[apologies for posting to talk rather than osmf-talk - very bizarrely, I appear to have been *un*subscribed from osmf-talk upon renewing my membership. Go figure. :) For those not following, the issue is the application of a large number of Skobbler employees to join OSMF, shortly before the OSMF elections. It has been suggested this would mean that ~65 of the total OSMF membership were Skobbler employees. Full thread at http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/2011-August/date.html]
Serge Wroclawski wrote: > I can't speak to the specifics of this situation; I don't know > the individuals, or the company involved, but I will say that > on the surface, it would seem that this company has chosen > a path which has ruffled some feathers, and I'd hope that > this thread acts as a message to it and other companies > to be sensitive in how they interact with the foundation, > and the community, and to be concious of how their actions, > whatever the intent, may appear. +1. In my experience (outside OSM) there are three reasons for anyone to join a membership organisation such as OSMF: a) to gain a vote in the affairs of the organisation; b) to financially support the aims of the organisation; c) to receive member-only benefits. In the particular case of OSMF, a company can achieve (b) by making a donation (via http://donate.openstreetmap.org/ or direct to the foundation), and indeed this is more effective as it doesn't incur the overheads of membership. It's a well-established route: Google famously, and generously, gave £5,000 in a recent donations drive. That leaves (a) or (c). For (c), the only OSMF member-only benefit, as I understand it, is reduced admission to the State of the Map. It's very possible that Skobbler has signed its employees up to OSMF because it's planning to fly them all over to Denver and this works out cheaper. (Personally I would have thought that sponsoring SotM, as Mapquest, Bing, ESRI, Waze et al are doing, would have been more cost-effective as presumably sponsors receive a discount on admission, but I don't know this for sure.) Or (a), to gain a vote in the affairs of the organisation. Serge makes a distinction "between impropriety and the appearance of impropriety", and Steve has alluded to the reaction when many Cloudmade employees joined - "I think you have to look at this in the context of the last time a company paid for its employees to become members". There is no evidence of any impropriety; the risk is an appearance of impropriety. The question "how will this play on Slashdot?" is not a bad one to ask. Oliver Kuhn, Chief Commercial Officer of Skobbler, is of course already on the OSMF board and has posted that he personally believes OSM should concentrate on the needs of "data consumers" like his (http://www.abalakov.com/openstreetmap-map-data-who-cares), steering contributors towards projects such as addressing (http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2010-July/051511.html), and that it could consider weakening the share-alike clause (http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/legal-talk/2010-June/003398.html). Again, there's no suggestion that Oliver has been using his OSMF position to push these aims, and I'm sure he wouldn't. The risk is the appearance of impropriety in a situation summed up as "the Skobbler CCO is on the OSMF board; the Skobbler CCO wants OSM to concentrate on the sort of data used by his company; Skobbler has paid for its employees to join OSMF such that they now form a large bloc". To avoid this appearance of impropriety, I think it would have been better for Skobbler to instead either make a donation to OSMF or sponsor SotM. But, again, there's nothing in the Articles preventing them from signing up 65 members; if they want to, they're perfectly entitled to. For the avoidance of doubt, I believe commercial support for OSM is a good thing and am not arguing against it. cheers Richard _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
