[Strategic] getting started
Frederik Ramm
frederik at remote.org
Tue Jun 1 11:20:24 BST 2010
Hi,
Mikel Maron wrote:
> Partially, I don't think the Foundation has a good comprehensive
> picture of all needs, along with an evaluation of how much the
> community can provide, and what would need funding.
This is not comprehensive but maybe it can serve as a lego brick in the
overall picture.
Speaking of the German community:
* Sysadmin is being handled well by the community. (Mind you, burden in
osm.de is small compared to osm.org; just four servers and no hardware
worries.) I can see that there would be enough volunteers if burden
became more. From what I hear of Wikimedia (who have paid sysadmin
staff), paid staff is not so desirable here because it creates a chain
of command which does not exist otherwise - paid staff have to watch
their back and do their masters' bidding, the are less hackers ("our
kind of people") and more bureaucrats. Getting a new software package
installed on a Wikimedia server is said to often take weeks. OSM is not
yet ready to fossilize I think.
* Community outreach is handled well by the community - they organise
talks for other communities like LUGs or cyclist associations and so on,
and they have fun doing that. They do however make considerable use of
Geofabrik's offer of providing them with OSM flyers, and also Geofabrik
print lots of large OSM posters for these kinds of events. People need
to be constantly reminded of these free offers but when they make use of
them the feedback is always positive. From this experience I think that
OSMF should not try to do outreach themselves (e.g. should not start a
grand programme of OSM introduction for hillwalkers or whatever), but
should be very supportive of community actions. I could imagine an OSMF
PR support office which does not do anything on their own, but operates
a small "web shop" where community members could order flyers, posters,
handouts, stickers for free.
* All things to do with mapping are at the core of the project and
handled well by the community; interference by OSMF would be harmful.
Any grants distributed for mapping parties etc. would be very difficult
to administer and always leave the sour taste of "they got their beers
paid, why didn't we?" with those who did not qualify or did not know how
to apply.
* What the community does very badly is speaking to the press. Every so
often we have a major TV station looking for someone whom they could
interview about OSM, and the request is bounced around on the mailing
lists, and nothing happens. For example in the case of Haiti, the TV
ended up interviewing Prof Alexander Zipf from Heidelberg Uni (he's
behind OpenRouteService and they had done something specially for Haiti)
but really, in terms of "who was involved in Haiti mapping" this guy was
only a second or third rate interview partner. Problem is, some smart
OSMF press official would not have been any better; what we would have
needed in that situation is someone who knows the right people in OSM,
calls them up, briefs them about what the press want, reassures them
that they'll do well, and maybe write an official letter they can
present at their school as an excuse for missing a day of work. I.e. in
my opinion we don't need an OSMF PR official but something like a
"community press liaison officer" or so. It is certainly a difficult
task but I see OSMF's role in empowering the community rather than
putting itself in the limelight.
* What the community also does badly is lengthy interaction with
officials or executives of any kind. E.g. they have found a potential
data source and now want to convince the owner to allow its use for OSM.
Sometimes we're lucky and we have a community member who really follows
things up but mostly people write one letter and then forget about it,
and the letter is often badly worded. I don't think much can be done
here, I'm just including it for completeness.
* Needless to say, this includes sponsorship deals; every now and then
community members make contact with people willing to sponsor but even
their first question - "what do you need?" - is often too hard to
answer, much lesse the second "and what would we get in return?". But
the existing servers that we have, and the tech mailing list on which
their shortcomings are endlessly discussed, help to improve that; people
are getting a clearer picture of what kind of hardware is required.
Still, sponsors inevitably want some recognition, if only a receipt,
which can only be given by OSMF or FOSSGIS.
* The community is also not very good at handling all things to do with
licensing, incoming as well as outgoing - i.e. stuff that falls within
the area of the Data Working Group. Whenever some commercial entity uses
OSM publicly, there will inevitably discussion about whether they are
allowed to do it, whether they're doing it right, whether they need to
"give something back" to the community etc.; this often carries with it
some bad vibes for the community and may sometimes even lead to people
making public statements or even writing letters that shine a bad light
on the project. Witness L-A's witchhunt page on the wiki. I still hope
that the community can learn to do these things better but this is an
area where if the community had some support where they can email their
case to a professional and that professional would then record the case,
confirm the details, and fire off some polite standard letters, that
would already take away some steam.
> For instance, OSI had offered to fund a re-granting scheme, where
> OSMF would receive applications for small grants to support use of
> OSM in cooperation with civil society organizations. This would not
> necessarily involve Local Chapters, but could. Would OSMF be able to
> politically take on such a role?
We recently had a guy pop up on the mailing list who was involved with
some citizen movement in a major German city. Something or other that
was aimed at getting people more involved in local government, and he
wanted to use OSM for something or start a dialogue. Nobody was
interested, I think partly because he was too unspecific. It seems he
was looking for some high level counterpart on OSM side to discuss how
his project and OSM could cooperate but nobody took him on. Every now
and then I, at Geofabrik, get requests for assistance from some
charitable organisation where they want to put up a wheelchair
accessibility map or whatever, and I usually tell them that they can
either go to the community where help is free but they'll have to find
someone who likes their project, or they can pay me - but even though I
tend to offer them help at much discounted prices they usually cannot
afford me and have a hard time creating interest for their project on
the talk list. So really, as you say above, sometimes it is not OSM who
need help but someone else who wants to use OSM.
I'm unsure how OSMF, even if they wanted to, could help these people
because someone has to do the work in the end, and does OSMF really want
to start paying out money to OSM consultancies to do charitable work, or
convince project developers to help someone else with the aid of some
money? I am on the fence about this - on the one hand, as a commercial
entity I can see some opportunities here because money is going to be
injected into "doing things with OSM". On the other hand this would put
OSMF in the awkward position of having to decide who gets the cash.
Bye
Frederik
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