Dear fititnt, I want to respond to your posts here as I am the head of the community team (where Carla works at HOT). I have been a paid employee of HOT for two years and prior to that have been a board member and a voting member of the same.
I believe that Carla has now clarified her post from March of this year, so hopefully you have a better understanding of her intent.
As woodpeck says HOT staff used their working time to support the setting up of the forum as a contribution to the OSM ecosystem and infrastructure and we are, of course, keen to use the forum but definitely do not want to own it (or be perceived as owning it). If anyone wants more information on how much time was donated and to what aspects of the forum set up, my colleague Ruben (who has been the person most involved) would be happy to provide that information in a separate thread.
I’d also like to clarify that Carla isn’t ‘literally a paid spokesperson’ for HOT. Her role is community services associate and she works on the development of projects and initiatives that support community mapping for humanitarian and development purposes.
On the call for corrected narratives from the OSM Philippines community, I think this was a situation where HOT (and partners) received open, serious, rigorous critique from an OSM community and responded through dialogue and action. The situation that led to the OSM Philippines publishing their call was not something HOT is proud of, but I’d also say it is something that we have learnt from and we still work closely (and hopefully more effectively) with many community groups in the Philippines.
On the work of the Open Mapping Hub in Latin America, I’m not sure I totally understand in what way the team is presenting itself as a replacement for the OSMF… Their aim is again to support communities and partners to leverage the power of open mapping and OSM to support better humanitarian / development outcomes for local people, which I think is quite distinct from that of the OSMF. They have been quite active in communicating their activities and intentions and engage regularly with the OSM community in Latam through community channels. You can find more info on all of the regional Open Mapping Hubs that HOT supports, here.
On the trademark issue (also responding to dieterdreist’s point above), the thread you linked to from OSM-talk was an open discussion and one of the outcomes of it was that HOT edited its OSM wiki page to draw a clearer distinction between what HOT is and what OpenStreetMap is. We also made a commitment to do the same on our new website (due to launch in the next couple of months) to remedy the confusing footer that we currently have and this commitment still stands.