Board/Minutes/2021-02-S2S/Discuss Membership prerequisites - steps towards Annual General Meeting resolution

From OpenStreetMap Foundation

Discuss Membership prerequisites, steps towards Annual General Meeting (AGM) resolution

Notes by participants. Might be enriched.

This session took place in parallel with "Discuss rebooting the Engineering Working Group". A summary was provided to the other group.

Acronyms

Participants

Board members

  • Guillaume Rischard
  • Mikel Maron
  • Rory McCann
  • Tobias Knerr

The rest of the board members participated in the parallel session.

Biographies.

Background

This resolution passed with 79% during the 2020 Annual General Meeting (AGM):

"The board of directors shall, together with the OSMF Membership Working Group, work on a set of proposals to ensure that all successful applicants for membership or associate membership in the OpenStreetMap Foundation have made a reasonable amount of contributions to OpenStreetMap. The specific form of the contributions (e.g. mapping vs. non-mapping) does not make a difference for the fulfillment of these prerequisites. The board shall submit these proposals as possible resolutions at a general meeting in 2021."

Please note that the MWG-proposed framework for the Active contributor membership program was approved on 2020-06-01. The program was made possible by a vote during the 2019 AGM.

Collaborative notes

Rory thinks that the HOT model (of members choosing each other) is more robust & less hackable than other models, but is not necessarily suggesting adopting this model.

Tobias: is it a matter of asking the Membership Working Group (MWG) to come up with the details?

Action item: delegate to MWG?

Mikel: risk of discouraging people from joining

  • Number
  • What happens when you don't meet the number
  • Messaging

Who is membership for?

Do we have any non-negotiables for OSMF membership?

Using something similar to Active contributor membership (ACM) program would allow synergy with the work for requirements checking that we've agreed on a budget for.

Decisions

Delegate to MWG

Ask MWG:
Should the board give guidance to this Working Group (WG)?
Messaging, and communication, to the OSM community, is very important, and a multiyear process.

  • Should the board be explicit with other types of contributions aside from map edits?
    • Motivation: Currently we list edit counts, explicitly listing other types of contributions ensures this is communicated well.
    • Wiki edit counts?
    • Give talk at an OSM event with X+ attendees.
  • Requirements need not be same as Active contributor membership program.
    • both numerically measurable and assessed by decision.
  • is needs consultation across community. Can MWG run this?
    • consultation should happen with a proposal (or some other new input), not immediately.
  • People who are doing paid work on OSM should be able to become members.

- Come up with suggested criteria for skin in the game based membership
- Don't discourage the people we want as members

Action item

  • Guillaume to take it to MWG.
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