Being a "don't talk, act" member since 2008, entrepreneur and former
chairman of a couple of local initiatives, I strongly agree.
Seeing all the "empty talkers" from my country run for charter
membership and still not having geoserver, which is the most mature open
geospatial product I can think of pas incubation made me completely lose
interest in OSGeo.
I am disappointed, a little frustrated and plotting a business course
that values open source and open knowledge. OSGeo or any in-crowd will
have no part in my future.
Thank you for your honest and to the point analyses.
Milo
On Sep 25, 2015 21:58, "Darrell Fuhriman" <darr...@garnix.org
<mailto:darr...@garnix.org>> wrote:
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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