[Strategic] getting started

Mikel Maron mikel_maron at yahoo.com
Thu Jun 3 06:26:15 BST 2010


Thanks for the details Frederik, comments throughout...


> 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.

Fair points. I think we need to take signals from the technical working group on this.

My impression is that they are happy in volunteer mode. I am not certain that everything gets covered, particularly on the communications side. 
That's understandable, not part of the job, but perhaps they could draft a role, which could be floated to the community.

> . 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.

Creating and distributing support materials makes a lot of sense. 

Kate made a request on talk the other day for OSM advertising materials.

I could also see this encompassing things like white papers targetting
corporate and government users.

The PR shop would gather requirements, arrange designs, and distribution.
The materials certainly need funding. Is the HR here a paid position?

Would outreach support go beyond this, to program support?
A fictitious example: a conservation group wants to map the greenbelt 
of their in detail. They have the interest to do it themselves, using OSM,
but need funding.

> * 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.

Ok. I haven't thought mapping parties, but something like what I outlined above.
I think there's going to be a place for something like a small grant program, somewhere.
There is not something the community currently does particularly well.
It definitely needs to be properly administered. What is everyone's thoughts on
this kind of program's appropriateness for OSMF?

> * 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.

I see a pattern emerging. The need isn't for OSMF to do the work itself,
but organize properly for volunteers to do the work. When OSM was small,
this could be handled ad-hoc. Now at scale, we need to be more systematic.

> * 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.

Agreed ... in all of these interactions, they are going to be more comfortable
dealing with OSMF.

> > 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.

Right, exactly. How do we help them? These are going to be amazing applications of OSM.

I don't think it's paying OSM developers, but funding non-profits to do work with OSM.
They will of course need technical help, but the decision should be done on merit of the program,
not on the developer. I would see it as the grantee's responsibility to find developer resources.

-Mikel
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