Talk:Foundation/AGM19/Election to Board

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Official set of questions

The deadline for members to post questions for the candidates -upon which the official questions will be based- has been reached. Thanks to all that have participated. You can still see the full set further down this page. Our election facilitator, has organised the community questions and here is the official set.

Candidates are now kindly asked to submit their answers to the official questions -and their manifestos- before 2019-11-27 00:01 UTC- directly to Michael Collinson and cc our administrative assistant (mike@ayeltd.biz, dorothea@osmfoundation.org). It's up to the candidates to answer all the questions or just a few of them. Our suggestion is to answer all of them, except where indicated in specific questions. The official answers and questions thereof should be what voters use to judge.

Tell us a little about your OSM activities

For example:

  • What brought you to OSM and why are you still part of it now?
  • What is your OSM user name?
  • What mapping contributions have you made in the last year?
  • Are you/have you been a member of any OSMF working groups?
  • Do you participate with other OSM mappers, for example in a local chapter or in social meet ups?
  • Have you run anything yourself, such as an OSM-newbie event?
  • Have you written about OpenStreetMap in the past - for example, in a blog, or on mailing lists, or in a newspaper? Please provide links if you can.
  • Do you contribute as a software developer?
  • Have you attended board meetings as a guest?

Tell us a little about why you want to be a board member

  • What do you think you can achieve as a board member that you can't as a regular OSM(F) member?
  • What is the most pressing issue the OSMF board should address?

Being a board member

Please describe any experience you have had in ANY or ALL of these 3 areas:

  1. Being a board member for OSMF often involves complex negotiation and discussions within the board, with working groups, and with the wider OSM community. Teamwork and the ability to make decisions, listen (truly listen) and hear a diverse set of opinions takes humility, time management, calm process planning, and community-building skills. Please also share examples on how you managed scenarios and conversations that you may not agree with and/or that challenge you.
  2. Do you have experience of managing a project or a team of people? Do you have any experience of coaching others to lead (i.e. managing managers)? How long have you been doing these things?
  3. Have you ever managed multiple stakeholders with different agendas? What was the situation? What did you do? What challenges did you face and how did you overcome them?

Board diversity

Three remaining board members are men and only one of the twelve candidates is a woman.

  1. Is this indicative of a gender diversity problem within OpenStreetMap? If so:
  2. Can you describe the problem as you understand it?
  3. What is the role of the board to help fix this?
  4. What will you do in particular?

Your time

If you are currently a member of a working group, do you plan to continue your role in that working group while on the board? Do you have enough time to commit to multiple roles?

Transparency: Conflicts of interest

Is your main source of income related to mapping or GIS work in some way, (whether OSM-related or not)?

What, if any, conflicts of interest do you have that would affect you if you were on the board?

Specifically, are you an employee of, member of, or otherwise affiliated with (paid or non-paid) a company, government organization or non-profit that does work in the OSM ecosystem or might compete with it? Do you have any contracts (employment or otherwise) which would limit what you can say in public that are relevant to OSM? eg a non-disparaging clause with a company/org in the OSM ecosystem? Or an employment contract which commits you to "always work in the company's best interest"?

We are looking for a new Treasurer

Would you be willing to volunteer?

Are you willing to attend a Board face to face meeting?

The Board has a tradition to do an expenses-paid two day face-to-face meeting soon after the election, with a focus on agenda-setting for the rest of the year. Since there will be many new members, it also offers a chance to get to know each other better. Do you think this is a good idea? Are you willing/able to attend such a meeting?

The Board and Working Groups

Please give us your view on the current overall structure and health of OSMF working groups using at least SOME of the following questions to help you.

How do you feel about the current structure of the OSMF, and the divisions of responsibility between the Board and the Working Groups? Are those divisions clear to you? Are there responsibilities of the OSMF that are not currently under the remit of any working group? Is this a good thing? Do you think the working groups are fulfilling their responsibilities? Are each of the working groups healthy? How do you think the board should support the working groups?

It seems that working groups are not growing in participation. Some of the groups are over-tasked. Others are maintained by the same people year over year. While this contribution is wonderful, part of community health is engaging new volunteers/leaders. If the majority of big decisions about OSMF/ OSM are to be done by the working groups, how can we be sure that they get more support? What is your role as a potential board member to assist on the sustainability of working groups?

The Board and the community: communication

There a lots of communication methods amongst the OSM community and OSM project. How do you personally keep track of everything being said/discussed/agreed?

