They don’t have to.
They only have to manage a rather small non-profit that operates a bit of IT infrastructure, handles OSM licensing, (doesn’t really happen now) point people that have questions to the right place in OSMspace and provide some infrastructure so that the OSM contributors can handle OSM.
Conflating doing that well with the unrelated question of OSM governance is what keeps on causing the backlash against any attempt to oil the squeaky wheels of the OSMF
Then we can’t complain about the lack of money, since we hate the guys who do have money and are potentially the only ones who would care about us (companies making tons of money using our data).
Why are we so afraid of becoming big? So we have the same discussions as of 2010, having the same problems as of 2010, and hoping for any different outcome, when we are basically doing the same stuff as we did in 2010 (your forum message talking about finances is from 2013).
I would love to have OSMF paying someone professional in fundraising/corporate-talking to help us. HOT, actually, is hiring someone like that right now. I suppose that 80k/year they are paying for that will translate in a much higher figure for their balance sheet.
I would more think in the realms of let us be big and strong enough as a grassroot that we do not have to schmooze some big corps while also accepting their contributions but being resilient enough to not be reliant on them to survive - and if you look at the last couple of years the percentage of overall funding of OSMF coming from a small circle of big ones is increasing steadily in a way that atm we cannot survive without e.g. MS spending big on some OSM(F) projects, etc. That is what I deem unhealthy.
I suspect our definitions of big and small differ, small is a couple of dozen of employees, more than enough for anything the OSMF should want to do. But I gave you the answer to the question here
I would love that too, but I’m not sure that’s working well for the past 20 years. And I’m not sure it will ever work in the future (we can’t compare ourselves with Wikimedia, our “products” and the value we create are very different).
For me, in current OSM perspective, that not small nor big, it’s huge. If we aim to just have 10 full-time paid employees, we would already need to do so many things differently.
I was just answering the question as to what “small” means for me, not prescribing any particular staffing level for the OSMF.
That said not everybody that fills a specific role in the OSMF needs to be either employed or elected. For example it could co-opt individuals to the board for specific tasks that it wants to delegate*. A hypothetical ED would for example would likely be an ex-officio board member, but there is nothing stopping the board from doing that for non-employed individuals too.
* currently the maximum size of the board is limited to 8, however that does not need an AoA revision to modify the value, just a simple majority at a GM. Naturally all these details are subject to change when the foundation moves, but even an optimistic (but not realistic) take on that would place that at earliest end of 2026.
Just a nit-picking note to the board: the OSMF has not had Annual General Meetings for a long time (more than a decade iirc) and the General Meetings should not be refered to as such.
Honestly I think we’re much farther along conceptually, and aligned with your take (though more diversified in fundraising strategy, note the Sovereign Tech Fund grant as one example). What’s missing isn’t the will or alignment on ideas.
Rather what’s missing is consistent execution. At the moment, that still needs to be driven by individual members in the OSMF Board. That does not mean they are the only ones doing things, but they are working with volunteers and staff to achieve something. Fingers crossed the new board now has feet to be even more productive.
A more general question wrt financial policy that I must have missed at
the end of last year: the 2025 budget document mentions that in
particular the expected donation income was adjusted to create an
essentially break even budget for tax reasons.
Out accountant and I sorted out that
There is a longer list of how to discriminate between Grants and Income
in British Tax Law, and I do not necessarily remember the details. The
practical consequence had been to treat a lump sum of 100.000 USD we got
bank transferred in 2024 as:
Those 40.000 USD raise the cash level but do not reduce the deficit.
This is to adhere to tax law, not to minimize due tax.
I’m happy to discuss this in full accuracy and in depth on and after 8
Oct when the crunch work of SotM, board election, and a couple of
personal non-OSM matters have sorted out. I’m sorry that I’m unable to
spend more resources before that day on that matter.
- donation drive: as was noted during the GM, one of the main reasons
for the deficit in 2024 was that there simply wasn’t any kind of
public donation drive (year end or other). In July 2025 the board
minutes indicate that this was discussed for this year, but there
doesn’t seem to have been any followup on the topic, including
reactivation of the with loud fanfare introduced finance committee
that seems to have gone completely dormant. Is the board actually
going to initiate a Q4 donation drive, or is this considered just as
unnecessary as in 2024?
