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

[Michal Migurski]

> On Oct 29, 2020, at 5:05 AM, Mikel Maron <mikel.maron at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>>  how is https://donate.openstreetmap.org/ not a good way for companies or organizations to fund OSM? Do companies/organizations want more information or certainty on how funds are going to be spent (such as the several hardware fundraising drives that OSM did in the past, or sponsoring SotM, or the SRE position now), or are they looking for a more structured way for funding (such as the Corporate Membership scheme)?
> 
> I can jump in here, I organized the fundraising for SSRE and iD recently. Eugene, exactly right. Clarity from OSMF on needs and spend is important. That goes for organizations, but also individuals (re hardware drives). Before this year, the OSMF didn't really know how to spend the money it already had. That doesn't mean there were not real needs. It takes work to define needs and be ready to spend money.

I’ll add a little detail since Eugene asks a very good question.

As an individual donor you might be feeling good enough about OSM to throw a few dollars over the fence on a particular occasion, and then decide not to the next time. It’s often based on excitement or anxiety, and encourages fundraising drives to choose a desperate tone: give money today or we will run out of resources tomorrow! This makes future planning impossible and it’s one reason NGOs and political campaigns prefer recurring donations to one-time gifts.

Companies and organizations generally have to make group decisions and there are people higher up the ladder who approve them. Those people like to see graphs with long time horizons and lines that go up and to the right.

In my current role, the ultimate decision maker plays a very hands-off role and delegates choices about funding. If he sees enough people whose opinion he trusts agree then it goes forward. Practically, that means I have to be in agreement with 3-4 people so we talk about things like how an org plans to use the money, whether we think it’s headed in a good direction, and how it fits into our group’s overall strategy.

In a previous role, the ultimate decision maker made choices in a more ad hoc way. Sometimes that would result in meaningful funding for an org, other times he’d be annoyed and refuse to approve funds. At the time, the generally poor tone on OSM-talk was a major determinant of our mood and we declined to support hardware and certain other donation drives at the time because we weren’t happy with how the Foundation operated and the kind of community conversations it allowed or encouraged.

Hope this helps answer your question!

-mike.

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