Having an English language only panel discussion on Colonialism seems a bit like having an all male panel discuss equality of men and women.

How about inviting some people who have

• no Twitter account
• no fancy English job title?

@cbeddow - that is a broad topic a bit outside the scope here. I had tried to briefly summarize the core problems above.

In 2019 the community has quite extensively discussed the board’s plans for the microgrants program and the considerations made there were integrated into the framework the OSMF decided on then. However in 2020 the practical implementation completely reversed many of the key points of the framework - ignoring almost all of the considerations derived from the wisdom and experience of the broader community on the matter that were partly integrated into the framework.

As a result community participation in the selection process was very limited, very little broader discussion of the individual proposals happened, committee deliberation on the decision was completely closed to the public, there was obviously an ensemble selection in the process (i.e. selection was not purely based on the merits of the individual proposals - like with SotM scholarships where i discussed this in more detail) but no documentation of the criteria used for that is available. Also no documentation of conflict of interest handling is available (and we already know that at least the board completely failed in considering this problem on their side).

Finally after the selection no follow-up or critical review of the whole process is visible. There seems to have been a complete communication blackout from the commitee afterwards, no information even on what funds have been paid, what benchmarks the projects might have passed, what kind of review and reporting might have happened. Most of the project pages on the wiki have no substantial edits after the acceptance, a few project made reports on their progress from their own initiative but no overall collection or review of them is visible to me.

At the moment this is at best a waste of money. But beyond that it could also have substantially negative effects as volunteers could easily get demotivated by seeing the OSMF handing out quite significant amounts of money based on unclear and questionable criteria without meaningful followups or public discussion on the merits of these projects and the reasons for financing them instead of others.

@trial - glad to see there is inter-language communication resulting from this (which is of course helped by the OSMF board having organized translations of the survey which brought us a topic to talk about across language barriers)

@marc__marc - keep in mind the OSMF board is not the whole OSMF and the OSMF is not in any way all the OSM community. Even if you have the impression that within the OSMF on one is interested in and some people might even have and articulate a distinct dislike for outside perspectives that question already formed opinions and assumptions (which is an impression that indeed you can get quite easily these days) that does not mean there is no value in sharing and discussing your thoughts publicly in the OSM community. Us discussing our views on the OSMF board survey for example has value independent of if the OSMF board will be interested in listening to it.

Regarding language dominance - i think the most important measure for the OSMF would be to actively embrace and support language diversity and explicitly stop treating English as the default for communication - no matter how inconvenient that might seem. Several times people have already suggested that everyone should start communicating in their native language and facilitating inter-cultural communication through (automated) translation this way making diversity and the difficulties resulting from it more explicit. And of course native English speakers need to stop judging non-native English speakers for their use of English language (because it is supposedly inappropriate, rude, insulting etc.) and stop steamrolling them in discussions.

Of course the ultimate goal should be that we can all choose to communicate in English when we consider it helpful to facilitate communication between people from different parts of the world with everyone having the maturity, restraint and critical self reflection to not use the language in those cases to project their cultural norms and values onto others.

@BCNorwich - misinterpretation of the results is a risk with any survey and i see no indication of intentions to do so upfront. On the contrary in many questions i see an honest attempt to gauge the sentiment of the community on the subject.

However as said i also think that drawing meaningful conclusions from the answers will likely be difficult due to the design of the survey. The first question is a good example here. If a large fraction of the respondents agree does that mean they think the board did good on the matter of diversity? Certainly not since that is not what the question was asking. If OTOH many respondents disagree, does that mean the OSM community is anti-diversity? Certainly not, because disagreeing with the specific actions of the board does not imply a specific sentiment w.r.t. the matter of diversity in the OSMF. If certain groups of people based on the demographics agree more frequently than others does this mean they are more tolerant and more pro-diversity than others? Certainly neither because again the question was on something much more specific and because of cultural differences in the way people tend to articulate disagreement more carefully and more strongly in different cultures.

As indicated in the diary i think if you don’t feel good about the survey what you should do instead of just sulkingly not taking it you should take the opportunity to formulate your views on matters the survey covers and this way give the board the opportunity to learn about how the community thinks about things despite the survey not allowing everyone to articulate that in a comprehensive manner.

