[OSM-talk] advertising

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

> OSM is a community, and besides lots of fun with fine people it has  
> one
> concrete outcome: a map. This is what we produce, and it is displayed
> right away to every of our website visitors.

If I interpret 80n's posting correctly, then www.openstreetmap.org  
ist not our (the project's) web site, but the foundation's web site.  
The foundation is not the project but an entity founded to support  
the project, without a claim to be the only such entity.

Thus, www.openstreetmap.org reflects what the foundation thinks will  
benefit the project; it is fully at the foundation's discretion to  
put any kind of ads there or whatever they think helps them further  
their chartered purpose (which is probably more or less the same as  
the goals of the project).

If you are a foundation member, and you have a different opinion on  
what benefits the project, then you can work on the opinion-forming  
process inside the foundation, with the possible outcome of making  
changes to the foundation's web site.

If you're not a foundation member, then this is of no relevance for  
you; since you are contributing to the project and not the  
foundation, www.openstreetmap.org doesn't concern you. It is just one  
of a number of supporting web sites - maybe one with a cooler domain  
name and/or more users, but nothing keeps the project community from  
opening any number of such web sites outside of the foundation's  
influence.

Complaining, as a non-member, about the contents of  
www.openstreetmap.org, is then as if you were complaining about my  
openstreetmap web page or someone's geodata blog or whatever.

That is what I distilled from 80n's post. There are, of course, some  
problems with this approach - the foundation web site at  
www.openstreetmap.org also hosts crucial parts of the project  
infrastructure, namely the API and central database, but these cannot  
simply be replaced by someone else's. But if you manage to make the  
distinction in your head and think of www.openstreetmap.org not as  
"our" but as "their" web site, then it suddenly becomes less  
important what's on there, doesn't it?

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00.09' E008°23.33'