[Osmf-talk] Should OSMF run another microgrants round?

[Amanda McCann]

Hi all,

Perhaps I wasn't 100% clear. I was mostly asking “Should we do another Microgrants round, and if so, what should we do differently?”, i.e. practical suggestions like this for how to improve (= what went wrong last year) are welcome.

On Sat, 23 Oct 2021 17:24 +02:00, Simon Poole <simon at poole.ch> wrote:
> Any project receiving funds needs to declare all relationships of any kind to OSMF officers, 
> employees etc up front and rules need to be in place that make it clear 
> when and when not these require projects to be disqualified.

Yes, that was one of my ideas, and the Microgrants committee also recommends that (page 8)

> the original governing document turned out to be, as expected, far too vague. 
> ...
> at least half of the projects boiled down to paid mapping

One of the recommendation from the commitee (pg 5) is 

> We need to define “traditional paid mapping” which is prohibited as a use case of the grants. Is it simply “money per task/hour/project for adding map data to OSM”? How do stipends, to cover food, transport, internet, or also how do prizes such as objects or gift cards, stand out from paid mapping? Needs to be very explicit

So sounds, like we need to improve that.

> Taking it at a given that at least 6 out of 12 projects had high 
> marketing value even if a majority of those were outside of the OSMFs 
> normal scope, it is head banging against all available walls insane that 
> none of them was written up and was published as an OSMF originating 
> story and then milked for maximum value.

You're gonna know the answer to this: No-one wrote it up. 
Maybe a new suggestion for future grantees is “You should write up a blog post for us about your successful project”, so the CWG (which I'm also on) will have something to publish.


> I would have suggested getting a paid professional to do the stories, not increasing the load on the 
> volunteers running the show.

Hmm, interesting.

> The committee points out that the software projects ran smoother [...]
> would suggest splitting these things up

Sounds like we should set up some sort of other working group to handle this sort of engineering tasks.... 😉

-- 
A. McCann
Secretary
OpenStreetMap Foundation

Name & Registered Office:
OpenStreetMap Foundation
St John’s Innovation Centre
Cowley Road
Cambridge
CB4 0WS
United Kingdom
A company limited by guarantee, registered in England and Wales
Registration No. 05912761