So Heather - does your statement mean that you think proportional representation of the OSM community in the OSMF membership is not important?

I think that’s a bit of a broad conclusion to base on the stated evidence.

Yes, even if there are also other indicators that broadly speaking the contributor structure differs significantly between the US and Europe this is something a closer look at is required, especially if you want to make quantitative statements.

Thanks - i was contemplating doing a similar analysis but i already suspected this is something others will look into so no need for me to invest time. :-)

My suspicion already was that the traditional over-representation of Germans in the OSMF has reduced significantly over the past years. But this is of course not due to the German community being less represented in the OSMF but because the US kind of raised the bar for everyone else. Your numbers also confirm an impression i already had before that in terms of absolute numbers Russia, Japan and Poland are the countries most severely underrepresented in the OSMF.

What i would really like to see (and i hope maybe Pascal will be able to provide a better look at this at some point) is how the same analysis would look like not for OSMF members per mapper but OSMF members per hobby mapper. As Simon for example pointed out a much larger portion of mapping activities in the US seem of commercial nature compared to most of Europe so the US overweight would probably be even more extreme if you take into account that SEO spammers are not really the kind of mapper you want represented in the OSMF.

Peter’s statement in the board meeting clearly indicates this was not a document previously circulated but something new. From the statements made so far it is not completely clear to me if it was communicated to the board directly from the outside or if it was introduced by a board member.

And since this is repeatedly being communicated incorrectly - this was not a document written by the advisory board, it was something written by members of the advisory board (unclear who exactly was involved) - it was never discussed by the advisory board as a whole AFAIK before being proposed publicly - if it were this would have been documented in the board meeting minutes. If i make a policy proposal that does neither make it a document written by the advisory board even if i write it together with Patrick Stählin or Christian Quest or someone else on the AB. It only becomes a suggestion from the advisory board by being transparently proposed on the advisory board mailing list giving all other advisory board members the opportunity to provide input and making sure the process is properly minuted.

Kilkenni linked to the Ukrainian forum discussion:

https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?pid=726332

There is a similar discussion in the Russian forum:

https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=64205

@Kilkenni - you are fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of the statement by the DWG.

While your statement of opinion in the diary entry is ok and as i said i think it is good you make it the attacks in your comment (delusion etc.), which serve no purpose in argument but are clearly just aiming to insult without arguments, are not.

Attempting to discredit the DWG to force them to change their statement into something you see more favorable politically is not an appropriate approach.

Note as you linked to the DWG has sought input on the matter before they formulated the new statement. You did not bring anything into the discussion except the expression of the desire to keep things they way they are. You now after the decision formulate some arguments (which as said is good) - but you criticizing the DWG for not taking those arguments into account before you have made them is somewhat cheap. As said i am sure the DWG will take them into account in future deliberation on the matter but frankly your strongest argument from my perspective is the comparison to other disputed boundary cases and as i explained you so far failed to sufficiently take into account the full spectrum of such cases and picking just a few ones that might seem to support your position is not ultimately very convincing. Of course ultimately the basis of arguments against the on-the-ground rule is rather thin anyway.

So my suggestion to you is to instead of attempting to discredit and insult the DWG to re-evaluate and possibly refine your arguments and potentially your position. This might be hard for you because your political convictions are strong but you are not likely to convince a lot of people with just those convictions.

To my knowledge at least the following statement is somewhat misleading:

First of all, one needs to understand that in case of Crimea, two countries are de-facto at war

This implies that there is currently an ongoing armed conflict about control of Crimea which to my knowledge there is not. This does not mean there is no armed conflict between Ukraine and Russia but it is quite definitely not currently about the de facto control over Crimea.

Regarding other examples how OSM handles administrative boundary disputes - the Western Sahara case is a relatively prominent example. Other smaller examples exist elsewhere - for example in the South China Sea. Other situations to consider which are probably not on your radar since they have been unchanged for a long time are the Taiwan-China conflict, the dispute over the Kuril Islands and Argentina’s claim to the Falkland Islands. None of these is 1:1 equivalent with Crimea of course - still they all have similarities in some ways.

