Darrel YOU ARE WRONG.... BUT
osgeo is a great and successful community and this alone desrve the
OSGeo existence.
Before we only had project oriented communities (mapserver, grass,
etc). But now we have a place in the network to get togheter with all
projects and users. Aren't we using stack of softwere instead of a
single solution very often?
FOSS4G is where we exchange ideas, create innovation and get fun also.
Some excellent work is done also in some working groups... incubation
and geo4all for example...
So you are WRONG!
BUT.... i have to agree that things could even be better :-)
In my opinion (and this is part of my manifesto even if i still have
one more year to serve the board):
- we need to redefine objectives of the association cause things have
changed (reault framework...)
- we need to better promote our valuable software and community
(marketing. ..)
- we need to review and redefine rules so that they are transparent
and clear (communication... )
- we need to lower the rates of our international meetings to be more
inclusive
- we need a plan for investment (investment plan..)
So i call for a face2face meeting of 2 days of all the board members
in the next months to discuss all these points.
Apparently the last board was not able to set a date, but i'm keen
that the new board will be able to do it. It will aslo he agood
starting point to define our working plan...
The i call all of you charter member to help and do things...
continuing in shaking the community but also propose and act to make
the world a better place. Then if you think the world would be better
without osgeo... well... be part of the community is not mandatory :-)
Best
Proudly member of osgeo
Maxi
Il 25/Set/2015 21:57, "Darrell Fuhriman" <darr...@garnix.org
<mailto:darr...@garnix.org>> ha scritto:
The recent discussion on the board list
<https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/board/2015-September/013172.html>that
came out of the question of the 2014 videos has got me thinking
about a few things again, and I want to try to get them out there.
Grab a mug of your favorite liquid and hunker down, because I put
some time and effort into this, and your own well considered reply
is appreciated.
Keep in mind that all of these comments are coming from my
personal perspective, which, like everyone’s, is an incomplete
picture of the whole. Much of what I’m going to say has been
rolling around my head for a while, so I’m just going to put it
out there.
I will start with a provocative thesis:
OSGeo lacks visionary unified leadership and without it will
become irrelevant.
Of course, making such a claim requires support. So let me break
down the statement.
“Visionary leadership” is really two things, “vision” and
“leadership.” I will address each in turn.
OSGeo lacks vision
I looked at the list of “Goals” for OSGeo
<http://www.osgeo.org/content/foundation/about.html>. I wonder:
when was the last time these goals were evaluated for both success
and relevancy?
Here is my own opinion of success of some of these goals. (In the
interest of brevity, I haven’t tried to tackle everything. That’s
left as an exercise to the reader.)
Example 1
To provide resources for foundation projects - eg. infrastructure,
funding, legal.
Allow me to break each of those examples down.
Infrastructure
It’s true that OSGeo provides some infrastructure, such as Trac
instance, Mailman, SVN repos. If the budget is to be believed, we
pay some $3,500/yr to OSUOSL for said infrastructure. I wonder if
such a service is necessary, however. Issue tracking and source
control are much better provided by Github, which is free for
organization such as ours.
I say this because a) that’s money that could be better spent
elsewhere and b) supporting these services burns precious
volunteer time (more on that below).
There are clear cost savings available, which are not taken
advantage of. For example, OSGeo could be hosting FOSS4G
infrastructure: conference websites and registration, a central
location for conference videos (regardless of platform/provider).
This neglect is especially galling given that FOSS4G is OSGeo’s
sole source of income.
Funding
OSGeo does not fund projects. It has provided some funds to pay
for Code Sprints — $15k in 2014 according to the budget
<http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OSGeo_Budget_2014>.
Legal
I see nothing that has been done on this front recently. Please
feel free to correct me.
Conclusion
OSGeo, where it actually does what it claims, has not adapted in
ways that could save money.
My grade: D
Example 2
To promote freely available geodata - free software is useless
without data.
The geodata working group is dead. As near as I can tell by
perusing the mailing list archives, and the wiki, there has been
no meaningful activity in the past two years (maybe more).
My grade: F
Example 3
To promote the use of open source software in the geospatial
industry (not just foundation software) - eg. PR, training, outreach.
The Board of Directors
<http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Board_of_Directors#Packaging_and_Marketing>page
says:
Packaging and Marketing
OSGeo’s marketing effort has primarily been focused around the
packaging and documentation efforts of OSGeo-Live, and to a lesser
extend[sic], osgeo4w. […] It has been entirely driven by volunteer
labour, with 140 OSGeo-Live volunteers, and printing costs have
been covered by local events or sponsors. In the last couple of
years, OSGeo has covered local chapter expenses required to
purchase non-consumable items for conference booths (such as a
retractable banner). In moving forward, OSGeo hope to extend
marketing reach by providing co-contributions toward printing
costs of consumable items at conferences, such as toward
OSGeo-Live DVDs.
Local Chapters
Much of OSGeo’s marketing initiates are applied at the local
level. In many cases, this is best supported through as little as
an email list and wiki page. OSGeo also supports local chapters by
offering to pay for an Exhibition starter pack for local chapters.
Local chapters are also usually the coordinators of conferences
and related events, as mentioned above.
Exhibition starter packs almost never happen; OSGeo-Live
explicitlygets no support; and OSGeo struggles to staff a booth at
its own conferenceto say nothing of any other conferences.