@Zverik - with routinely recorded i meant there are established tags and support for them in editors and other tools. I was specifically looking for other safety relevant aspects for which we so far have no established mapping concepts.

I would probably choose route 2 under the condition that i have a reliable map that helps me avoid getting lost on one of the turns.

Which is a great demonstration i think that the core idea of OSM - to collect and openly share verifiable local geographic knowledge is a highly inclusive endeavor in its core. Anyone can map what has importance for them or for people they care about and no matter who mapped something - anyone can use that information to improve their life and their safety without restrictions - even if their use case has nothing to do with why someone mapped this in the first place.

People have different priorities and see the world through different eyes, which is why it is so important that OpenStreetMap is grounded in the knowledge of locals (and beyond that a broad and diverse cross section of locals) and that locals have and maintain ownership of their map. Reliable assessment of the safety of these routes will only be possible through documentation by local mappers, not through the work of some armchair mappers half around the world or some AI.

The question i would be interested in: Are there any verifiable safety relevant aspects of roads and paths that are not already routinely recorded in OSM like surface=*, lit=*, highway=street_lamp?

Your sarcasm is not very constructive and seems somewhat misplaced - as is the sweeping dismissal of the work of all past board members from the past ten years. You can without much doubt call me the strongest critique of the OSMF board for a large part of these ten years (and i can therefore understand and empathize if this critique occasionally feels like over the top by those whose work i criticize) but i would never characterize their work collectively as paralyzed. Not to mention it is a bit ironic that the chairman of the board that pedaled back on some of the most important progress of boards during the past ten years in terms of transparency is dismissing their collective work as paralysis.

Regarding if the Foundation strives to reflect the community - as mentioned already with the Diversity Statement the current board has at the beginning of the current term quite categorically declared the limits of such endeavors. Overall i see positive efforts in that regard (the free membership for active mappers, the virtual SotM without barrier at least for passive participation, not spending money on the highly problematic scholarship program). But i see also negative trends (like rollback on transparency, move from open argument based discourse to closed negotiations with interests, increasing focus on video meetings and proprietary channels (twitter, reddit), decrease in diversity and increasing cultural homogeneity in the working groups, overall strong centralization tendencies) and many missed opportunities at decentralization and supporting the creation and development of independent and diverse grassroots structures (like local chapters involvement, microgrants).

I understand your focus at the moment is defending your AoA change proposal and that this makes me trying to help you understand the different and critical view of me and others of this change a rather difficult endeavor. But i would invite you - when this is no more an urgent priority after next week - to revisit this conversation and re-read and think about the comments i made and maybe also think about hypothetical possibilities.

We are drifting away more and more from the subject of the diary entry here so this is beginning to be seriously off-topic here.

It is not clear to me what you mean by “codified work culture” in the OSMF.

I mean this - as explained here.

When i say that a huge majority is pretty much excluded or alienated i am talking about the approximately 60 to 90 percent of the OSM community who either don’t speak English on a level that would qualify them for a board appointed committee (so far a hundred percent of all committee members the board has appointed were people with good to excellent English language abilities - in contrast to the working groups which traditionally have been much more inclusive in that regard) or who are seriously alienated by the work culture in the OSMF (which among German mappers is for example the number one turnoff).

There is a cheap shot at the Board here, “English language and Anglo-American culture filter bubble” […]

No, it is not. It is an assessment i have developed based on a large number of observations and that i have explained in detail on many occasions (some of which i have linked to above). The increasing detachment of the work and communication in the OSMF from the base of the international mapper community is an assessment i can make with high reliability.

This is not primarily the fault of the current board of course - what i’d criticize the board for here is primarily that you fail to critically reflect on the fact that you are much more part of the problem than you are part of the solution.

Anyway - the context in which i mentioned this was the need for a discussion within the OSM community about how the traditionally consensus based and do-ocratic decision making processes can scale in a growing and increasingly diverse global and multicultural/multilingual community. That is a discussion that has to happen in the OSM community as a whole and not just within the much more narrow realms of the OSMF.

[…] and which approved the active contributor program, so that a more diverse membership can be recruited for the Foundation.