The Board and the community: What would you do? ...

Being a board member requires you to carefully discuss, assess issues and either reject or follow through on a solution and actually "make it happen". With this in mind, here is a selection of potentially tough or controversial issues that concern individual OSMF members. Please think through ONE in detail and let us know your views. Time permitting, feel free to comment more briefly on other issues - there will be at least one voter interested in your answer!

  • What is your POV on multilingual maps in openstreetmap.org' ? In India, most of Indians are not comfortable with English language. Should the board initiate a project to provide maps in different languages on our main website? How?
  • Do you believe in the ground-truth based rulings of the Data Working Group? What is your stance on the overruling of the DWG by the board on the Ukrainian border last year? How would you decide in the future on such issues?
  • Gender pronouns. Some other online community rules/codes of conducts require the use of a person's stated pronouns (aka “preferred pronouns”), e.g. the correct pronouns for transgender people, including the use of “gender neutral singular they” or neo-pronouns (e.g. ”xe”). Do you think this is a reasonable rule that OSM(F) should adopt? Or a completely intolerable ridiculous rule?
  • Prominent projects like Facebook, MAPS.ME or Moovit are using OSM data but are allegedly missing proper attribution. This is unchanged despite multiple requests from various mappers. What would you do as a board member?
  • What are your thoughts about employees of companies (that use OSM data) becoming Board or Working Group members of OSMF? What is your solution to ensure transparency, equity and impartiality of OSMF in cases like this?
  • The European Union has enacted new tough rules on personal data protect, "GDPR". These came into force in May 2018. According to the License Working Group, OSM needs to make some server API changes to comply fully and these are not yet done. If elected, what will you do to clarify the situation? Do you think the OSMF is currently potentially at risk of not being GDPR-compliant?
  • As a board member, what steps would you take to ensure that the OSM front page and its components such as editor is further developed in a manner supported by the mapping community? Consider 3 things: 1) There is specific controversy about the iD editor. iD maintainers are alleged to disregard community input and have stated that they not care what the community wants - a community-vetted fork has been suggested; 2) How will you encourage existing developers of the software that powers OpenSteetMap to continue participating and be motivated? - they are all volunteers and put in huge amounts of time, surely that deserves a high degree of autonomy and decision making?; 3) How will you encourage new developers to join and participate in our community?

OpenStreetMap 2030 Vision

OpenStreetMap is 15 years old. What do you think will be different in another 15 years? For you personally, what do you want to see happen?

Please remember to also send us your manifesto. Thank you :)

Community questions to OSMF board candidates, upon which the official set will be based

information sign

The deadline for members to post questions for the candidates -upon which the official questions will be based- has been reached. Thanks to all that have participated. Our election facilitator, Michael Collinson will publish the official set by the end of 2019-11-16 (UTC).

Here are questions from the OSM community to the candidates for the OSMF board elections. An official set of questions -based on the questions below- will be published on November 16.

Asking questions? You are kindly asked to be respectful in your tone and try to phrase questions in an open way without already implying a certain answer or trick questions which are superficially about something else than what you want to know. Also you should give enough context to your questions, possibly with links, so they can be understood by any interested community member and not just insiders familiar with the specific subject and by any candidate so both long term active members and newcomers have an equal chance of giving you an accurate and honest answer.

The questions from 2018, 2017, 2016 etc. might still be relevant for inspiration.

Questions from non English speaking community members

  • We invite local communities to get together, discuss and add their questions. If you do not feel comfortable in asking your questions in English, feel free to add them in your native language.
  • We invite other community members who can help, to add translations above of the non-EN questions. In case no-one reading this page can help, the Communication Working Group (CWG) will try to find people to translate the questions.
  • Please note that -depending on the language and date- the CWG cannot guarantee translation of all non-EN questions. So, we kindly ask you to add any non-EN questions as soon as possible.

Are you a candidate? In advance thanks to all candidates for standing for election. You are kindly asked to wait for the official set of questions, which will be published on November 16th, on this page. Please submit your answers to the official questions and your manifestos directly to the facilitator Michael Collinson (mike@ayeltd.biz) and cc our administrative assistant (dorothea@osmfoundation.org). Please view the official questions as a possibility to articulate your views on matters that might be important for OSM community members. And please state freely if you have not formed an opinion on a question or are unable to answer it based on your current knowledge. Please also feel encouraged to state if your position on a question is a firm conviction or if what you say is just an opinion. Also if English is not your native language and you feel you cannot properly express your ideas on a certain question in English feel free to answer in your native language.