Note: Local chapters certainly do do marketing and outreach, but
these efforts are essentially unsupported by the OSGeo Foundation.
In fact, this goal and the Board of Directors webpage seem to be
explicitly contradictory.
My grade: F.
Commentary
I could go on with my own personal evaluations, but I’m not sure
that’s necessary. The only place I see that OSGeo has
unquestionably succeeded in the past few years is the final goal,
“To award the Sol Katz award for service to the OSGeo community”.
So, what’s my point here? It’s simple: there is no longer a
coherent vision for what OSGeo should be. I’ll return to that
below, but let me continue with my other point.
OSGeo lacks leadership
Again quoting the Board of Directors’ page:
The board’s primary responsibility is to efficiently and
effectively make strategic decisions related to the running of OSGeo.
I won’t bore you with the details, but a perusal of the board
meeting minutes would indicate that strategyis rarely, if ever, a
part of the meetings.
The emphasis on consensus-based decision making often leads to no
decisions being made. I can’t count the number of discussions that
have come up on the board list only to devolve into a morass of
nit-picking and eventual lack of action when everyone tires of the
discussion. What action that is taken is often to “delegate” to a
(possibly inactive) sub-committee, then never follow up.
Instead what we have is a great deal of inertia, little interest
in changing things, and no clear indication of what the Board’s
priorities are.
If priorities do exist, they’re lost in a maze of confusing,
incomplete and often contradictory information on the wiki. (Wikis
— like abandonware for documentation.)
On pending irrelevancy
I encourage you to ask some random people in the open source
geospatial community what OSGeo means to them. I would make a bet
that the most common answer is a blank stare.
I would ask the board members to come up with three things, other
than FOSS4G, where the OSGeo membership has shown its importance
to the community as a wholein the last two years. Something where
people say, “Did you hear about[exciting thing]OSGeo is doing on
X?” To be clear, I don’t mean just things that OSGeo has a finger
in, but things that needOSGeo. If OSGeo disappeared tomorrow,
would any of these projects be significantly affected?
I don’t think it can be done. The OSGeo Foundation is sliding into
irrelevancy — and it may already be there.
If anything should be seen as strategic for OSGeo, it’s FOSS4G,
the foundation’s primary (sole?) source of income. Even regarding
its flagship public event, the board is largely absent. Rather
than provide adequate resources and planning, they instead rely on
burning out volunteers, then make post-hoc demands on the way they
shouldhave done it, provide no future support for organizers to
heed those demands, rarely follow up, then go on to repeat the
same mistakes the following year. Honestly, it’s surprising that
FOSS4G has failed only once. (I think this is a reflection of the
demand for the conference, not the blazing competence of OSGeo.)
Michael Gerlek brought this up
<https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/discuss/2015-July/014521.html>on the
osgeo-discuss list in July, and probably has a more generous spin
on it. He essentially argues that it’s time to declare mission
accomplished and shut down or rebooted. I agree with his points,
and I’m arguing that OSGeo can have something to offer, but it
will require a major re-think of its mission.
Fixing things
I hinted at this in my recent questions to the board candidates,
but I want to be explicit here: OSGeo needs to evolve or die.
Here’s how I would do it:
1.
The board needs to evaluate all of its goals, as defined on
the About page, to decide if they are still truly goals.
Define any new goals.
2.
Ask the question: “What does it mean to succeed at this goal?”
If the goal is vague, or ongoing, give a timeline: “What does
success look like for this goal one year from now?”
3.
Create measureable objectives for achieving those goals. Ask
the question, “How will we know if we’ve succeeded?”
4.
Prioritize the goals.
5.
Allocate resources to the goals.
Obviously this is a tricky one, but I think we can look at
this a balance between Importance and Effort.
Spend money to reduce to the effort required, more money if
the goal is more important — this might be the hardest
cultural shift. Volunteer time is precious and easily
discouraged. Make sure that you make it as efficient as
possible by spending money when you can.
For example, many of the infrastructure services OSGeo
provides can be easily outsourced to more featureful services
that are more responsive and rely less on volunteer labor.
6.
Close the loop on tasks. When a task is delegated to a
committee or individual, track its progress, both to know that
it is or isn’t happening, and to be able to acknowledge and
incorporate the work when it’s done. Failing to acknowledge
people’s labor or to use the results of that labor will
virtually guarantee that the volunteer does not continue to help.
7.
Evaluate success and failure. GOTO 1.
Aside: none if this will happen without a strong executive.
Whether that position is paid or not is up to the board, but it’s
clear that there needs to be someone who can make decisions
without endless rounds of fruitless discussions. The board as
currently constituted is not dysfunctional, but it is mostly
afunctional.
I’m will go so far as to suggest this: Fly every board member who
is available to a two or three day retreat. Get everyone in the
same room, a professional facilitator to speed the process, then
figure out what OSGeo is going to be and how to get there. Don’t
fret excessively about the expense — this isn’t about saving
money, it’s about saving OSGeo.
If you ask me, irrelevancy is a fate worse than death. Be
bold!It’s better to try to do something big and new then fail than
to simply fade away and be forgotten.
Though my comments above may sound harsh, they are sent with the
very best of intentions. I want OSGeo to succeed, but OSGeo is
never going to succeed if it doesn’t know what it’s try to succeed
at.Without real reform, I don’t see success happening, just
irrelevance. Here’s hoping this gets the ball rolling.
Darrell
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