[OSGeo-Discuss] OSGeo is becoming irrelevant. Here's why. Let's fix it.

Fri Sep 25 15:12:49 PDT 2015

Being a "don't talk, act" member since 2008, entrepreneur and former
chairman of a couple of local initiatives, I strongly agree.

Seeing all the "empty talkers" from my country run for charter membership
and still not having geoserver, which is the most mature open geospatial
product I can think of pas incubation made me completely lose interest in
OSGeo.

I am disappointed, a little frustrated and plotting a business course that
values open source and open knowledge. OSGeo or any in-crowd will have no
part in my future.

Thank you for your honest and to the point analyses.

Milo
On Sep 25, 2015 21:58, "Darrell Fuhriman" <darrell at garnix.org> wrote:

> The recent discussion on the board list
> <https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/board/2015-September/013172.html> that
> came out of the question of the 2014 videos has got me thinking about a few
> things again, and I want to try to get them out there.
>
> Grab a mug of your favorite liquid and hunker down, because I put some
> time and effort into this, and your own well considered reply is
> appreciated.
>
> Keep in mind that all of these comments are coming from my personal
> perspective, which, like everyone’s, is an incomplete picture of the whole.
> Much of what I’m going to say has been rolling around my head for a while,
> so I’m just going to put it out there.
> I will start with a provocative thesis:
>
> OSGeo lacks visionary unified leadership and without it will become
> irrelevant.
>
> Of course, making such a claim requires support. So let me break down the
> statement.
>
> “Visionary leadership” is really two things, “vision” and “leadership.” I
> will address each in turn.
> OSGeo lacks vision
> I looked at the list of “Goals” for OSGeo
> <http://www.osgeo.org/content/foundation/about.html>. I wonder: when was
> the last time these goals were evaluated for both success and relevancy?
>
> Here is my own opinion of success of some of  these goals. (In the
> interest of brevity, I haven’t tried to tackle everything. That’s left as
> an exercise to the reader.)
>
> Example 1
> To provide resources for foundation projects - eg. infrastructure,
> funding, legal.
>
> Allow me to break each of those examples down.
> Infrastructure
> It’s true that OSGeo provides some infrastructure, such as Trac instance,
> Mailman, SVN repos. If the budget is to be believed, we pay some $3,500/yr
> to OSUOSL for said infrastructure. I wonder if such a service is necessary,
> however. Issue tracking and source control are much better provided by
> Github, which is free for organization such as ours.
> I say this because a) that’s money that could be better spent elsewhere
> and b) supporting these services burns precious volunteer time (more on
> that below).
>
> There are clear cost savings available, which are not taken advantage of.
> For example, OSGeo could be hosting FOSS4G infrastructure: conference
> websites and registration, a central location for conference videos
> (regardless of platform/provider). This neglect is especially galling given
> that FOSS4G is OSGeo’s sole source of income.
> Funding
>
> OSGeo does not fund projects. It has provided some funds to pay for Code
> Sprints — $15k in 2014 according to the budget
> <http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OSGeo_Budget_2014>.
> Legal
>
> I see nothing that has been done on this front recently. Please feel free
> to correct me.
> Conclusion
>
> OSGeo, where it actually does what it claims, has not adapted in ways that
> could save money.
>
> My grade: D
> Example 2
> To promote freely available geodata - free software is useless without
> data.
>
> The geodata working group is dead. As near as I can tell by perusing the
> mailing list archives, and the wiki, there has been no meaningful activity
> in the past two years (maybe more).
>
> My grade: F
> Example 3
> To promote the use of open source software in the geospatial industry (not
> just foundation software) - eg. PR, training, outreach.
>
> The Board of Directors
> <http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Board_of_Directors#Packaging_and_Marketing>
> page says:
> Packaging and Marketing
>
> OSGeo’s marketing effort has primarily been focused around the packaging
> and documentation efforts of OSGeo-Live, and to a lesser extend[sic],
> osgeo4w. […] It has been entirely driven by volunteer labour, with 140
> OSGeo-Live volunteers, and printing costs have been covered by local events
> or sponsors. In the last couple of years, OSGeo has covered local chapter
> expenses required to purchase non-consumable items for conference booths
> (such as a retractable banner). In moving forward, OSGeo hope to extend
> marketing reach by providing co-contributions toward printing costs of
> consumable items at conferences, such as toward OSGeo-Live DVDs.
> Local Chapters
> Much of OSGeo’s marketing initiates are applied at the local level. In
> many cases, this is best supported through as little as an email list and
> wiki page. OSGeo also supports local chapters by offering to pay for an
> Exhibition starter pack for local chapters. Local chapters are also usually
> the coordinators of conferences and related events, as mentioned above.
>
> Exhibition starter packs almost never happen; OSGeo-Live explicitly gets
> no support; and OSGeo struggles to staff a booth at its own conference to
> say nothing of any other conferences.
>
> Note: Local chapters certainly do do marketing and outreach, but these
> efforts are essentially unsupported by the OSGeo Foundation. In fact, this
> goal and the Board of Directors webpage seem to be explicitly
> contradictory.
>
> My grade: F.
> Commentary
> I could go on with my own personal evaluations, but I’m not sure that’s
> necessary. The only place I see that OSGeo has unquestionably succeeded in
> the past few years is the final goal, “To award the Sol Katz award for
> service to the OSGeo community”.
>
> So, what’s my point here? It’s simple: there is no longer a coherent
> vision for what OSGeo should be. I’ll return to that below, but let me