The OSMF members mandated that program by resolution in the last AGM, the implementation by the MWG and board was simply implementing that decision. Presenting that as a pro-diversity achievement of the current board is quite a distortion of history (for the record - the idea for a need-independent free membership for active mappers goes back at least to my suggestion of this in September 2017

You note correctly “the growing and increasingly diverse community” and to some degree at least that growth and increased diversity has been helped by Board actions over the past year, and will be in the future.

No, i was referring to increase in diversity in the OSM community, not in the OSMF. And not in the past year but roughly over the past decade. And that is not in any significant way the result of OSMF board activity.

@Allan:

Well, Christoph, I don’t deal in hypothetical possibilities. […]

Here might lie a major source of why Simon and me see this matter differently from you. Our critical remarks are based on thinking this through more than one step ahead and that requires dealing in hypothetical possibilities. If our respective hypothetical assessments are correct is open to debate, looking at hypothetical possibilities however is not. Making strategic decisions (and AoA changes definitely qualifies as such) without looking at hypothetical possibilities for the long term results is just reckless IMO.

I observed similar issues in the past - some time ago in the context of the board’s hiring plans several community members were concerned about the lack of a proper risk assessment by the board. And risk assessment is of course exactly that - dealing in hypothetical possibilities. If the board as a principle does not deal in hypothetical possibilities that in my eyes radically and fundamentally limits their ability to make beneficial strategic decisions.

We are having trouble reinvigorating the EWG

And i am not at all astonished by that - neither are most long term OSM community members. I expressed my concerns about the negative effects of the OSMF selectively starting to spend money on work on volunteer motivation back in July.

One of the main strategic benefits of all day-to-day work in the OSMF being done by volunteer working groups created and managed from the community rather than by the board is that it ensures that what the OSMF does remains grounded in and connected to the consensus in the volunteer mapper community. If you have difficulties recruiting volunteers that should be taken as an indication IMO that your plans are not grounded that much in the community any more. As i have also expressed before it does not help that a huge majority is pretty much excluded or alienated by the dominant and meanwhile also codified work culture in the OSMF.

And again: Yes, i get that this approach seems inefficient to the board seeing current and urgent needs to get thing done. And it is without doubt that with the growing and increasingly diverse community overall consensus based processes (like the grassroots formation of working groups from the OSM community) are struggling. I am probably more painfully aware of that in my OSM-Carto work than most. That is a matter we need to discuss in the OSM community overall. As expressed before my preferred answer to that is increased federalization, more internal diversity and competition and more and more efficient base democracy. But i am open to discussing other options - including elements of more hierarchical centralization. But the discussion needs to happen in the full breadth of the OSM community and not just within the English language and Anglo-American culture filter bubble of the OSMF.

To address your other points in summary - i never doubted that the board has reasons for doing things the way they do. That is not the issue here. The issue are the unintended consequences of the changes you make.

And i never said that the board seeks centralized control of the iD editor - that is a red herring.

Well - we are drifting a bit off-topic here.

As usual the discussion about interpretation of the Mission statement in its inherent vagueness is moot.

The traditional practice in the OSMF has been that the day-to-day business (or housekeeping, or mundane tasks) is done by the working groups and that the board’s task is mainly to set and maintain the circumstances for this work to function properly. The creation of ad-hoc special committees selected and appointed by the board in non-transparent processes that are tasked with matters that are typical working group tasks is probably the most obvious example of this having changed during the past year. And you now have another case (software dispute resolution panel) where the board even has a concrete offer from an existing working group to take on that task that the board will most certainly - and i venture a guess here, though that is a pretty safe bet - not task to the independent working group but to a board selected panel.

Now don’t get me wrong - i fully understand that with the various big changes you have made during the past year you see the necessity for creating new structures to support these changes. But claiming that the working groups and their position in the OSMF are unaffected by this is unrealistic.

