[Strategic] SWG meeting 25 March 2011

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 03/24/11 14:30, Richard Weait wrote:
> And we have homework due for the meeting.  The Board has tasked SWG
> with review of the OSMF Articles of Association.  All SWG members are
> assigned the task of reading the current AoA before next meeting as
> agreed during the meeting last week.

If I may rise a point that I have made some noise about in the past:

The UK Companies Act that, if I am not mistaken, governs OSMF as well, 
has all sorts of interesting provisions regarding members and meetings 
and so on; one of them is that the full list of members (including 
postal addresses) must not only be kept by the organisation but also 
made available to other members free of charge (and to the public but a 
fee may be charged).

Currently, OSMF doesn't even (necessarily) know the real name of its 
members, much less the addresses.

In this posting - which serves as a good entry point to the 2009 
discussion, but be sure to browse backwards and forwards - Nick Black 
echoes something that 80n had said before, namely whether OSMF members 
are indeed members in the sense of the companies act:

http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/2009-August/000156.html

If it turns out that they are not, then I guess OSMF has only three 
founding members and that's it. (If I am not mistaken, of these founding 
members one has lost interest altogether and hasn't been seen in years; 
one has all but left the project to concentrate on his own competing 
project because he doesn't like the license change, and the third is now 
a Microsoft employee ;)

Needless to say, that would be an interesting situation to say the 
least, as these three people could then steer OSMF and its resources in 
any way they like.

Bye
Frederik