[Osmf-talk] Draft resolution on membership prerequisites

[Darafei "Komяpa" Praliaskouski]

Some thoughts:

"42 mapping days" will exclude:
 - map consumers of all kinds, people who need to say "hey your
tagging/servers/distribution/licensing is unusable".
 - people from small places. My village I mapped in 5 days and generally
I'm out of things to map there.
 - people from low economy regions. Anyone who just does not have the
luxury of 42 days of hobby in front of a computer.
 - shy people who don't believe they are in position to prove themselves to
someone.

"42 mapping days" will amplify:
 - people who can focus on one thing for 42 days and more and don't have
other life.
 - paid mappers of all kinds (the only real way to get in is to work
somewhere where you have an assignment to contribute for 42+ days).
 - current, unbalanced, membership base. (this won't apply on renewals to
remove people, right?)

"mapping or non-mapping" I can't really get what it means. On the coding
side, anyone can generate a git history of any temporal shape quite quickly
to fill in some github fork.  Requiring to commit to some specific repo
will make the maintainter of it a gatekeeper of OSMF membership.

I believe the proposal is ill-thought and will cause more damage than help
in current form.


On Sun, Feb 13, 2022 at 7:29 PM Tobias Knerr <osm at tobias-knerr.de> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> at the 2020 AGM, a 79% majority of the membership asked the board to
> propose prerequisites for membership in the OSM Foundation which would
> ensure that all applicants for membership have made a reasonable amount
> of contributions to OSM (not necessarily through mapping).[1]
>
> We would like to ask for your feedback to a first draft of this proposal
> which you can read below. It uses a definition for "reasonable amount of
> contributions" that is comparable to the active contributor
> membership[2], but has lower requirements: 42 days of contributions ever
> instead of 42 days per year. Existing memberships would not be affected
> by this change.
>
> The 2020 resolution called for a membership vote on this topic in 2021.
> Unfortunately, the board didn't produce a proposal in time for the 2021
> AGM and we would like to apologize for this delay. Our current plan is
> to have the resolution ready for a general meeting on April 30, 2022.
>
>
> # Potential text of the resolution
>
> Using its powers under §15 of the Articles of Association, the board of
> directors shall reject applications for membership or associate
> membership if the applicant has not demonstrably contributed to
> OpenStreetMap on at least 42 days. The specific form of the
> contributions (e.g. mapping vs. non-mapping) does not make a difference
> for the fulfilment of these prerequisites. The board may delegate
> verification and rejection of membership applications to a working group.
>
> ## Rationale:
>
> This change would more firmly establish the OSMF as an entity serving
> the people and communities who create OpenStreetMap. By ensuring that
> votes in Foundation elections and resolutions are cast by OpenStreetMap
> contributors, it becomes more likely that the Foundation will continue
> to support the the project well.
>
> The criteria take inspiration from the fee waiver (known as active
> contributor membership) to allow using a similar implementation. Unlike
> the fee waiver, eligibility will be evaluated as a one-time step during
> application for membership, rather than annually. As such, members do
> not have to fear losing their membership if their activity fluctuates or
> declines. Existing memberships won't be affected.
>
> ## Considerations:
>
> This one-time check applies to all member applications including those
> that pay the regular £15 membership fee.
>
>
> # Footnotes
>
> [1]
>
> https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Annual_General_Meetings/2020/Suggested_resolutions#Vote_3:_Work_on_membership_prerequisites
> [2] https://join.osmfoundation.org/active-contributor-membership/
>
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>
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