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

[Margherita Di Leo]

Hi,

On Sat, Sep 26, 2015 at 5:20 PM, Darrell Fuhriman <darrell at garnix.org>
wrote:
>
>
> All of those are great and wonderful things! The community does great and
> wonderful things. That’ s not my point.
>
> My point is, those activities would happen even if the OSGeo Foundation
> disappeared. I’m not questioning whether we have a large and vibrant
> community, we do. And we still would.
>
> My local chapter existed before it was an OSGeo chapter, and we would keep
> on having meetings and doing fun and exciting things even without the OSGeo
> Foundation.
>
> Put another way: The OSGeo Foundation needs the Open Source Geospatial
> community, but does the Open Source Geospatial community need the OSGeo
> Foundation? I don’t see that it does.
>
> A lot of food for thoughts here! I fully agree that the community would
survive without OSGeo, as well as local chapters. From my point of view
this is an important sign that the community is resilient, and the
horizontal structure of OSGeo fits well with it. But this does not imply
that OSGeo is an added value for the community, and I think an important
one. There are a number of activities that benefit from an umbrella
organization. One is the Google Summer of Code, just to cite an example
that I know. It would be possible as well for the single projects to
participate on their own, but this would mean organizational burden
multiplied for the number of the projects. Further, even the participation
of a large org like OSGeo is not given for granted, for example this year
an important org like Mozilla was not accepted [1]. Smaller projects might
have reduced possibility to take part. Other important examples include
initiatives like Geo4All, the education committee, the FOSS4Gs, etc.. I
don't even want to try to mention all of them.
I also think that there is (as always happens) room for improvement. But
remember that all the activities are carried out by volunteers.
I think that for example OSGeo could provide a sort of reimbursement for
the time spent by the volunteers working at the server infrastructure
behind the web site and the mailing lists, and could potentially think to
stipend other key figures. OSGeo could for example offer first legal advice
for the companies who decide to release their code under a free license.
Could even offer an infrastructure to gather and keep the money for the
various projects.. I am not well informed about the implication of the
bylaws and whether all this is possible or not. I think that all these (and
more) activities would give more sense to the umbrella role. But these are
not for free, therefore there should be a decision behind whether OSGeo
wants to invest in this direction.

Just my 2 eurocents
regards,
Margherita


[1]
http://blog.queze.net/post/2015/03/03/Mozilla-not-accepted-for-Google-Summer-of-Code-2015



-- 
Dr. Margherita DI LEO
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