As i indicated before i want to write a bit about the situation of the OpenStreetMap Foundation before this year’s board election, which is going to happen from October 10 to October 17.

This is not going to be substantially about OSMF policy and operational decisions but about the overall situation of the organization and the long term trends.

The background

What we have seen over the course of approximately the past 10 years as a long term trend is a roll-back of transparency and public interaction of the OSMF board with the OSMF membership and the OSM community at large. When exactly this had begun is a bit hard to tell – we have had the transparency initiative from the 2015 board substantially expanding the interaction of the board with the community and the involvement of the OSMF membership. The first major roll-backs of transparency happened under the 2019 board. Most notable being the first non-public board meeting since 2015 in May 2020 – framed mid month board chat back then, but meanwhile clearly the more significant meetings in terms of actual deliberation of the board taking place than the public ones. Most of the transparency rollbacks were subtle and came in small steps difficult to individually recognize if you are not familiar with how the OSMF used to work before. Contracts for long term paid work, for example, used to be public, so the community could transparently see what exactly those doing paid work for community money were contractually obliged to do and if these were fair and balanced terms. Martin Raifer’s contracting in 2021, as far as i remember, has been the first contract for long term paid work since the 2015 transparency improvements that was not made available to the OSMF members. Grant Slater’s hiring in 2022 was the first paid work contract that was done without a formal board decision. These days none of the contract terms for paid work are known to the OSMF members any more. So the OSMF membership and the OSM community do not know what those people who receive community money for their work are contractually obliged to do for that money.

In terms of bigger anti-transparency measures the board committees are also noteworthy. In 2020 the OSMF articles of association had been amended to allow non-board-members on board committees. We now have two committees in the OSMF under these terms. They recruit their non-board members autonomously and apparently with neither a formal process nor formal documentation of the appointment (so to understand who became a member of these committees at what time we have to trust that the documentation on the OSMF website is always updated in a timely fashion. There is effectively no oversight of the OSMF membership over these committees or consultation of the OSMF membership about the work of these committees. Legally, the committees are obliged to produce minutes of their meetings, but neither of these committees seems to actually have meetings (the personell committee not at all, the finance committee not since 2024). The personell committee publishes yearly PR style reports but nothing that allows any meaningful level of scrutiny by the membership on their work and their role in the OSMF.

In parallel to the transparency rollbacks we also saw a massive decrease in bidirectional communication of the board with the OSMF membership at large. The most noticeable event in that decline was the introduction of the moderation regime on osmf-talk in 2022 which was around the same time when open discussion among the OSMF membership about OSMF matters and board decisions died off. It is not that the introduction of formal moderation is clearly the sole reason for the decline in engagement between the OSMF board and the OSMF membership, but it definitely was a factor.

The bottom line is: These days there is practically zero eye level communication between the OSMF board and the OSMF membership and the OSM community. I already pointed this out more or less when i contemplated about who the actual members of the OpenStreetMap Foundation are. The OSMF board has since then even further retreated into the bubble of the de facto membership of the OSMF as sketched in that post and is practically – as board members – hardly having any direct interaction with the OSM community outside that bubble any more – and indirect interaction mostly in the form of asymmetric top down corporate style PR.

This complete unfamiliarity with actually openly talking to the OSM community on OSMF matters often becomes obvious in a rather funny way during the public board meetings when board members try to explain things to their audience with shallow PR statements while the non-board members present are usually me and a few other long term OSM community members who often are more familiar with the subject at hand than the board member talking.

I will leave out the considerations on why all of that is happening – partly because that feels too much like giving advice to an organization that has no interest in or appreciation for said advice, partly because – due to my rather limited insight into what is happening behind the scenes in the OSMF outside the scrutiny of the OSMF members – there would necessarily be quite a bit of speculation in that.

What i think can be said without much speculation – and what i hinted at in my contemplations on the actual members of the OSMF – is, that the OSMF board seems to be increasingly weakening in its influence on the organization. That the OSMF is under democratic control of its formal members who elect a board to represent them, which then governs the organization, is increasingly an illusion, because

• the OSMF members lack the ability to make competent decisions to elect the most qualified people to the board to lead the OSMF in a way that serves the needs of the OSM community, in particular because:
  • thanks to the transparency rollback and the failure of the board to communicate with the members in a meaningful way the members lack basic information on what is going on in the OSMF.
  • due to the managed pre-election interaction between the members and the board candidates the members can neither assess the candidates’ ability and willingness in engaging in meaningful open discourse with the community nor can they ask critical questions assessing the candidates’ views and positions on matters of importance.
• As a result people are elected to the board without a meaningful assessment if they have the skills necessary to substantially lead the organization.