And you are definitely wrong with stating that the DWG does not act within its mandate when making such statements. In fact it does in a way do exactly what you want it to do, namely being transparent about their approach to resolving editing conflicts. The statements on Crimea to me seems nothing more than a documentation of the standing principles under which the DWG handles any editing conflicts that might occur in the area.

None the less i think it is good you argue your point here. I am sure the DWG will read it and will take it into account with any future revisions of the statement on Crimea.

Having a CoI does not require someone recuse themselves from discussion, just voting. We have been advised on this by a lawyer, and it is supported by other documents I have read about the UK’s companies act. The OSMF could adopt a stricter CoI policy.

To be clear that refers to the minimum legal requirements under UK law. It does not in anyway prevent the OSMF to create CoI rules beyond the minimum legal requirements.

As Mikel so nicely demonstrated in the meeting there are very good reasons why a board member with a CoI should not have any privileges in discussions on the matter in question. This is not a question of minimum legal requirements to me but a question of credibility of the board. Knowing that the specific secondary interests represented by board members with a CoI have unlimited representation in the internal discussion of the board while any other special interests have none totally undermines the position of the board as a balanced representation of all the interests of the OSM community.

Thanks - i think there are not too many other reasons why Mikel and Martijn would dispute the existence of a circular resolution that did not meet quorum so… ;-)

Regarding disqualification from discussion - without intention to open up a full discussion on CoI here - my understanding of recusal would be that the board member recused for a certain matter on that matter would not have any of the privileges of a board member including the right to speak at a board meeting without invitation. But as you said this is not such a big issue in the public meeting because this is subject to public scrutiny - an opportunity which i made use of here.

But of course if the recusal extended to other things than votes the question why this was not considered much earlier in the process would become more significant.

Additional question: Did the question of employment contract clauses like Rory brought up in the board candidate questions play a role during the interview of Heather?

Regading the “Mapping company draft” - Kate replied on that and cited general board policy regarding internal communication IIRC and that the board cannot therefore make it available. Michael’s partial transcript kind of confirms that.

Regarding your description of the closed part of the meeting - you don’t mention any discussion or decision whether the CoI of Mikel and Martijn disqualifies them from participating in the discussion (which considering the “CoI demonstration” by Mikel in the public meeting i described is an obvious question from the perspective of the outside observer).

Did i understand you correctly that in internal discussion Mikel and Martijn were against voting on the policy in this meeting? For Mikel this seems pretty obvious but Martijn did not say a word in the public discussion so it would be significant to know.

This is certainly not the place to discuss Conflicts of Interest in general. As you know i have asked several question about this to the board candidates for the upcoming elections and i will certainly bring this up again afterwards.

https://twitter.com/Anonymaps/status/1063845660879962112

Unfortunately two days too late - Anonymaps running for board, that would have been something.

Does the MWG have Anonymaps registered as a member? Would Anonymaps be eligible for a fee waiver because Paypal is not available on Null Island?

Yes, and i hope everyone sees that in particular in a situation like this having the board meeting in public - or at least parts of it - is of significant value.

And i want to point out that the terms i used - surreal and comedy - do not in any way mean silly. Surrealist art and comedy to me are anything but silly. Both are in a way methods to express something that cannot easily be expressed with conventional means. Because we have similar problems elsewhere in OSM community discourse i sometimes wish we had more surrealism and comedy in OSM. Anonymaps is an example in what direction this could go and what positive effects this can have.

My impression from the outside as a guest listening in to the public part of the meeting without knowing about the non-public part is of course very different from your inside perspective and neither of us can probably accurately assess how it looks like for the other.

@Richard - yes, i realize that i should have restricted that statement to the public board meetings. But of course part of the surreal was that it was public.

I don’t agree with your assumption that github-style systems are uncomfortable for non-developpers.

1. I have never said that, what i have said is that github is primarily designed for software developers so non-developers will therefore inevitably feel less at home there. This is not only a matter of how it formally presents itself to the user, it is also a matter of who else is present there. In a pub where 90 percent of the customers are men women will feel less at home even if the design and presentation of the establishment on its own is equally attractive for men and women.
2. You should always be careful projecting you own personal experience as representative for the group you consider yourself part of.

