[OSM-talk] Survey: How to pay the OSM bill

Tom Chance tom at acrewoods.net
Wed Jul 11 17:15:03 BST 2007


On Wed, 11 Jul 2007 15:59:17 +0100, Nick Whitelegg
<Nick.Whitelegg at solent.ac.uk> wrote:
> I really don't like the sound of anything which proposes restrictions of
> this sort on the use of the data, and I would be unhappy with my own
> surveyed data being subject to such a restriction. Advertising would be
> infinitely better in my own opinion.

I agree.

Another model is to establish companies or social enterprises that give a
certain proportion of their income back to the OSMF. My employer, an
environmental charity, does this quite well with a number of green spinoff
companies. If members of the OSM community manage to develop profitable
business models based on OSM then they should seriously consider this as
part of their business plan. Rather than commercialising OSM, create
spinoffs that leave the OSMF and the OSM community to get on with being all
about free maps and tools.

As for other sources, I've worked with a few charities and foundations of
varying sizes (incomes from £10k/yr to £650k/year). Without doing the
research thoroughly, I can confidently say that there are lots of trusts,
grants, companies and NGOs out there that OSMF could get its hands on.
Whether they'd cover core costs (e.g. servers), specific projects (e.g.
cycling maps of Belgium), one-off events (e.g. mapping parties) or
something else needs to be looked at.

In my opinion the best strategy would be to raise enough from the community
and supportive companies to pay for a part-time fundraiser for at least a
year or so. Get her/him to research the options properly, maybe try out
some ideas, and publish a publicly available fundraising strategy after 9
months.

Kind regards,
Tom





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