OpenStreetMap Foundation investigation into unusual membership signups [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

OpenStreetMap Foundation investigation into unusual membership signups [pdf]

openstreetmap.lu

106 pointsMRPockets12 comments

My announcement email has a short summary:

https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/2019-Jan...

https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/19/grab-maps-osm-thailand-sou... to add the context

So the solution is to have more members? Wouldn't at least a magnitude more of new members than the detractors be needed, still leaving a wide margin of error for the detractors of the election.

Also, link to the page to join the OSM Foundation: https://join.osmfoundation.org/

I wouldn't mind joining, but I have no idea who to vote for for the board.

This is the 2018 election: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Foundation/AGM18/Electio...

Candidates give their answers to the same series of questions.

Looking at the current board is pretty interesting: https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Board_Member_Bios

It's really weird that Grab is using outsourced companies to do this when they should actually have their own very decent, accurate data sets to work with. Every Grab driver drives with their app open and a map showing. Surely they would be collecting GPS and route data from the drivers' (or passengers') apps during the trip. I'd think this approach would be cleaner and far more accurate.

The GPS data is only half of it, though. Much more valuable and difficult to obtain is the metadata, ie. the type of way, width, surface, quality etc; the name, any official government names and/or local names; access rights; lighting; seasonal restrictions etc etc

If 100 signups is all it takes for OSM to release a 22-page postmortem full of charts, then OSM has bigger problems.

These are not normal account signups, they are signups to become an associate member (https://join.osmfoundation.org/) which can vote in foundation elections.

Normal members can participate to the election too, according the website. The differences between regular and associate member are 1) the associate’s name and address is not publicly inspecatble, while the regular member’s is; 2) Associate members cannot vote on resolutions.

Sure. I think the point is that these aren’t OSM contributor “signups”, they’re Foundation memberships. The Foundation is not as big a deal in OSM as it is in Wiki(m|p)edia because the project is intentionally low-budget and hands-off.

Even that is not really comparable. The WMF does not actually have any members, and only has a superficial pseudo democratic shim (if that is good or bad is a different discussion though).

The "alarm" is caused because concerted action of roughly 10% of the OSMF membership could easily tip the current wobbly balance one way or the other, and there is no guarantee that the current "hands-off, low budget approach of the OSMF would survive such an upheaval.

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