Regarding use of ‘github clones’ like gitlab - i listed four reasons why widespread use of github for OSM matters is problematic. You can see for yourself which of these also apply for an alternative. The most likely point that could be solved by a github clone would be the ‘not open source software’ aspect.

Merci pour le soutien. Es ist schön zu sehen, dass das Thema auch in anderen Sprachen auf Interesse stößt und diskutiert wird. Avoir le courage de donner ton opinion en français.

Frederik indicated something different above with:

In the discussion, the number of “hobby mappers” who supported the draft was countable with the fingers of one hand, while people involved in corporate and humanitarian mapping cried havoc on Twitter and the mailing lists, demanding either my head on a platter or at the very least the whole policy to be re-written from scratch.

Anyway - i would be perfectly fine with you ignoring my opinion but it would probably be wise to take into account my arguments. What i argue for here with emphasis are not my personal or business interests of what i would like a policy to say but what i think a policy should be designed like independent of what it specifically regulates in substance in the interests of the mappers, the OSMF and the OpenStreetMap project as a whole.

And you should also not forget that Mateusz and muramototomoya also voiced their opinion and that the way this new draft is presented is also not exactly high profile so far.

My impression from talking to people about this matter recently is that not speaking up on it should not be interpreted as being fine with the draft (or being specifically opposed to it in a certain way for that matter). Mostly it seems to be that people don’t have the impression that articulating their opinion would have any positive effect on what the OSMF does. I think for the OSMF this is a much more significant problem than how much regulation of organized activities exactly is best to lead to the least opposition. Or in other words: If despite investing a significant amount of time in presenting arguments, with the background knowledge of the OSMF to support these arguments and with the ability to present my reasoning consistently in English i am not able to convince the OSMF that i have a valid point at least in some aspects how much do you think the average local hobby mapper is motivated to present their perspective on the matter here?

I would suggest to leave the democratic legitimacy of the OSMF out of the discussion - this is a subject a lot could be said on and the outcome of such discussion surely would not look good for the OSMF. But it has very little effect to the subject at hand. It is my understanding that whatever regulation or non-regulation of organized activities the OSMF decides on it is up to the individual mappers and the local communities how to use this. Unless the OSMF wants to enforce such a policy against local mappers (i.e. protect organized activities against resistance from local communities) the primacy of the local mappers and the local community would be unaffected. In other words: The OSMF can’t really order local mappers to accept organized activities under their rules.

I have not said and i don’t think you have any external interests influencing your views here. But as already said i think the attempt to try pleasing everyone more or less proportional to the intensity with which they voiced their opinion (this is approximately how i interpret the new draft) is a very bad idea because not taking into account the interests of the many thousands of active hobby mappers who would never voice their opinion on this matter directly is a big mistake. It would further deprive the OSMF from what it needs most, namely support and engagement from the OSM community. In light of most of the working groups looking for members this to me really seems fairly obvious.

Because for a hobby mapper it is not a matter of if they can live with it, it is a question of if they want to live with it.

This shows, once again, that we listened to all sides, and chose compromise over confrontation to get something that everyone could live with.

As already said this is not about who you formally listen to but whose input you take into account when writing the text. When you chose compromise over confrontation that to me translates to adjusting to the interest of those who shout loudest and threaten confrontation while sacrificing the interests of those who appear more influenceable or expendable.

The board questions being dominated by those board members with the most obvious conflicts of interests because they are employed by corporations involved in organized editing activities is just embarrassing. Of course the responsible approach of them would have been to refrain from participating in the discourse as board members but in absence of that the responsible thing for you would be to treat their commentary the same as any outside input from a corporate representative.

@rorym - as i tried to explain on osmf-talk this is in particular about the idea of OSM to subordinate itself to a supposed moral absolute of the humanitarian mapping community. It is fine if individual mappers engage in emergency response mapping but it is IMO not acceptable if the OSMF requires every mapper to accept the primacy of emergency response trumps the values of the OpenStreetMap project. It does not matter that much if this is an exception that is practically used as a loophole to circumvent the rules, this is more about the message of values and their priorities behind it.