Regarding how the thing would affect the future of the working groups - you obviously cannot look at it merely from the perspective of how would the current plans of the current board affect the current working groups. To get an idea of one part of the problem maybe ask yourself this question: What would happen if a number of community members would, after you have created committees for that, offer to create a working group for budgeting, contractor management or other things, i.e. they would say: We volunteer for doing this work - but only as an independent working group, not as members of a committee headed by a board members where volunteers are merely there to help the board and as alternative […] to hire professional staff. Would you dissolve the committee then in favor of having a working group or would you urge the volunteers to subordinate themselves to the board headed committee because you think that this task is something you want to retain immediate control over and do not want it to be done by an independent working group? If your answer is the latter then you - as i said - create a second branch of the OSMF for everyday tasks and demote the working group to be limited to secondary tasks not considered significant enough to warrant a board headed committee mandated by the AoA.

I have commented in more depth on the near term perspective for the OSMF based on the current direction of the board on my blog - including on the background of the AoA change and how it fits into the general trend of increasing centralization of the OSMF.

For completeness - the one diary entry [that] has been posted by a community member is

osm.org/user/SimonPoole/diary/394975

Allan, i think you just confirmed one of the key points of Simon - that the intention of the board with the proposed AoA change is to create a second branch of the OSMF for everyday tasks (formulating the budget, raising funds, and managing personnel) besides the working groups, which so far - as Simon explained in detail - have been the only part of the OSMF tasked with day-to-day business.

And you also seem to confirm my main point here - that branch is not - like the working groups - meant to be independent of the board but to work under direct instructions and control of the board. That the board has during the past year - and in conflict with the Mission Statement i might add - taken over more and more day-to-day tasks itself might make this seem the natural next step but considering this not to affect the position and practical work of the working groups seems at best naive.

By the way - regarding dark motives - i kind of admire your confidence that none of your six colleagues on the board has motives you are unaware of. I know many of them longer than you have and still i would not claim to understand the motives of any of them well enough to be able to make a statement of moral trust.

To start at the end - companies do not typically have work done by volunteers. And staff of companies has the contractual obligation to follow the order of their boss, and that of the boss of their boss - and ultimately the board.

What has been the common pattern of OSMF work for the past decade+ is that decisions of working groups with any more substantial effect for the OSMF as a whole required confirmation by the board. The whole point of committees as defined by the AoA to me seems to be to avoid that and to delegate actual power (while still controlling its use through organizational hierarchy). Otherwise why would the board propose an AoA change? They are free to create a new type of “board headed working group” any time without changing the AoAs. In fact they have already done so (in the form of the special committees - though not all of them are headed by board members).

Regarding the historic context - i think that was the Management Team, not Management Board.

Regarding the Committee AoA change proposal - i fully agree that this essentially means putting into question or demoting the existing working groups and in general breaking with most of the traditions of the working groups in the OSMF that - as you have pointed out - have in large parts been developed from the painful experience of past failures.

But i don’t think removing the requirement of a board member heading a committee would solve anything here. The thing that distinguishes the committees according to the AoAs from working groups or any other informal bodies in the OSMF is that the board is supposed to be able to delegate its formal powers to to the committees:

The Board may delegate any of its powers to committees […]

As i see it, that is legally only possible if the committee is controlled by the board - which would not be the case if the committees are not headed by the board. So IMO the ability of the board to delegate formal powers to committees would be inherently connected to the board having immediate control over them. Even if the committee would have a ceremonial figurehead that is not a board member.

My reading of the board’s motive for creating committees with also members from outside the board is that the board wants to be able to recruit staff for doing work for them. Staff here not necessarily in the sense of being paid by the OSMF, but in the sense of people working under immediate control and orders of the board or board members. For example, the board members evidently see the upcoming need for quite a significant volume of work in the domain of personnel management (i.e. managing the various people meanwhile being paid by the OSMF for work in some form) and they don’t want to or feel they don’t have the time or abilities to do this all themselves. But if they’d create a working group or a different informal structure for that, they’d run into the problem that such entity could not make any legally binding statements towards personnel (like instructing them what to do, handle requests for leave, dealing with payment matters, approval of deliverables/invoices from independent contractors etc.)

That the concepts of volunteers who are bound by orders from the board is not going to work is a different matter. Practically the whole thing would probably mean either the committees consisting of friends of board members who they trust personally, that members of the committees would be required to sign some kind of oath of loyalty or that members of the committees are people who are already contractually bound to the OSMF (as staff or independent contractors) or to other companies/organizations with a contractual relationship with the OSM (i.e. leased laborers).

