[OSM-talk] Status of the Local Chapter working group

[Stefan de Konink]

On Thu, 13 Aug 2009, Nick Black wrote:

> * Give potential Local Chapter leaders and other community members the
> change to discuss the proposed agreement

My biggest concern now is the mixture of not-for-profit and democratically
lead organisation. It is a big concern for me that the actual
organisations that actually jumpstarted OpenStreetMap in The Netherlands
would not even be able to apply under these rules. While in the past every
press anouncement from OpenStreetMap NL was distributed via them.

To be concrete; in my Dutch perspective a non-profit organisation is a
Foundation. And the Dutch `Foundation' cannot have members, only
contributors. For the reason to have an independancy between `the board`,
`the money` and `the contributors` voting about money is board only, the
board cannot get (significant) money for theirselves the contributors
bring in money and/or effort. If the term of a board member is done,
the board chooses a new board member. That sounds like a dictatorship, it
is.

For this legal reason Stichting Vrijschrift or Stichting OpenGeo could
never apply. Hence there are no 30 members and even with 30 contributors
their is no democratic saying on anything. Since the purpose of a
'foundation' is to have a goal, not people talking if these goals are
valid.

Therefor if only membership organisations are allowed to be a local
chapter this should be point one.


Personally I would prefer that the membership would be directly to OSMF
and that localstuff is handled by /any/ organisation that has
OpenStreetMap or free available geography/data as one of their targets.


Stefan
(for sake of completeness; treasurer of Stichting OpenGeo and
volunteer in Vrijschrift)