Strategic working group/Plan 2012
OSM Strategic Working Group 2012 plan (draft)
Face to Face meeting
A face to face meeting of as many SWG participants as practical would be useful. Many participants may, in advance of the licence change, be in London already, so a face-to-face may be possible without much additional cost.
Foundation Articles of Association (AoA)
Henk has ownership of the review of the OSMF AoA, with the action to have them ready for a vote before 1st April 2012.
Question: are there any potential costs for a legal review?
Review Memorandum of Association
This needs to be reviewed by the SWG. [more detail required… Henk can fill us in?]
Question: are there any potential costs for a legal review?
Adopt a set of OSMF Core Values
This arises out of a suggestion by Dermot at the Seattle Board Face-to-Face meeting. In any organisation, a simple set of core values outside of any specific goals or metrics that may be set, can provide a useful point of focus for a potentially diverse team. In OSM we have encountered many areas of potential friction due to the different priorities of mappers, but we are all striving towards what we believe to be a common goal.
The exercise of articulating our common set of core values is intended to identify the key aspects of this common goal. Once consensus is achieved on what the core values are, future "ideological differences" can be more easily resolved by reference to the core values.
For clarity, at this time we hope to propose, as SWG, a set of core values that will be acceptable to OSMF members and that can be adopted as OSMF Core Values. However, our process is to define "Mapper" values rather than organisation values in the hope that the values we choose will be such that mappers in general will find that they are aligned with their own values.
Existing Draft of core values. Discussion of these draft values continues.
Adopt policy on "Mapping Services" for end-users
OSM intends to excel at providing map data and does not have a history of trying to provide rich slippy map APIs, geocoders or other map services to end-users. This often causes confusion to people new to the project, whose expectations of what an online map should do are based on complete solutions such as Google Maps. To date, we have, as a project, not prioritised richer end-user tools. It should be noted that core project infrastructure is already overloaded and that donated resources are intended to facilitate mappers, not end-users.
Board policy is that OSM should become the most used map - subjectively, there are many obstacles to would-be end users of our map data, so SWG should consider whether more needs to be done to encourage increased usage of OSM data. A first step has been taken with the Switch2OSM campaign. SWG must consider the options open to end users of OSM today and assess their sufficiency to help bring about the goal of OSM as most used map. Where gaps exist, SWG must determine a useful and practical course of action.
Complete review of community suggestions (may give rise to further plan items)
The SWG carried out a review of mailing lists, forums and other places where mappers discuss ideas, to assemble a list of any ideas with a strategic leaning. No value judgements were made in the original idea capture. The next step is to review all items for relevance and usefulness.