One of Steves favourite sound bites is “we have the money, lets employ somebody” in a couple of variants, used again in his current manifesto to convince people in to electing him back to the OSMF board.

During my time I simply ignored them, not wanting to derail things more than they typically were, but the obvious response would have been “how on earth would you know?” (well that is actually the polite version).

The OSMF has limited financial reporting (it has improved over the last two years) and essentially no planning, also known as a budget. It is currently simply not possible to know what the financial status of the OSMF is or should be at point in time in the future. And while the OSMF has roughly £80’000 of cash available we shouldn’t be eating too much in to that given that substantial amounts of it would be needed in case of larger hardware problems (imagine one of our hosting locations catching fire) or other shortfalls and unexpected costs. Not even mentioning any kind of planning for short term cash needs.

It is one of the things that I consider a personal fail that we didn’t manage to get something resembling a conventional budget in place over the last two years. It is not difficult, but it would have required cooperation from multiple board members to be actually meaningful and that was not forthcoming and so I concentrated on other pressing issues.

One of the larger planning issues is the largest line item, SOTM. Right now a couple of days before this years event, the OSMF board has no idea what has been signed in its name (if anything has been signed that is), what the potential risks are, nothing. And this was the same the previous year, the year before, the year before that and so on ….

Last year the board faced a potential GAU (German expression for the largest conceivable accident) when the local organizers for Birmingham threatened to walk out, we patched that up, but till this day we don’t quite know how much we would have been in the red had the worst case happened. [I would like to point out that the local team was doing the right thing. I was simply showing that, yes, even “safe” things go wrong, and without planning you can’t even do “what if”s in such a situation]

Now there is quite a lot of potential sources of funding available for OSM, but we are kidding ourselves if we think it is going to rain manna if we don’t get our act together, get our financials under control and actually have projects worth funding (a separate topic).

To be clear, from a legal point of view there is nothing wrong with the OSMF finances and the way we have financed hardware purchases in the past has been low risk, leaving SOTM and our G&A as the larger variables. But it has trapped us in a vicious circle.

Rebooting (with an emphasis on boot) the OSMF board might be a way of breaking out, installing a Junta with the person mainly responsible for the current state of affairs in charge, not.