Thank you all for participating in this procedure.

Conflicts with the community

How would you avoid a conflict with the community similar to the recent ones at Wikipedia, Stack Exchange, Blizzard and Gitlab? Wynndale (talk) 20:51, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

Conflicts of Interest, and contractual obligations

(i) What, if any, conflicts of interest do you have that would affect you if you were on the board? (ii) Are they any previous board decisions which you would have had a conflict of interest? (iii) Are there any contracts (employment or otherwise) which would limit what you can say in public that are relevant to OSM? eg a non-disparaging clause with a company/org in the OSM ecosystem? Or an employment contract which commits you to "always work in the company's best interest"? (I had an employment contract like that) Rorym (talk) 10:22, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

Would you be able to do OSMF board work during any paid employement (if you have any)? i.e. Would you be able to be paid to OSMF board work? Or would all OSMF board work you do be in your free/unpaid time?

(This gives the electorate an idea of how much time you'd be able to spend, and how much (if any) other resources you can use) Rorym (talk) 10:26, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

Should the Board actively support projects that relate to core infrastructure?

Projects like a new version of the API or expanding the functionalities of osm.org? Support like paying for development, or by actively stimulating the community. Joost_schouppe (talk) 19:04, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

Are you willing to attend a Board face to face meeting?

The Board has a tradition to do a face to two day face meeting soon after the election, which several members is agenda-setting for the rest of the year. Since there will be many new members, it also offers a chance to get to know each other better. Do you think this is a good idea? Are you willing to arttend such a meeting? Under which conditions? Joost_schouppe (talk) 19:04, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

OSMF has a certain buffer of money. What do you think should happen to that money?

Joost_schouppe (talk) 19:04, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

Spending and funding

If OSMF shows it can spend money in an efficient way, it is not unthinkable that this would open the door to more corporate donations. Do you think that is something worth striving for? Joost_schouppe (talk) 19:04, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

Treasurer position

If elected will you volunteer for the position of treasurer? SimonPoole (talk) 21:24, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

GDPR

GDPR entered into force on 25th May 2018. LWG issued a position paper on 3rd May 2018 suggesting changes to do in order to comply. In particular, the API is expected to be modified. I updated JOSM18 months ago to be compliant to these expected changes, on 13th May 2018. Since then, no one has come forward to implement these changes on API side. If elected, what will you do to clarify the situation? Do you think the OSMF is currently potentially at risk of not being GDPR-compliant? --Don-vip (talk) 21:49, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

iD editor project governance

There are some controversies around how decisions by the iD editor maintainers disregard community input. iD maintainers have openly stated that they do not care for what the community wants. Some people have called for the OSMF to stop automatically deploying new versions of iD as "the official editor", instead turning to a community-vetted fork of iD. As a board member, what steps would you undertake to ensure that the main editor on the OSM front page is developed together with, rather than against, the mapper community? --Woodpeck (talk) 10:12, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

Supporting OpenStreetMap developers

There are currently very few developers actively participating in improving the software and technical aspects that power OpenStreetMap. How will you encourage the existing developers to continue participating despite a hostile environment? How will you encourage new developers to join and participate in our community? Yellowbkpk (talk) 19:21, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

Pronouns!

Some rules/codes of conducts require the use of a person's stated pronouns (aka “preferred pronouns”), e.g. the correct pronouns for transgender people, including the use of “gender neutral singular they” or neo-pronouns (e.g. ”xe”). Do you think this is a reasonable rule? Or a completely intolerable ridiculus rule. (NB: Another question about community conflicts refers to the recent StackExchange conflict, which involved this topic) Rorym (talk) 10:36, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

Community: How will you grow and support a global, healthy community?

OSM and OSMF are often a complex community of communities. Some people regard the OSMF and Talk mailing list as the 'community' voice/decision-making space. It is clear that not all people use these communication channels. How should OSM /OSMF adjust to be more inclusive, open and collaborative? See the Open Principles for some guidance on the best practices.--HeatherLeson (talk) 13:33, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

Governance: What should we do to improve engagement in the working groups? chapters?

