[Osmf-talk] Framework for the foundation's hiring practices

[Simon Poole]

Am 12.05.2020 um 11:52 schrieb Christoph Hormann:
> ...
>
> So the one-dimensional and monocausal view that "paid work can have a
> chilling effect on volunteering" is from my perspective at best an
> understatement.  I would in addition like to point out that deriving
> the need to hire paid work from the inability to motivate volunteers as
> a one-to-one substitute for the envisioned paid position is a self
> fulfilling prophecy.
>
> ...

It would have been nice if we could have stayed on topic for once.

But anyway.

While I haven't been with OSM as long as some, it is clear to me, that
you are perpetuating a myth that was never true in such a pure form.

Contributions to OSM "infrastructure" have (outside of mapping which is
not the current topic) have always been a mix of paid and volunteer
work, just look at the contributions to the website and API for a
historic perspective. Even now some areas have seen nearly completely
volunteer work (system administration), others nearly exclusively paid
(iD).

And the OSMF has nearly a decade of directly paying for certain work,
not because it theoretically couldn't be done by volunteers, but because
these have never been forthcoming for the topics in question.

Now I don't want to belittle the concerns that paying for some things
will have a disruptive effect, am just as wary of a WMF 2.0 as others,
and I don't have a solution for the catch-22 situation that we have with
system administration.  But pretending that we've created OSM purely on
volunteer work is disingenuous at best.

Simon



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