[Osmf-talk] Hostile takeover of the OpenStreetMap Foundation?

[Roland Olbricht]

Hello everybody,

First of all, I'm sorry for all the people that got scared from
automatic translation. This is the at least second such incident within
relatively short time after the outcry for nothing when a HOT employee
reminded the Brazilian community on the old Forum that the venue changes
to community.osm.org, apparently in Portuguese without side intentions.

Automatic translation does not reliably convey the mood.

I would like to thank Simon and Martin for putting my message
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-de/2022-October/117842.html
back into its context.
With the course of events I agree with Simon that board members rather
should not comment on the election because this diverts attention to
people not to be elected as opposed to the candidates that deserve
attention.

Note that all mails from my private mail address like this one ar
personal opinions.

My mail had been from 2022-10-17, in response to the empty candidate
sheet only a couple of days before the end of nominations:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=Foundation/AGM2022/Election_to_Board&oldid=2420746
Any volunteer as candidate from anywhere has been highly welcome. And is
so, although this means next year because nominations have closed.
Nobody had expected four or even two electable candidates from Germany,
but one would have been decisively more than zero when the OSM community
somehow needed four from the entire world.

Imagico's analysis puts this into a squarely wrong context, but that
deserves a mail on its own. That Imagico relates Mikel's blog post to
Fukuyama as of 1989 also is weird.
In a nutshell, it is no coincidence that "responsible" contains
"response": the board is mostly busy with responding to shocks from
outside OpenStreetMap to avoid damage on OpenStreetMap, not any form of
strategy. Multiple former board members have written their testimonial
about that.
If one expects people to run a political agenda on top of that, then one
overstreches the time of the very volunteers one wants to attract for
the job.

Board members are legally responsible (as opposed to trusted by) to the
entire OSMF constituency. Two other things are the trust to make the
best decisions versus the trust to abide laws and bylaws.
OSM (without F) community members as well as OSMF members are free to
trust or not trust whoever they want, and that is a good thing called
freedom. As a person, I do trust all candidates that they act lawful. I
did not trust all past candidates to always make the right decisions.

Do you believe that a Facebook employee would have facilitated a lawsuit
against his employer? This had been a discussed option at that time,
because of poor attribution.

Do you believe that Bryan would have supported to handover the control
of iD presets to a committee, and potentially regionally adapted? The
whole process that led to the SDRP had not exactly been unanimous.

Do I believe myself I would have been neutral about Overpass, Mentz, or
even EWG related decisions? No. There is a CoI policy that would kick in
by heart although in many cases not by letter, and I would recuse. Then
again, broad things may send multiple board members into the CoI at the
same time and inhibit sane decisions, so this is not a silver bullet. In
other words, for a working CoI the members mus be different enough to
not recuse too many at any given moment.

So it are the beliefs and affiliations that drive election decisions,
not the professional CV achievements, and rightly so. It is why that
question from last year Minh refers to had been broadly misleading.

It is amongst the reason why we need diversity, not uniform
super-understanders, another will follow.

The Roland of 2019 (without children) cannot speak for the Roland of
2022 (responsible for a little child) because he cannot understand the
problems arising from that. I don't claim that I can from the trouble of
child extrapolate to the much more difficult situation of multiple
children plus unstable economic situation, quite often women. But the
effects for one child are large enough to state that: "I will not trust
a non-caregiver to understand the implications on OSM for caregivers",
affecting some decisions, most notably synchronous events and
communication overhead. Note that "having children" can be different
from "forcibly ceasing any other activity when the child is in trouble",
the essence of "responsible". Basically any synchronized event (offline
or online) needs a lot of preparation to ensure childcare and
contingency plans what to do if the childcare fails. Writing this text
has been spread out over multiple breaks because it has taken six hours
to flatten out hopefully all point a reader could misunderstand; there
can be weeks when even less residual time after job and childcare would
be available. It is a thing that people employed for their OSM work just
do not know.