It seems that working groups are not growing in participation. Some of the groups are overtasked. Others are maintained by the same people year over year. While this contribution is wonderful, part of community health is engaging new volunteers/leaders. If the majority of big decisions about OSMF/ OSM are to be done by the working groups, how can we be sure that they get more support? What is your role as a potential board member to assist on the sustainability of working groups?--HeatherLeson (talk) 13:48, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

Term limits

What is your position on the proposed term limits (all three variants please)?--SimonPoole (talk) 23:46, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

If you are standing for re-elections what is holding the board back on giving itself term limits? --ThePacki (talk) 19:10, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

What maps inspire you?

It's nice to give recognition to people doing great work. Share a map that you feel demonstrates the best of OSM. What are our success stories? --Bhousel (talk)

Experience: Describe your governance, leadership, team, and/or board experience(s)?

Being a board member for OSMF often involves complex negotiation and discussions within the board, with working groups, and with the wider OSM community. Teamwork and the ability to make decisions, listen (truly listen) and hear a diverse set of opinions takes humility, time management, calm process planning, and community-building skills. Please also share examples on how you managed scenarios and conversations that you may not agree with and/or that challenge you.--HeatherLeson (talk) 04:51, 10 November 2019 (UTC)

Experience: People and project management

Broadly speaking, what experience do you have of managing a project or a team of people? Do you have any experience of coaching others to lead (i.e. managing managers)? How long have you been doing these things? --RobJN (talk) 22:42, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

Experience: Working with multiple people with different agendas

Can you please give an example of when you have managed multiple stakeholders with different agendas? What was the situation? What did you do? What challenges did you face and how did you overcome them? --RobJN (talk) 22:42, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

What should be done with entities that persistently violate ODBL license?

Prominent projects like Facebook, MAPS.ME or Moovit are using OSM data but are missing proper attribution. This is unchanged despite multiple requests from various mappers. What you plan to do with this problem as a board member? Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 16:44, 10 November 2019 (UTC)

Map internationalization

What is your POV on multilingual maps in openstreetmap.org' ? If you see the current situation, eg: India most of the Indians are not comfortable with english langauge. A dropdown language bar would solve the issue . Would spend time to make openstreetmap internationalized ? --Naveenpf (talk) 01:24, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

Influence of Corporate Mappers

Do you have concerns about the increasing influence of corporate mapping entities in Foundation business, whether via election to the Board or participation in Working Groups, and the potential ability and intention to steer OSM in directions more favorable to their employers? SJFriedl (talk) 16:44, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

Diversity and the board

It seems that the three remaining board members are men and only one of the twelve candidates is a woman.

  1. Is this indicative of a diversity problem within OpenStreetMap? If so:
  2. Can you describe the problem as you understand it?
  3. What is the role of the board to help fix this?
  4. What will you do in particular?

Randyme (talk) 00:11, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

Independence of candidates

Is your main source of income related to OSM or GIS work?

Are you paid for your mapping or for your participation in the OSM community? If yes, who are your employer(s) or client(s)?

Does your current employer(s) or client(s), or has it ever:

  • paid or reimbursed OSM memberships or participation to OSM events? Have they in your case?
  • encouraged people to join the OSMF?
  • recommended voting for certain candidates in the OSMF board election?

What are your and your employer(s) or client(s) links to GlobalLogic and its employees?

-- Stereo (talk) 00:24, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

OSM-wide Survey

Would you support a community-wide optional survey sent out to all OpenStreetMap contributors?

Questions could potentially be about gender, age, race, ethnicity, geography, tools & software, governance, cartography, mapping motivations, the map, and more. Survey would be anonymized, or at least give the respondents the choice. There could be a separate committee created along with community and expert input to draft and administer a survey.

There are often surveys done about OpenStreetMap users, but they are sent out to a small pool of users and have limited responses. Also, naturally they have more of a selection bias then an OSM-wide survey would have. Hopefully, this survey could build upon the work of a recent surveys such as the survey on global and local communities in OpenStreetMap (https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2019/08/08/survey-on-global-and-local-communities/) with over 300 responses, and the Surveying OpenStreetMap Survey (https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2019/06/13/surveying-openstreetmap/) with 161 responses.

Does an OSM-wide survey have historical precedent? It sort of does, in April 2009 with permission from OSM, a questionnaire was created and sent out to 31,015 OSM contributors using the OSM messaging system. This survey was completed by 444 OpenStreetMap contributors (Citation: Budhathoki, Nama R., and Caroline Haythornthwaite. "Motivation for open collaboration: Crowd and community models and the case of OpenStreetMap." American Behavioral Scientist 57.5 (2013): 548-575.) At this time OpenStreetMap had 120,000 users but a smaller number of contributors. Over ten years later we have over 5 million users, and over a million contributors.

