Working Group Minutes/MWG 2024-11-06

From OpenStreetMap Foundation

DRAFT

Minutes of a meeting of

the Membership Working Group

of the OpenStreetMap Foundation

held online 2024-11-06 09:00 UTC

Present

Roland Olbricht (board)

Edward Bainton (minutes)

Mateusz Konieczny

Bogomil Shopov

Michael Spreng

Key:

italic is a decision

bold is an action + responsible person

Michael intro

  • on MWG a couple of years
  • did most of the work to dig into the membership problem before the AGM

Roland intro

  • treasurer
  • looked at member lists against member records
  • hope it’s not so hard to keep the CiviCRM up and running

Bogo & Mateusz

⁃ introductions

Edward intro

⁃ Mapper for maybe 10 years

⁃ Not very techie, expertise is more non-profits and UK company law

Michael

History of membership issues:

Consultant was engaged to work on customising CiviCRM for OSM needs

  • own view is pressing thing is that we get a new consultant
  • difficulty is with admitting members with 42 mapping days in past 365
  • ~2000 members, so this has been too much for vols to check by hand
  • so paid someone to write a plugin for CiviCRM
  • consultant did that quite well, it had 1-2 issues, these were queried, then it fizzled out
  • he’s quick on short answers, seems he has too much on for deeper work
  • we have the funding - it will be £10-20k pa to keep the consultant engaged but this is small in OSMF terms and worth it for such an important matter

Problem cases reviewed before the election

  • still open
  • auto-renewing on PayPal is an issue
  • many people have paid twice

Roland

  • can we stop the recurring payments from the PayPal side?
  • Suggested we do this to prevent future problems
  • Meeting agreed

Michael

  • what about emails to the relevant members?
  • we could send these out to double payers and ask do you want refund or happy to treat as donation
  • Meeting agreed

Michael

⁃ Two cases

  • 1. where 2 recurring payments we will have to cancel
  • 2. where second payment made as one-off may need to refund

Roland

  • timescale is ~4 weeks
  • general principle for working groups, is that working groups lead on decision-making
  • shouldn’t happen where the board over-rides the decision, as previously where board over-rode

Edward

  • Legally board cannot surrender their decisions to a WG without the WG becoming ‘shadow directors’, who have to register with Companies House
  • WG can recommend to the board
  • shared some potential wording re a presumption in favour of WG recommendations.

Michael

  • strange blip where many Indian sign-ups in a short time. This was a click-farm or similar.
  • plugin for active contributor memberships. When you start a renewal process, it parks the existing membership as pending.
  • once mapping days are checked the membership is sent to current
  • if the renewal works as expected, for a brief moment its pending, then it goes current and doesn’t create a new membership: great
  • but things can go wrong. if the user isn’t logged in to OSM, or network problems, the valid membership remains in the pending state. the user usually notices and comes back, but the plugin has forgotten. this is the majority of the problem cases.
  • but there are also cases where people have abandoned altogether. CiviCRM gives them a pending membership but no current membership. we don’t know what happens here. we were generous: we see from the log that they have had a valid membership, but then they
  • we have a list of 122 members who were told they are not yet valid for voting. we can go through each one and check whether there were more that were actually eligible
  • the pending membership case is harder to find. pending memberships are common, they occur every time someone starts the process and then abandons it, or are found not to be eligible for the 42 days. this is possibly 1000s of memberships. this is only associate membership.
  • Board has allows normal members to sign up on active basis but has never implemented this. In some cases like board membership, people have been

Edward

  • asked for clarification whether these problems affect associate membership only, or normal membership also

Michael/Roland

⁃ associate membership only

⁃ there is a decision that normal membership can be granted without payment (like with active contributors) but this has never been put into practice. Reserved for very unusual situations, eg where an associate member wants to become a board member.

Edward

  • recommended that this position doesn’t change, normal memberships must be paid for to make it easily tracable.
  • mentioned legal weight of (normal) members register and all the legal problems that come if it is inaccurate
  • asked whether general review of rules was on the agenda
  • expressed his view that this was the underlying problem, and the technical implementation was a smaller contributor

Mateusz

  • if we want the rules changed, this needs a change to the foundation rules
  • that would need to be at an annual meeting.
  • expect it to take a long time: to be in time for next meeting probably needed to start 6 months ago

Discussion of the sensitivities around public members’ register:

Roland

  • board has seen draft constitution for OSMF moving seat to EU
  • Belgian rules are similar: all members have access to the membership register
  • Belgian law has no concept of “associate member” so this didn’t feaure

Michael

  • we don’t know what will happen in the future: so far requests to inspect the members’ register have been boring statistical things. But who knows if the press might get involved one day.

Edward

  • Companies House is suggesting they will use powers under recent    legislation to make the members’ register private between the members, and between the Registrar and the company

Roland

  • Edward could plan how to respond to the new Companies House rules
  • Agreed the bigger issue is with the foundation rules rather than the technical implementation

Edward agreed to watch Companies House developments and keep MWG informed

Michael to send Edward bullet-point content for mail-out in the two cases.

Edward to draft the emails.

Roland to automate the mail-out and receive responses.

Michael

  • who will volunteer to look through the CiviCRM?
  • Roland & Bogo will do this

Roland

  • issues between PayPal and OSMF: there is no primary key to cross-refer between different email addresses between PayPal and OSM-registered email.

Michael

  • there is a fix using a key that PayPal provides to identify recurring payments.

Michael

We need to find people who had active contributor membership, but whose active contributor membership is now pending.

We need to find that their pending membership was once a valid membership: the only way to do this is probably from the activity log.

Currently we have to say we don’t know how many are in this state.

Suggests we postpone this, and prioritise the 122 cases.

Roland

  • will follow up the replies to the mail-out
  • will cancel recurring payments on PayPal on Stripe

Meeting closed 0958

DRAFT

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