It is the core reason why we need diversity, what Simon points about,
and why it is difficult. If fact there are a ton of things (cultural,
generational, technical environment, even internet connectivity,
timezones, for conferences also health limitations, passport
restrictions, or whatever). There are many US members of the OSM
community who are e.g. both mappers and caregivers, and many member of
the German community who are not caregivers, so the line here is not
about nationality but about: "having a guaranteed eight hours for five
days a week to do OSM work, because anything else is catered for" as
opposed to "trying to divert the remaining spare time after the day job
and other obligations to do some OSM work". Paying people for OSM
activities is indeed a thing that mostly US based companies do, so it
might be tempting to confuse the "tenured paid to contribute" versus
"volunteering" line that is meant here with nationality things, which is
not meant here.

However, the good news are both that there are multiple female
candidates and amongst them caregivers, and that two of the three
remaining board members are caregivers, and in practice it works. You
don't need to be caregiver to be a good board member. However, there
might be despite best effort times where you will not get an answer from
me for multiple days because the child comes first and sleep disasters
exist. Caregivers understand why, others might be annoyed.

Likewise, there are cultural issues that may motivate a OSM community
member to rather trust one board member more than the other. So I stand
to the assessment that:

     The board shall be diverse enough that every OSM member finds a
board member to trust and talk to!

opposed to

     The board shall be composed of uniform super-understanders that are
able to allure every person on the planet!

The latter being what the standard megacorp often claims and fails to
deliver. For the sake of completeness a manual translation of post in
question., the text how I would have written it in English if my
audience were English speakers. In brackets are remarks for context
which the intended audience knows. I'm now again offline to give
medication, hold hands and change diapers.

---

Hello everybody,

although late, I would like to address an urgent concern.
Many of us, including me, have a general angst, that one or another
megacorp might takeover the OSMF and restructure it to the megacorp's needs.

The legal owner of the OSM database (as well as the servers) is the
OpenStreetMap-Foundation, existing for that purpose.
That their membership is not undercut by undercover agents had been so
far the main concern.
[Background: the Global Logic incident, when a company (from India and
not the US btw) sent hundreds of its employees to become OSMF members
out of a sudden, outnumbering existing OSMF members]

However, we have now a situation where a hostile party can simply come
through the front door.
As three to four board members have announced to not candidate again, we
[the OSM community] need to find three to four people tha are willing to
be elected:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Foundation/AGM2022/Election_to_Board#Submission_of_self-nominations
[Reminder: nobody had put forward a candidature at the time of this mail]

I'm writing for multiple reasons "willing to be elected" and not a
pre-planned commitment to work.

First of all, a board member that does nothing is better than a board
member that pursues an agenda outside the community consensus [referring
to the narrative that nobody outside the board really knows what the
board does].
OTOH, board members that support OSM by heart will find the work that
must be done without pre-planning [remember: "responsible" contains
"response", not "act"]

But most of all, we do not have a German candidate so far but a huge
German community.
Being elected is thus rather probable.
[Background: in most or all past board elections, the most popular
amongst the German candidates had been elected.
Remember that at the time of writing there had been less candidates than
vacancies.
Writing pages over pages of text in English for the election is a lot of
work, and I understand that people are reluctant to do that for
perceived little chances of success, so clarifying that one should worry
less about that.].

And necessary, because we might see some infamously late nominations
[listing not all late nominations, both those for whom concerns were
ushered whether they are a good fit for the board]:
in the last years that have been Bryan Housel, the [former] iD developer
who has willfully ignored the community's consensus on tagging. Or Logan
McGovern for whom I did not find any substantial mapping or other OSM
relating activity [based on the "Logan Mc" user mentioned in
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Foundation/AGM20/Election_to_Board;
from memory I would say that the link to "WarpathPeacock" did not exist
at that time]. And Facebook employee Michal Migurski [has meanwhile left
Facebook, but were an employee of Facebook at the time of past elections].

If [all of] you [German has a distinct plural here, English needs an
idiom if it is unclear from context that people and not a single person
is meant, again a pitfall for an automatic translation] do not want that
people like those decide over the future of OSM [should be OSMF, really
unhelpful typo]
then is now the right moment to write your [grammatically singular] name
to the above mentioned list.
This is written here in German and outside the automatic translation,
because I do not want more people like the ones mentioned above to be
encouraged to put forward a last minute candidacy.

Cheers,

Roland