Clifford Snow wrote > Frederik, > I want to make sure we are clear. Are you signaling your belief that we > need some strategic planning?
Well, what does strategic planning even mean in the context of OSMF? OSMF currently operates under the strategy of keeping its influence pretty much as minimal as somehow possible. It mostly limits it self to operating the servers for the editing api and publishing a weekly planet dump. Everything else is kind of outside of the scope of the OSMF and to be provided by third parties. This strategy is implemented to such a degree that e.g. not even planet extracts to make the unwieldy monolithic planet file usable are provided by OSMF but by third parties. It operates under the strategy that anything that can conceivably be provided by third parties should. OSMF does not e.g. fund software development, it does very limited to no funding of outreach or PR, it does not provide any (or very limited) client applications / services. State of the Map is probably the only major exception to this rule and people have proposed to move that out of the scope of OSMF too, as has successfully been done with organizing the regional "State of the Map" conferences. All of that can be (and is) done without the involvement of the OSMF. For example funded Software development has been done by companies like CloudMade, MapQuest on a company budget, or Mapbox that applied for external funding through the Knight foundation to develop OpenStreetMap software like e.g. the iD editor. Developer resources like Toolservers have for example been provided by third parties like the "German Chapter", "US Chapter" or the "French Chapter", or Wikimedia through the OSM toolserver, or through Rambler or probably a number of others I have forgotten. PR resources have been provided to the community by yet more third party sources, like e.g. some of the offers of Geofabrik to print PR materials to use in various ways like e.g. to man booths on trade shows. Outreach has been done by yet more third parties like e.g. H.O.T. or like the community ambassador programs of CloudMade. So again the strategy of OSMF has been to not "pick winners or loosers" to use a political term but let the community a free hand in anything that isn't absolutely necessary to centralize, which covers the servers necessary for the editing API, protecting the core data in the database and legal issues like the license, copy right violations and trandemark issues). Personally I am not the biggest fan of this rather libertarian approach, but it is a perfectly valid strategy for OSMF to take and which approach would ultimately lead to more success for OSM is pretty much impossible to factually determine and is thus left to personal opinion and controversial political debate. Under this premises what would strategic planning for the OSMF look like? Well, it would pretty much be an extremely technical discussion about the scalability of the server hardware. Although that might be a fascinating topic for some, I doubt that is what is meant by strategic planning in this debate and I don't really see any issues with that at the moment. In that light, one can also see the success and failure of the previous attempts of the SWG. As Richard pointed out, one of the "successes" of the SWG was to establish a policy of inclusion of third party tiles in the layer chooser. Although I think it was an important achievement, and as a member of the SWG at the time helped formulate it, I wouldn't directly call that "strategic planning". Most other topics successfully handled were also pretty "short sighted" technical aspects if I remember correctly. But that is at least partly because there simply isn't any scope for strategic planning in the current model of the OSMF. So anyone who wants to do any "strategic planning" must first of all massively expand the resources, scope and responsibilities of OSMF. However, given that OSMF already even with its extremely limited scope of responsibilities suffers under a massive trust issues where far too many active members of the OSM community seem to find a huge conspiracy theory in each action OSMF takes, I don't see how a big expansion of responsibilities of the OSMF would be accepted by the community without hugely costly and probably damaging political fights. The alternative is to do these "strategic planes" outside of the OSMF, e.g. in one of the local chapters or topic specific groups like H.O.T. Nothing stops them from devising great and strategically thought out PR campaigns. No one stops them from providing valuable resources that have been identified as strategically important for the growth of OSM. No one stops them from fund raising to support those activities (although there are some possibly unresolved issues with the use of the OpenStreetMap trademark in those PR and fund raising activities). No one stops them from developing those killer application that will make everyone want to use and contribute to OSM. It is just that OSMF might not be the body through which to achieve those goals and that planning. Indeed, there have been brief ideas thrown out to found a new organisation e.g. "OpenStreetMap EndUser Foundation" to support all of the end user activity that is so important to give users an incentive to contribute to OSM as it gives them real value back for their effort. I think ideas like that where discussed in the SWG, but I might remember incorrectly and it was just tossed around in the "normal" discussion channels like the talk list (it has been a while since I last looked through the SWG minutes). So overall, the first question to answer is do we really want to do this in the scope of the OSMF or are there other organisations who are better suited for such activity? Does the OSMF have the support of the community for such a "power grab" or are the trust issues it suffers with a non insignificant number of active members too big to over come for such an expansion? OSM has always been a "do-ocracy" and the current libertarian model of OSMF does fit that quite well with all its benefits (anyone with the skills and resources and a brilliant idea can just do it and is not held back by a comity or the slow grinding of forming a political consensus ) and its disadvantages (if you don't have the technical or financial resources to implement your brilliant idea, you have nothing to say) Just some thoughts to keep in mind in the current discussion, Kai -- View this message in context: http://gis.19327.n5.nabble.com/Pawe-s-q-what-can-be-done-tp5747772p5747967.html Sent from the General Discussion mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
