[OSM-talk] Busy bee

[Dan Karran]

Steve,

If you're going to make it necessary to pay to become a member, please
make sure to keep the foundation completely seperate from the website
side of things. You will scare so many people off if they think they
have to pay to be a member of an open source community.

Being a member of a board is different, however, and entirely
acceptable in my opinion to charge people to be a member of such.

I understand that running the operation costs money, but charging
people to participate (or seemingly so) will scare them off, in my
opinion.


Cheers,
Dan

On 5/21/06, SteveC <steve at asklater.com> wrote:
> Hi everyone
>
> Since the OSMF discussions I've been quite busy with a number of things
> including the IoW, Mapchester and Xtech and have sort of dropped the
> ball in exercising my defacto benevolent emporor status.
>
> One thing these events did do was allow me to talk in person to quite a
> few OSM contributors in person and get a feel for how they felt about
> OSM, OSMF and where things were going. Everyone seems to think it'll
> take over the universe which is satisfying.
>
> Discussion in person and on the list seemed to stall at the 'what is a
> member' stage. In person talking to a number of people (ben deserves
> credit) a way out emerged that I didn't get any major disagreement with:
>
> For the initial vote as defined in the IRC discussion everyone on this
> mailing list (as of when this email goes out) or an OSM user is
> _eligible_ to become a member and can therefore vote. To become a member
> you need to paypal me 5 pounds or write me a hand-written snail mail
> letter.
>
> There are no second-class members, both methods afford the same
> priviliege. Parallel to this, people wishing to fulfil positions can be
> nominated or self-nominate. The initial people voted in will then decide
> on things as per the IRC discussion.
>
> The first vote will be held in three weeks time, the 11th June using the
> Single Transferrable Vote. I'm open on how long the poll should stay
> open.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Transferrable_Vote
>
> Oversight. Someone should verify that I'm not allocating/burning votes
> and so on. I suggest that two independent people write simple voting
> software and people vote at both sites and then these are compared. I'll
> write/reuse one, someone can volunteer for the other. If this is
> significantly diagreeable then I can just open up the member list etc to
> someone people agree on. I'm not going to ship the entire member list to
> everybody, it'd be an invasion of privacy and we don't have a policy.
> Yet.
>
>
> Why this system? Because it shows effort and covers both bases. Most
> people I spoke to are happy to pay some minimal amount of money to
> become a member, vote and get on with it. Some people feel that they're
> already contributing a lot or that money should not be an issue. It's a
> view I can understand, I share it with other organisations I'm involved
> in. In this case, sending me a letter shows some effort and costs next
> to nothing. Interesting postcards get bonus points :-)
>
> It also tackles in a minimal way the 'I'll register a 100 members'
> thing. Well, you now need 500 quid or 100 hand written letters.
>
> In summary, this isn't perfect and we're finding our feet. Rather than
> stall on the issue of membership, I've tried to find a practicable
> solution and as the IRC/mailing list  discussion went, those voted will
> figure out the issues longer term.
>
> Pleas email me to get my snail mail address.
>
> I suggest http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Foundation is a good
> place to keep track of things.
>
> Here's the IRC summary etc:
>
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Meetings::20060405
>
> I hereby nominate myself for Chairman.
>
>
>
> Another issue: A couple of people have mentioned that they'd like local
> OSM groups and lists in other languages. The first one will be local-gb
> (great britain) and Nick Black'll run it. Drop me a line if anyone wants
> a mailing list etc.
>
>
> have fun,
>
> SteveC steve at asklater.com http://www.asklater.com/steve/
>
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>


-- 
Dan Karran
dan at karran.net
www.dankarran.com