An inhomogeneous new OSMF Board

Dur­ing the Annual Meet­ing in Tokyo, new Board mem­bers replaced long-standing mem­bers Steve Coast and Mikel Maron. Dur­ing the first few weeks, even before the face-to-face meet­ing, it became clear that the think­ing of mem­bers of the Board is now much broader than it has been in past years. The role of the OSMF has been brought into ques­tion. While the think­ing among the Board mem­bers seems to be very diverse, it becomes clear that, from a high-level per­spec­tive, there are two sides. One side con­sid­ers the OSMF as pro­vid­ing a sup­port func­tion for the map­pers’ com­mu­nity, while the other acknowl­edges that mak­ing Open­StreetMap data a viable alter­na­tive to the incum­bent map sources requires a bal­ance between data con­tri­bu­tion (the map­pers’ com­mu­nity) and data con­sump­tion (those who pro­vide ser­vices based on OSM data to the consumer).

Both sides are fully aware that the map­pers are the key ele­ment. How­ever, one side con­sid­ers them­selves to rep­re­sent the inter­ests of the map­pers. In the world of busi­ness, this would be equiv­a­lent to the labour unions. The other side is also will­ing to con­sider the needs of those who are work­ing with data in order to lever­age the use of Open­StreetMap data and there­fore make the nec­es­sary com­pro­mise in order to grow the OSM ecosys­tem. This would be sim­i­lar to the Min­istry of Econ­omy, which deals with a pros­per­ing econ­omy. To give an exam­ple: com­mer­cial com­pa­nies that are con­sid­er­ing the use of OSM data have approached the Board in order to dis­cuss the impact of their to-be-launched ser­vices of Open­StreetMap. Most com­pa­nies expect to dis­cuss such top­ics, where busi­ness secrets are involved, under a con­fi­den­tial­ity agree­ment. One side of the Board is will­ing to make such a com­pro­mise, while the other con­sid­ers con­fi­den­tial­ity agree­ments to be a dis­ad­van­tage for the map­ping com­mu­nity and dis­likes con­fi­den­tial­ity agree­ments in general.

Many of these con­flict­ing stand­points have already evolved dur­ing the first weeks of the new Board. The cur­rent pur­pose of the Open­StreetMap Foun­da­tion (“an ini­tia­tive to cre­ate and pro­vide free geo­graphic data, such as street maps, to any­one”) is too broad for it to be of help in jus­ti­fy­ing either stand­point. It comes down to the fact that the pur­pose of the OSMF needs to be more pre­cisely defined in order to judge which stand­point is more in line with the OSMF’s intentions.

I assume this dis­cus­sion will become a sig­nif­i­cant part of the Board’s face-to-face meet­ing at the begin­ning of November.

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