Tgertin (talk) 14:01, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

Experience within the OSMF

Which OSMF working groups are you a member of, or have been a member of in the past? If you are currently a member of a working group, do you plan to continue your role in that working group while on the board? Do you have enough time to commit to multiple roles?

Gravitystorm (talk) 15:44, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

Structure of the OSMF

How do you feel about the current structure of the OSMF, and the divisions of responsibility between the Board and the Working Groups? Are those divisions clear to you? Are there responsibilities of the OSMF that are not currently under the remit of any working group? Is this a good thing? Do you think the working groups are fulfilling their responsibilities? Are each of the working groups healthy? How do you think the board should support the working groups?

Gravitystorm (talk) 15:44, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

What do you think you can achieve as a board member that you can't as a regular OSM(F) member?

If not elected, is there anything the board could do to enable you to achieve those things?

-- ThePacki (talk) 19:10, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

What is the most pressing issue the OSMF board should address?

Are you willing to work on those issues even if not elected to the board?

-- ThePacki (talk) 19:10, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

Transparency

Which organisations are you affiliated with (paid or non-paid) other than OSMF?

-- ThePacki (talk) 19:10, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

Governance

Do you belive in the ground-truth based rulings of the Data-Workinggroup? What is your stance on the overruling of the DWG by the board on the Ukrainian border last year? How would you decide in the future on such issues?

-- ThePacki (talk) 19:10, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

Employment

Do you work for a company that produces maps based on OSM data? If so, do they attribute OSM in the method required by https://openstreetmap.org/copyright ? (You can answer with a screenshot!) -- Richard (talk) 20:18, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

Your published views

Have you written about OpenStreetMap in the past - for example, in a blog, or on mailing lists, or in a newspaper? Can you provide links to representative or significant examples of your writing? -- Richard (talk) 20:18, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

What is your skin in the game?

The GlobalLogic incident has shown how important it is that the OpenStreetMap foundation is governed by those who are involved in achieving its goals.

What mapping contributions have you made in the last year? What other substantial contributions have you made to the OpenStreetMap project in the last 12 months?

-- Stereo (talk) 21:40, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

Private interests on OSMF guidance and future

What´s your thoughts about employees of companies (that use OSM data) becoming Board or Working Group members of OSMF? What's your solution to ensure transparency, equity and impartiality of OSMF in cases like this?

Sanjorgepinho (talk) 21:54, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

2030 vision

It’s 2030. OSM has been around for a quarter century. Write a news story about it. -- kirsanov (talk) 22:18, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

How can OSMF support local communities?

How in your opinion can the OpenStreetMap Foundation better support local communities? --RobJN (talk) 22:42, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

How can OSMF help to ensure that energy and resources are spent on things that the community wants?

The OSMF has access to a pool of resources (e.g. corporate sponsorship money, donations, goodwill). One argument is that the OSMF should be maximizing the amount of resources it can solicit and channeling it towards the community / the communities priority wishes. Do you agree? How can the OSMF get better at doing this? --RobJN (talk) 22:42, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

Where do you think the community is weakest and what role should the OSMF have in filling this gap, if any?

The success of OpenStreetMap comes from the strength of its community of volunteers. However, as in everything, whilst the community excels in some aspects there may be areas where it is less successful? Where do you think these strengths and weaknesses are? On the weakness, what do you think the reasons for this are? And how do you think the OSMF should respond? --RobJN (talk) 22:42, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

Communication issues

Communication methods amongst the OSM community and project are vast. How do you personally keep track of everything being said/discussed/agreed? - LastGrape/Gregory 23:32, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

Deadline reached. The official set of questions will be based on the community questions above and last year's ones.

The deadline for members to post questions for the candidates -upon which the official questions will be based- has been reached. Thanks to all that have participated.

Next step
Our election facilitator, Michael Collinson will organise the community questions and will publish an official set for the candidates.


General Election to Board Wiki-Discussion:

This space is for discussing the page in a normal wiki talk page like style. For substantial election discussions the osmf-talk mailing list is probably a more suitable place. Subscription to osmf-talk is available to members of the Foundation, using the same email-address they have registered as OSMF members.

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