Results of the survey on membership prerequisites

Tordanik · 2022-11-21T15:52:36.210Z

668 members have completed the OSMF board’s survey on membership prerequisites. Thank you all for your time! These are the results:

Q01: Should an OSMF membership with voting rights require contributions to OSM?

Response	#	Percentage
Yes	499	74.70%
No	75	11.23%
N/A	94	14.07%

Q02: On how many days should a person contribute to OSM before they can become a voting OSM Foundation member?

Response	#	Percentage
0 (not displayed because previous answer was no)	75	11.23%
1 day (i.e. any contributions at all)	33	4.94%
7 days	49	7.34%
16 days	96	14.37%
21 days	110	16.47%
42 days	116	17.37%
3 months	108	16.17%
more	54	8.08%
N/A	27	4.04%

Q03: Would you like to share any other thoughts on the topic?

197 participants responded to this open-ended question. Among the responses, frequent topics include (in no particular order):

non-mapping contributions
ability to game the metric, vulnerability as a takeover protection mechanism
requests for different metrics or additional prerequisites (such as edit quality, recurring contributions, time since the first edit, counting only volunteer contributions)
impact on how inclusive and welcoming OSM appears and how well the interests of consumers are represented in the foundation
desire for some form of non-voting membership type for recurring donors
appreciation for the board’s initiative and support for the introduction of membership prerequisites

Discostu36 · 2022-11-21T21:53:18.882Z

Will the OSMF change the rules accordingly?

Tordanik · 2022-11-22T12:00:21.627Z

The topic is on the agenda of the board meeting this Friday. I hope there will be a decision during that meeting. Based on on the survey results, I plan to propose the adoption of a 21 day requirement. At that threshold, there’s a roughly equal split between members who would like the limit to be lower (37,88%) or higher (41,62%).

Note that the bottleneck in making this a reality is likely going to be implementation by the volunteers on the Membership Working Group. So if anyone reading this would like to help out, I’m sure they would welcome it.