If you observe the board and their decisions these days it is clear that their understanding of the background and competency on matters they are involved in is not only way behind that of domain experts in the wider OSM community (which is a problem since the board fails to openly seek input from those domain experts outside the OSMF’s inner circles), the board seems also highly unfamiliar with both the formal and informal procedural rules of the organization. You get the clear impression that the board is increasingly living in the moment and makes decisions largely ad hoc and context free without a long term strategy – exactly what Allan Mustard criticized as muddling through.

But you can’t expect to effectively lead an organization if a large portion of your decisions ostentatiously ignore the rules you (or your predecessors on the board) have created.

And the resulting absence of actual leadership from the board does not – as some might hope – lead to an absence of hierarchical structure in the organization, it leads to a shift of de facto influence and power towards informal structures and compartmentalized cooperations behind the scenes – structures and processes that are not only opaque and impervious to outsiders (which includes the OSMF membership), but also increasingly to the board.

This year’s board elections

All of these developments roughly sketched above seem to have culminated in the farce of this year’s board elections.

There are four seats (of seven in total) open for election this year. It had been established since many years that to motivate qualified people to volunteer for running for the board it is important for existing board members whose seats are up for election declare their intent to either re-run or not to re-run early – ideally before, but latest at the beginning of the nomination period. The board has never codified this principle in the board rules of order, but it has been a known community recommendation for many years and frankly i would consider it even an obvious principle of fairness.

Now here is the timeline of this year’s nominations:

Bottom line: None of the board members declared their intention before the nomination period and only one of them nominated themselves at the beginning of the nomination period. Even the one board member who ultimately did not re-run, first nominated herself late, and then withdrew. There might be good reasons for doing that, but nothing in that direction was communicated at any point in the process. The irony of the whole thing is that the board member who withdrew could well have been the most qualified person currently on the board (a bit hard for me to tell based on the limited insight we have based on just the public board meetings and their minutes – but a lot of things point in that direction for me).

As a result we have a meaningless election this year with four candidates for four seats. And the main reason for that is – i clearly want to state that here – the failure of the current OSMF board to meaningfully communicate with the OSMF membership about their work during the past years – essentially discouraging any interest from the OSMF membership at large in the OSMF. But i also want to clearly state: The individual board members of the OSMF are just people who have volunteered to take on a thankless and time consuming task to try to lead the organization together with six other individuals who they had almost no say in picking. So it is ultimately we, the OSMF members, who are to blame for having picked the wrong people for the job, or more accurately – due to the low participation of members in the election – for being completely indifferent about the OSMF. That lack of interest is, of course, to a large extent the result of years of the OSMF practically changing to become about as uninteresting to its members as possible – kind of: nothing to see here, move along.

What can be said for sure already now is that this election is going to seriously damage the legitimacy of the OSMF board as a democratically elected representation of the OSMF membership. None of the four board members elected this year will be able to claim to have prevailed in the election process against alternatives. They are not even the least bad of all the bad options (as some might have framed the choice in past board elections) – they are simply the only options available.

You might ask if there is anything the board could do at this point to mitigate this disaster? Yes, there is. The four “elected” board members could step down after the election and either the board or the membership could call for a new election. If the board is worried that operating with only three board members until the new election is difficult they could temporarily re-appoint the board members who stepped down (the board is allowed to do that, the seats of ad-hoc appointed board members are automatically up for election at the next general meeting).

But, of course, without any substantial change in communication of the OSMF board with the membership just re-doing the election is nearly pointless. A fundamental restart of the social contract of the OSMF as an organization with its formal membership would be necessary.

My recommendation to those OSMF members who are dissatisfied with this year’s election and how the OSMF board handled it and who care about the OSMF strategically pursuing the interests of the OSM community at large and supporting its values instead of serving goals informally negotiated within a small inner circle of the organization: Cast an empty ballot in this year’s election as a vote of non-confidence to the board as a whole. This won’t have any practical effect on the election results (and neither will any other voting decision). But it will be a clear statement visible in public.