Thank you for bringing up the question. I’m grateful Mikel has pointed
out that there is a risk of fatigue.
That said I (and most likely other board members as well) decided to
allocate available time rather towards activities like the STF, getting
vector tiles done, getting closer to a move to the EU.
Part of the assumption has been that there is neither a clear acceptance
to run a yearly fundraising campaign nor a clear consensus to where the
money should come from. Furthermore, the fees for corporate members have
been risen by 50 percent in 2024, and the changes are taking effect
still now. Corporate membership income makes for more than 50 percent of
the turnover.
This is not entirely under the control of the board as there might be
rebound effects by more corporate members either leaving (easy to spot),
ghosting (potential time sink for reminders), lowering concurrent
donations, raising concurrent donations (both visible only after the
fact), or not joining at all (essentially unknown).
To give this a productive twist, can you all please ask the question
from heart:
If there hypothetically were a GAFAM company coming along to promise a
million dollar a year over three years (not longer guaranteed) under the
condition to actually spent this in the same year for useful purposes.
Should the Foundation accept that? Or is it too much dependency?
What for five of seven GAFAM companies giving 200000 USD each? Too much
dependency or ok?
What for a million from a government or group of governments? If it is
the government of your personally most hated state?
What for a thousand small companies giving 1000 USD each? Is it OK? Who
is supposed to do the associated paperwork?
The idea is to balance the aspiration of independency from companies
with the agency to keep cyber threads in check and progress with
development like the deployment of vector tiles. This will inform whom
to ask for what.
- financials: it remains difficult, not to say impossible, to get even
a rough idea of what the current financial state of the OSMF is,
both in absolute terms and relative to the budget. Being able to
track financials at least roughly would seem to be even more
important as due to its structural deficit the OSMF has started to
eat in to its reserves in a major way.
Our financial tracking has evolved over the years, and I would like to
thank a couple of people for that, not limited to but including
Guillaume, Paul, Sarah, Harrison, Mikel, our account Michelle, and others.
In a first iteration, we have had a monthly presentation along the
board, but the fellow board members found the format confusing and
essentially nobody outside the board ever looked at the figures.
The next iteration has been the budgeting in advance for each fiscal
year for each working group. Paul has done this since years for the OWG,
and now this has been extended to all working groups. Unfortunately,
misunderstandings from the implications did eat a lot of the board trust
in a former board, so it is not free of friction as well. However, this
is now an established practice.
The financials committee has experimented with various prorating models,
but all have been unsatisfactory. Again, partly because no attempts to
collect feedback outside the committee have given useful results.
There is currently a partly-automated approach to prorate spending and
income by classifying and predicting each item separately. The results
are better, but still a good deal away from being perfect. This is not
yet approved by neither the old or new board. This model predicts a huge
deficit again for 2025 and informs the decision to run or not run a
fundraising campaign.
That is why I posted to that very old e-mail thread as it is IMHO the last time anything with regards to OSMF financing was discussed in the open.
Yes, there is these days likely no consensus on where the money should come from, but on the other hand the board has not engaged with the community to find agreement on such a solution either (I’ll spare you a rant on the board being MIA for a decade). If community support for that is so important for the board that would be kind of expected.
Leaving that aside, surely during the budgeting process there must have been some discussion of how to achieve the targeted level of income, if that included a drive for private donations then shouldn’t it be on the starting blocks right now?
Sorry to bump this up again, but it remains very difficult to determine what the board is actually planning to do this, already underway, fundraising season.
From the board minutes it would seem as if the plan is again to go with a hat in the hand to our corporate members. Not only has this historically not generated enough donations to provide for balanced financials, it would seem to be strategically very unwise to rely mainly on funds dominated by US interests. Even if we are not beholden to them, the look is just very bad and undermines our position in Europe and other regions.
Could a board member be so good and outline what the current plan is?