> continue with my other point.
>
> OSGeo lacks leadership
> Again quoting the Board of Directors’ page:
>
> The board’s primary responsibility is to efficiently and effectively make
> strategic decisions related to the running of OSGeo.
>
> I won’t bore you with the details, but a perusal of the board meeting
> minutes would indicate that strategy is rarely, if ever, a part of the
> meetings.
>
> The emphasis on consensus-based decision making often leads to no
> decisions being made. I can’t count the number of discussions that have
> come up on the board list only to devolve into a morass of nit-picking and
> eventual lack of action when everyone tires of the discussion. What action
> that is taken is often to “delegate” to a (possibly inactive)
> sub-committee, then never follow up.
>
> Instead what we have is a great deal of inertia, little interest in
> changing things, and no clear indication of what the Board’s priorities are.
>
> If priorities do exist, they’re lost in a maze of confusing, incomplete
> and often contradictory information on the wiki. (Wikis — like abandonware
> for documentation.)
> On pending irrelevancy
> I encourage you to ask some random people in the open source geospatial
> community what OSGeo means to them. I would make a bet that the most common
> answer is a blank stare.
>
> I would ask the board members to come up with three things, other than
> FOSS4G, where the OSGeo membership has shown its importance to the
> community as a whole in the last two years. Something where people say,
> “Did you hear about [exciting thing] OSGeo is doing on X?” To be clear, I
> don’t mean just things that OSGeo has a finger in, but things that need
> OSGeo. If OSGeo disappeared tomorrow, would any of these projects be
> significantly affected?
>
> I don’t think it can be done. The OSGeo Foundation is sliding into
> irrelevancy — and it may already be there.
>
> If anything should be seen as strategic for OSGeo, it’s FOSS4G, the
> foundation’s primary (sole?) source of income. Even regarding its flagship
> public event, the board is largely absent. Rather than provide adequate
> resources and planning, they instead rely on burning out volunteers, then
> make post-hoc demands on the way they should have done it, provide no
> future support for organizers to heed those demands, rarely follow up, then
> go on to repeat the same mistakes the following year.  Honestly, it’s
> surprising that FOSS4G has failed only once. (I think this is a reflection
> of the demand for the conference, not the blazing competence of OSGeo.)
>
> Michael Gerlek brought this up
> <https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/discuss/2015-July/014521.html> on the
> osgeo-discuss list in July, and probably has a more generous spin on it. He
> essentially argues that it’s time to declare mission accomplished and shut
> down or rebooted. I agree with his points, and I’m arguing that OSGeo can
> have something to offer, but it will require a major re-think of its
> mission.
>
> Fixing things
> I hinted at this in my recent questions to the board candidates, but I
> want to be explicit here: OSGeo needs to evolve or die.
>
> Here’s how I would do it:
>
>
>    1.
>
>    The board needs to evaluate all of its goals, as defined on the About
>    page, to decide if they are still truly goals. Define any new goals.
>    2.
>
>    Ask the question: “What does it mean to succeed at this goal?”
>
> If the goal is vague, or ongoing, give a timeline: “What does success look
> like for this goal one year from now?”
>
>
>    1.
>
>    Create measureable objectives for achieving those goals. Ask the
>    question, “How will we know if we’ve succeeded?”
>    2.
>
>    Prioritize the goals.
>    3.
>
>    Allocate resources to the goals.
>
> Obviously this is a tricky one, but I think we can look at this a balance
> between Importance and Effort.
>
>
> Spend money to reduce to the effort required, more money if the goal is
> more important — this might be the hardest cultural shift. Volunteer time
> is precious and easily discouraged. Make sure that you make it as efficient
> as possible by spending money when you can.
>
>
> For example, many of the infrastructure services OSGeo provides can be
> easily outsourced to more featureful services that are more responsive and
> rely less on volunteer labor.
>
>
>    1.
>
>    Close the loop on tasks. When a task is delegated to a committee or
>    individual, track its progress, both to know that it is or isn’t happening,
>    and to be able to acknowledge and incorporate the work when it’s done.
>    Failing to acknowledge people’s labor or to use the results of that labor
>    will virtually guarantee that the volunteer does not continue to help.
>    2.
>
>    Evaluate success and failure.  GOTO 1.
>
> Aside: none if this will happen without a strong executive. Whether that
> position is paid or not is up to the board, but it’s clear that there needs
> to be someone who can make decisions without endless rounds of fruitless
> discussions. The board as currently constituted is not dysfunctional, but
> it is mostly afunctional.
>
> I’m will go so far as to suggest this: Fly every board member who is
> available to a two or three day retreat. Get everyone in the same room, a
> professional facilitator to speed the process, then figure out what OSGeo
> is going to be and how to get there. Don’t fret excessively about the
> expense — this isn’t about saving money, it’s about saving OSGeo.
>
> If you ask me, irrelevancy is a fate worse than death. Be bold! It’s
> better to try to do something big and new then fail than to simply fade
> away and be forgotten.
> Though my comments above may sound harsh, they are sent with the very best
> of intentions. I want OSGeo to succeed, but OSGeo is never going to succeed
> if it doesn’t know what it’s try to succeed at. Without real reform, I
> don’t see success happening, just irrelevance. Here’s hoping this gets the
> ball rolling.
>
> Darrell
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Discuss mailing list
> Discuss at lists.osgeo.org
> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>
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