These lines - as can be derived from where they are located - result from boundary line segments (here from admin_level 2 boundary relations) crossing the 180 degree meridian. Since practically almost all geodata processing software by default interprets line segments as if geographic coordinates were cartesian coordinates and therefore assumes any such segment no matter how short it actually is to wrap around the whole earth along the parallel you need to avoid such segments by splitting any geometry crossing the 180 degree meridian along the meridian. If a mapper not aware of this carelessly moves a node across the 180 degree meridian the result is like what you point out (in this case probably fixed in osm.org/changeset/88746336)

First of all my complete chat logs from OSM related channels. Bottom line: I don’t use real time chat for anything other than individual person-to-person communication. There are reasons for that but that is outside the scope here. If you do this differently i don’t mind but i can’t provide advise how to deal with the technical constraints of the medium obviously.

I will try to explain in detail my fifth point in the list of recommendations i gave before and provide practical suggestions how it could be implemented. That seems to be where our misunderstandings are about. If you don’t understand any of the other suggestions please let me know. Likewise if there is something unclear about the following.

There are a number of ways you can practically implement the fifth recommendation:

• Have the deliberation on such decisions in public. This is by far the easiest, least work intensive and most comprehensive way for everyone i think. In this case you would not have to worry about documentation no matter what medium of communication you use because the community will most certainly take care of that. If no one else takes the initiative i would organize that in any such deliberation session one or two people would be there and take notes. With high impact subjects like funding of community projects i am sure there will be no problem in finding volunteers for that.
• If you decide you don’t want to deliberate decisions like that in public the most convenient way for the OSM community to implement my recommendation would be to publish a documentation of key parts of the deliberation and decision making process in written form. If you don’t write and keep such a documentation internally for your own reference and for the benefit of future board members to read up on past decisions then this approach would involve additional work. How would such a record practically look like? Similar to board meeting minutes or notes taken on a pad during audio conversation. Nakaner has a lot of experience in writing those - he would likely be able to give you good practical advise on that.
• If you are opposed to that an alternative would be the publication of a direct record of the deliberation process. Practical implementation of this depends a lot of the medium of communication the discussion is happening on. I can essentially only comment on email and real time audio conversation. Past boards have done quite significant deliberation on decisions via email, i have seen records of such (won’t say how ;-)). I have also obviously witnessed quite a bit of deliberation during public board meetings. I have however as indicated in my introductory remark no experience with real time text based group chats and i have never seen any logs of such chats where serious discussion and deliberation on decisions took place. That limits my ability to give advise specifically on that.
  • When using email you can export and publish specific threads of the conversation and that in my experience is pretty strait away in practical implementation.
  • In real time audio conversation publishing an audio record of the conversation is a simple method and could be transcribed by volunteers if necessary. There are also fairly decent methods for automatically transcribing audio conversation meanwhile but they tend to work best with high quality audio like in a podcast. In a meeting that would require probably quite a bit of discipline and investment in quality to lead to good results.

Again - this advise how to practically implement my suggestion is based on my own experience with past boards’ communication practice and outside of the OSMF. I understand that if the current board works very differently from that (i don’t know - public board work does not look that fundamentally different but it is obvious that the current board does a much higher volume of work non-publicly and as a result i have very little idea of that) these practical suggestions might not be overly useful. But in general: If you have practical difficulties implementing the suggestion to document and publish the key parts of the decision making process on high impact matters like this (independent of the question if you want to do that or not) it might be advisable to have a critical look at how you do your deliberation process technically. I know different people work differently. But i for example could never peoperly do my job as an OSM-Carto maintainer and make decisions there if there was not a full, structured and searchable record of past deliberations and decision making processes available to me. And i know other OSM-Carto maintainers similarly make extensive use of the past communication record during their work. Obviously a development project like OSM-Carto and OSMF board work are not the same but if you have practical difficulty implementing my recommendation that probably also means it is practically difficult for you to look up the record of a specific deliberation and decision making process in the archive of the board’s communication. And even if that does not appear to be a problem for you, you should be aware that future board members might not be able to work in a similar fashion.

Sorry - but what does self-evidence have to do with moral justification?

