Get out your vote for the OpenStreetMap Foundation board of directors. You have until approximately 5pm EDT Thursday for your email vote to be received in London.
If you are not yet a paid member of the OpenStreetMap Foundation, you can register here for 15UK Pounds (25 or 30 bucks): http://foundation.openstreetmap.org/join/ Please read below to see why your participation is important and why you should be aware of the hidden issue in this election. Avoid the risk of a single corporate entity having an inappropriate access to influence of the OpenStreetMap Foundation. Join. Vote. Map. It's fun, It's free. You can help. Best regards, Richard ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Frederik Ramm <frede...@remote.org> Date: Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 7:55 PM Subject: [Osmf-talk] EVERYONE: PLEASE VOTE To: osmf-t...@openstreetmap.org Dear everyone, this is a personal call on every OSMF member to please cast a vote in the election to the board of directors. List of candidates is here: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Foundation/AGM09/Election_to_Board and you can vote for (up to) 7 of the 11 candidates. You have roughly 24 hours left at the time of writing (voting by email closes at midnight BST (GMT+1) on Thursday). To vote, include the (up to) 7 names of people you want to vote for in an E-Mail and send it: To: secret...@osmfoundation.org (Blackadder, OSMF secretary) cc: osmvotes2...@randomjunk.co.uk (randomjunk, Independent scrutineer) cc: osmvotes2...@bleah.co.uk (sward, Independent scrutineer) Subject: OSMF Board Vote 2009 I am writing this to increase member participation because I feel that unless enough members participate in the election, it will be largely controlled by one single business entity - CloudMade. Read details below. Last year, about 30 OSMF members participated in the election of board members - that's probably one in four members who cast a vote or so. At the time, about 5 OSMF members were also employed by CloudMade, and assuming that they all cast a vote, that's somewhere between 15% and 20% of actual votes cast by CM employees - no big deal. This year, more than 30 OSMF members are employed by CloudMade (about 20 of which, based in Kiev, have joined en-bloc very recently), plus a few who are not employed but who are CM investors or consultants. If election participation is about the same as last year (i.e. one in four OSMF members vote at all), and assuming that all CloudMade employees intend to vote (why would 20 of them join OSMF a few days before the vote otherwise?), then this would mean that roughly 50 votes will be cast altogehter, more than 30 of which will come from CloudMade employees, putting 60% of the vote in CloudMade hands. I find this situation deeply disturbing. Especially given the discussions we had about the question of how many board members should be allowed to be from one company; Nick Black and Jim Brown, both from CloudMade, were adamant that this should be the decision of the electorate - I wonder if, at the time, they did the same maths? It sounds a bit hollow now, given these numbers. And that's why I hope that many people actually bother to cast a vote; if not one in four, but one in two OSMF members vote, then the CloudMade employee portion of votes would only be 30% which would feel better to me (no matter what the outcome of the vote is). As you probably know my personal preference is not to have any commercial influence on the OSMF board - but I am democrat enough to accept a different outcome if it is carried by a majority of members. I would just wish that if a majority of members decides to vote for Steve and Nick, that majority is not one consisting of their own employees. I must apologise for not being able to give exact numbers - all the "roughly"s and "probably"s and "approximately"s stem from the fact that I only have access to the list of members of this mailing list and must assume that this is more or less equivalent to the list of OSMF members. When I say that 21 CM employees joined "very recently" then I mean they have been subscribed to this list only a few hours ago but since this is not an automatic process, their membership applications might also be a few weeks old. Whether I count someone as a CloudMade employee is based on looking at their E-Mail address and/or checking with Google and that's of course another possible source of errors. Also, no exact information is available about last year's vote (how many people were eligible to vote, and how many did vote). But while all this has the potential to change the numbers slightly, it is very unlikely to change the overall situation that CloudMade employees are very likely to cast more than half of the votes at the upcoming election if the non-CloudMade members vote as lazily as they did last year - and hence this E-Mail. Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ osmf-talk mailing list osmf-t...@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/osmf-talk _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
