[Osmf-talk] Possible AoA Amendment #2: Your boss can't force you to vote a certain way

[Michal Migurski]

>> I don’t think it’s a legitimate risk or a real problem. None of the commercial organizations where I or my OSM community works would consider such a high-risk, low-reward move. I’m not aware of other organizations with an interest in undermining OSM’s established governance or the motivation to do so.
> 
> I find this statement naive to the point of incredulity. It's less
> than 2 years since we had to deal with one company directing over 100
> employees to sign up for membership mere hours before the election
> deadline. Have you really forgotten this already?

Andy, thanks for pushing back, your long-time level-headed contributions to OSM makes it important to take you seriously.

I think the incident you’re referring to is the Nov 2018 Global Logic one; Off-list, one of the incident report authors helpfully shared with me their summary. There are a lot of ways to interpret that move, including one in which GL acted based on a consistent understanding of how OSM governance works and we saw an attack where none existed.

https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/100_new_OSMF_membership_accounts_on_2018.11.15 

The perceived takeover risk here is not grounded in reality. The report states facts but also veers into guesses about GL’s motivations. Pulling back slightly, my concern with the current AoA change proposals comes from my observation that OSM is acting like a cornered, vulnerable community beset by outside interference. We have a strain of folklore we perpetuate among ourselves that chooses to see unexpected events exclusively as threats. 

I’m interested in an OSM that does the opposite, and presumes unexpected encounters are opportunities for growth and change.

We started out as a primarily UK and Northern European world mapping project; I first got involved about a year before the TIGER import when the US map was mostly blank. An effort to map the globe at street scale is pretty audacious. How could we possibly assume that in our growth beyond the UK we’d continue to encounter Saturday afternoon surveyors with identical motivations to the project founders? Just in the past decade, we’ve seen the rise of humanitarian mappers, AI-driven contributions, and full-blown occupational mappers all growing the map in different ways suitable to their conditions.

In order to recognize & act on opportunities OSM must be healthy. Borrowing an idea from individual psychology, we need to be operating nearer to the top of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs with our basic needs for survival and health met. Hasty AoA changes like this one indicate poor organizational health and look like the moves of a frightened animal.

How can we respond to events like GL or the two others that you allude to in a constructive way that grows the community and brings them on-side? What can we learn from other open source organizations about involving commercial and NGO participants in decision-making?

What do we need to do to act more like a fat, happy otter with plenty of clams?

-mike.

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michal migurski- contact info and pgp key:
sf/ca            http://mike.teczno.com/contact.html