Anyway - we continue to have fundamental communication failure here. I don’t know what more i can do. I can offer you to explain it in German but i doubt that would help. I explained explicitly in several different variations what my recommendations are. I did not leave it at stating this is self evident, that was just the introductory remark, If you stopped reading there please go back and read the full comment. You seem to be pointing to your explanation of your thought process while i am talking about the deliberation of the board members with each other during the decision making process. I explained this explicitly in my last comment but you still do not seem to understand what i mean. You now seem to suggest that my recommendation can only be met by publishing all your IRC logs though i think i have been clear that this is only about the deliberation of the board on the matter at hand. But yes, in case you deliberate on IRC publishing the IRC logs of that would evidently be valuable.

Note what saddens me here is not that you don’t follow my recommendations due to not understanding them. My aim here is not to get others to do what i want. In fact i would very much prefer to be convinced that these recommendations are unnecessary. What i am sad about is that since you don’t understand my suggestions you don’t have the chance to evaluate their merit - you just dismiss them as unintelligible.

In light of my fruitless attempts in communicating my recommendations i will go back to the beginning - and the diary where my second point is the analysis of the probable social implication of the new direction of the OSMF. In light of me not being the only one who thinks risk assessment and analysis of possible downsides is important this might be a useful thing for the board to consider. And i make pretty specific predictions about the future here so it will be easy enough to evaluate the merit of this analysis in the time coming.

So you want to know why

And I thought “Yes, I know them, sounds good”. Just because I didn’t want to write up all the rules & procedures first doesn’t mean I am not guided by principles & ideas, it doesn’t mean I am making decisions on an ad-hoc basis with any thought. It’s unwritten rules & procedures, like lots of OSM.

Is not what i have in mind when i recommend

document and publish the key parts of the decision making process, in particular risk analysis that has been made on social implications and economic risks.

I think that is pretty self evident. You described that you formed your opinion based on what ‘sounds good’, you imply that in doing that you are guided by principles & ideas.

But you did not document and publish the key parts of the decision making process, in particular risk analysis that has been made on social implications and economic risks. With decision making process i mean the decision making process of the board collectively. This is clear from context i think. And i see nothing in that direction. There has been nothing along these lines in the public board meetings - i have been there. And i am not the only one who sees a deficit here - Andy and others have asked for essentially the same on osmf-talk (in context of the iD development - but that is highly related).

The recommendation (or if you prefer to call it that - the standard) is to have a public record of the deliberation of the board made during the process leading up to high impact decisions like this. This would not necessarily have to be written, if the deliberation of the board happened in audio communication an audio record would be equally fine. Or you could have the deliberation in public in the first place. I already explained in detail why i think this is useful and important. Again - if you disagree please explain where you think my reasoning is flawed.

Rory, i think we have quite a fundamental failure in communication here. I will try to explain my thoughts again in the terms that you seem to expect them in. I am not sure if that is going to help but there is really not much more i can do.

So trying to phrase my thoughts in form of an answer to your question:

what do you actually want?

What i want is the board to make good decisions for the long term benefit of the OSM community and the values of the project. I tried to explain where i see room for improvement here. If you want to boil it down to specific recommendations for actions here are the most important:

• reveal information that is going to be public anyway at the earliest possible moment and not the latest possible moment.
• do not stagger the disclosure of information (in this case the three project financing plans first and the much larger iD plans a few days later).
• better yet: have the whole process in public - that would make things much easier for everyone.
• on money spending decisions, in partiular such with a high impact on the social dynamics in the OSM community, design criteria and an auditable process for making these decisions. If you don’t think you have the time for that just ask for help - people will gladly support you with that.
• either have the deliberation on such decisions in public or document and publish the key parts of the decision making process, in particular risk analysis that has been made on social implications and economic risks.
• document and publish what alternatives you potentially have considered.

Again, these are not things i want individually, these are recommendations of what i consider beneficial for making better decisions, in particular by enabling others to provide more meaningful evaluation and review of your decisions - as explained in more detail in my previous comment.

If you disagree with either these suggestions or my analysis of the likely consequences of your decision i would be eager to hear your arguments and reasoning. If something in what i wrote - either in the diary or in the comments - just seems weird or nonsensical to you i will also gladly explain it in more detail.