[Osmf-talk] OSMF 2020 between concern and disappointment

[severin.menard]

(automatic translation from French by www.DeepL.com/Translator)

The latest blog post [1] by Christoph Hormann (Imagico) on the OSMF was mentioned in #531 of WeeklyOSM, but was not the subject of a thread on the OSMF's talk list. With two months to go before the end of the year and a new election to the board, it deserves to be shared and commented on.

Personally, I share the same concerns and disappointment, as well as a certain discouragement. I generally had the same perception, with nuances, regarding the different candidacies submitted during the last election. How could one imagine that a change of 3 people out of a total of 7 would produce such radical mutations in the conduct of the board, something that the demonstrations of some and others did not allow us to perceive at the time?

The introduction of non-public meetings, which had not been held since 2016, is indeed regrettable and unexpected, when the only candidate who wanted them to return at the time of the elections was not elected, and at the same time two people who might have wanted to put an end to it were leaving the board. Respect for the transparency of exchanges and decisions is a point that should not be overlooked for supposed advantages in terms of efficiency or ease of speech. Apart from the loss of the members' ability to control the decisions made by the Foundation's board, it is also the best way to demotivate those who wish to follow, comment on and actively accompany its work. For my part, I would add the new tendency to create restricted committees whose members are chosen directly by the board (or whose selection is made through the caudal forks of one of the board members), which differs significantly from the practice of working groups open to any member who wants to get involved. However, even within the framework of these designated committees, the board can overrule the decisions, as evidenced by the selection of the Microgrants select committee, some of whose unsuccessful candidates were finally selected, which was not without surprise.

We are touching here on another strong and worrying trend of the OSMF 2020 board: that of freeing itself from the frameworks built in the past, the absence of willingness to put in place new, well-argued and well-defined frameworks, and the refusal to consider the implications of potentially far-reaching actions in terms of governance or financial management. In the absence of a visible history in the wiki (which would obviously be interesting here again in terms of transparency), it is difficult to say when exactly the sentence: "Is responsible for allocating $$ to diverse worthwhile software projects with grants and microgrants was added. "in the Mission statement page [2]. Apart from the fact that it is rather curious to mention US dollars when, unless I am mistaken, OSMF funds are not held in this currency but in EUR and GBP, this sentence seems particularly vague as to the scope of these funds and leaves room for all interpretations, while many exchanges between OSMF members have taken place on the definition of different perimeters, notably around another blog post also published by Imagico [3]. Unless I'm mistaken, only one member of the board is involved, but the exchange is particularly enlightening: Rory McCann summarizes the board's approach to funding decisions in terms of what "sounds good" and he fails to understand the expectations summarized by Imagico in the sentence "document and publish the key parts of the decision making process, in particular risk analysis that has been made on social implications and economic risk".
In a thread on the talk list [4], Rory draws a parallel between this mode of decision making and OSM tagging, as if it were possible to compare flexible, reversible semantic choices without any consequence on the future of the OSM project with decisions, especially financial decisions, which are not.

This propensity to (much) finance represents another trend of the OSM 2020 board. It is the most spectacular and visible from the outside. Only one of these financings falls within the Foundation's scope of action: the function of Senior site reliability engineer to ensure the continuity of service of the OSM servers, which is part of the Foundation's Mission statements, is difficult to circumvent if the volunteers who have been providing it until now do not wish to or can no longer maintain it and will represent an important item of expenditure in the Foundation's budget.

On the other hand, the decision to finance an additional four software products from the OSM ecosystem now makes the OSMF a de facto economic player with all the new stakes and interests that this brings with it. And apart from these crucial aspects of governance, this choice further explodes the cumulative amount of the Foundation's expenditures over the past 12 months. 300,000, of which 130,000 were devoted to simple iD maintenance, compared to 75,000 for the year 2019, out of the total available funds of 613,000 euros [5]. Half of the available funds will thus have been spent in a single year, practically the equivalent of the Pineapple Fund donation spent on software projects outside the OSMF's perimeter. The sustainability of this approach would be based on a fundraising strategy that has yet to be fully defined, given that the future economic context is particularly gloomy, that there has so far only ever been a single donation in excess of 100,000 Euros, and that the physical SotMs, a source of income for the Foundation, may not be organized in the coming years.

Moreover, this action focused solely on technical needs completely ignores other major issues, such as the one at the heart of the last two board elections since the GlobalLogic episode: the fragility of the board's ability to take control. Two years later, the OSMF does not seem to be better armed to counter this danger, and rather less so, having less cash and greater financial needs to maintain its servers. Draft solutions had been proposed, but were not taken up and implemented, such as increasing the number of seats on the board to reduce the risk of a radical change following a simple renewal. The search for other means to strengthen the structure of the OSMF could, for example, require legal support, which would probably be costly: inventing or consolidating a legal form that guarantees the independence of the Foundation, the maintenance of its objectives and certain of its values (for example, a free license that necessarily includes attribution and Share Alike), in the same way that the media The Guardian or Mediapart have been able to find original forms to perpetuate their independence.

Séverin
(also published on https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/SeverinGeo/diary/394528)

[1] http://blog.imagico.de/osmf-general-meeting-and-board-elections/
[2] https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Mission_Statement
[3] https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/imagico/diary/393808
[4] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/2020-August/007018.html
[5] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/2020-August/007003.html
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