, opinion is hung out on the clothesline for the world to see and
fling mud at it (I will address the general incivility of discourse in
the OSM space at some future date).

I will close with another citation of one of your posts to my OSM diary:

> The OSMF has been by its own self understanding (see here
> <https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Main_Page> and here
> <https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Mission_Statement>) always in a
> support role only for the OpenStreetMap project. I am not quite sure
> if you want to indicate you would like to change that (which would
> likely not only get opposition from large parts of the OSM community
> but also from the local chapters) or if you want the OSMF to be more
> serious, better organized and more efficient in its support role
> (which most including me would very much support).
No change in philosophy is envisioned.  I can only speak for myself, but
I sense that the Board indeed wants to "be more serious, better
organized and more efficient in its support role."  So far as I can
tell, that is our collective objective.  To my knowledge, nobody on the
Board wants to tell anybody else what to map or how to map it; nobody on
the Board wants to be a dictator and order mappers or working groups to
do this or that (in a volunteer-driven organization that wouldn't work
anyway).  We DO want to ensure that OSM thrives and that 15 years from
now it continues to be substantially the type of community it is today,
a primarily grassroots, bottom-up community.  We DO want the vast
majority of decisions to be made my local communities (which is one
reason I am pushing for more local chapters--IMHO that will be the real
strength of OSM, ultimately, having local chapters everywhere).  We DO
want OSM to be the best map that it can be, a map of the world that
anybody can use, however we collectively define that.  That said, *some*
decisions need to be made at the level of the Board.  As just one
example, there are calls for a) a move to vector tiles and b) complaints
that current tile servers are slow because of external demands on them. 
These are issues that a headless community, a local chapter, an
overstretched working group, or a lone volunteer doocracy developer
cannot address.  I view the tile issues as precisely the type of thing
the Board was constituted to manage (yes, that horrible corporate
American capitalist swear word, "manage") in consultation with the
community.

And again, if we want to be able to have open, frank, honest
conversations both among ourselves and with the community, *SOME* of
those conversations will have to be private.

cheers,
apm

P.S.  I would like to have a private conversation with you by phone,
Skype, or Signal at your convenience.  Please PM me so we can set
something up.


On 1/24/2020 6:43 AM, Joost Schouppe wrote:
> Hi Christoph,
>
> On Fri, Jan 24, 2020 at 11:12 AM Christoph Hormann
> <chris_hormann at gmx.de <mailto:chris_hormann at gmx.de>> wrote:
>
>     On Friday 24 January 2020, Joost Schouppe wrote:
>     >
>     > It's practical to have all open issues in one place. We do not want
>     > to have all those issues and comments open to everyone.
>     > [...]
>
>     Do i understand this correctly that this information is not
>     available to
>     the members not because you have a specific reason why *this*
>     information needs to be kept private but because the board has *in
>     general* outside the board meetings a 'secrecy by default' policy,
>     i.e.
>     every communication among board members or documentation of board
>     actions is by default not public and no one on the board has invested
>     into specifically making this an exception?
>
>
> I just didn't explain -why- this info is best kept private, not that
> there is no reason for it. I would say that considering the things we
> use Gitlab for, in fact makes it to be best "private by default".
> Anything that comes a bit closer to a decision becomes public anyway.
> It is worth thinking about potentially splitting it into a private and
> public tracker, though that would probably wind up in a discussion
> similar to the one you had with Frederik about public document
> writing. A discussion where I personally firmly agree with Frederik.
> But maybe the new Board doesn't, I don't know. I have the feeling most
> of us are open to investigate how we can have more of our
> communication in public, but more in a careful, step by step way.
>
> Joost
> В 
>
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