On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 07:56:11PM +0200, Frederik Ramm wrote: > Stefan de Konink wrote: > > 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. > > I think this only shows that we must not carve any rules in stone - > everything that we put up should only be "guidelines" but if in one > country it is unusual to have an organisation like that - and those who > draw up the guidelines cannot know what is usual in a country - then > other solutions must be possible.
Well, there might be things we want to "carve in stone". Basically it comes down to: Do we just tell the board of directors of OSMF: Anything goes. You negotiate with other groups, you decide. If you want to awards a candy story in outer Mongolia with the title of local chapter, you probably have your reasons for this, so thats ok. Or do we want to have some sort of minimal rules. We might well decide that a democratic organisation is a must. Which means the Dutch have to come up with a different solution if they want to have a local chapter. (This can be done, Wikimedia has the same rule and there is a Dutch Wikimedia local chapter.) Or we might decide that we are happy with such a Stichting. But thats the necessary process we have to go through. And this comes back to the first question we should have answered and have never really answered, namely what should those chapters be. What should they stand for. If we feel that they are representatives of the OSM community, it might be important for us that they are democratic. If we see them more as just the places where sponsored money can be funnelled through, maybe its not as important. Jochen -- Jochen Topf joc...@remote.org http://www.remote.org/jochen/ +49-721-388298 _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
