I already explained that I don’t see my wrongdoing here. I ask you, an external person, to guide me. There is so much text that I, really, don’t know where to start searching. I already know the general guidelines and what sort of discussions may violate them.
You are, once again, misunderstanding what the difference between a budget and actual spend is. We budgeted 24000 EUR, based on the data in the github issue you linked. As called out in the github issue, we knew past expenses would be a poor predictor of future costs and we had insufficient data to come up with a good estimate of AWS costs and called out that the budgeted cost was from the high side of possible costs.
We can’t publish an actual spend for all 2023 until 2023 is over. Our year-to-date AWS spend is 0, because it is covered by credits. We have additional work to reduce the log-related pre-credit costs, but given the limitations of volunteer time, I haven’t prioritized it. A large part of the reason I haven’t prioritized it is we currently have no AWS costs.
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So if you receive 25,000 EUR from OSMF for AWS, and you don’t spend it on AWS, where does it go? 25,000 EUR is quite a substantial amount of money (it’s 1/4th of your total low-budget). This part is not really transparent to me.
Please try a little harder to imagine how others might be viewing your posts.
For example, one of the sections in the guidelines say “Always be Civil” and “Respect each other”. Your post makes assumptions that aren’t respectful of the people that participate in this community. Another way of saying this is “assume good intentions”. You should assume that the people running this project know what they’re doing and have a good understanding of the budget for the project. Instead of making accusations of inappropriate use of funds, maybe you should gather more information and gain a deeper understanding of what’s going on first, then see if there’s opportunities where you can volunteer and help make it better.
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AWS credits expire after 1 year. Any unused credits are lost.
Okay! Thank you. I agree that my posts were quite assertive, but I hold a strong personal dislike for big tech and Amazon in general. I’ve always thought of OSM as a bulwark in the fight against them—an independent organization. Today, this realization has been ruined, and considering yesterday’s issue with the huge non-closable donation banner on OSM, this has been a bit overwhelming for me. I will need to reconsider how much involvement OSM should have in shaping my future self.
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Sorry, but I don’t understand how this answers the quoted (by you) post:
You do not receive 25k, it is allocated from the total budget. Before it is ever spent. Ok now one year later, we might have spent 20k on AWS than there is an expense of 20k on the left side of the balance sheet.
The reason it is called a balance sheet is because the expense and the income need to be equal. So, we write 20k in AWS credits on the right.
I recommend you read a bit about accounting than it might make a bit more sense.
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AWS has the concept of “Credits”, which is a dollar value balance that they can apply to your AWS account through a coupon code. It has no cash value (you can’t take a $25,000 AWS coupon to the bank and get it as $25,000 USD). When you claim an AWS credit code, any cost that your AWS account incurs is deducted from that credit balance and you don’t have to pay. It’s like a gift card that you can only spend at AWS.
These credits expire one year after they are issued.
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Firstly, to say I don’t like amazon, google and other big corporations and I find OSMF transparency as very important! But guy is on well-earned vacation, please let him rest until he’s back.
If I may, the first point of Etiquette/Etiquette Guidelines - OpenStreetMap Wiki says “Act in good faith”, which you are failing to do. You should start by assuming you don’t know the whole story and that your assumptions which make you think (paraphrasing) “OSM is wasting my money left and right” are most probably wrong.
Also, it seems you are upset. That is very bad time to be engaging in communication. I’d suggest to take a time to read WP:No Angry Mastodons (not a WP policy, and OSM is not related to WP, but it is a useful and easy to read article anyway) has nice explanation and instructions why you should not reply when angry and how to handle such situations. Human higher brain functions simply don’t work good when we’re angry.
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May I respectfully suggest that you spend a bit of time reading up about how commercial budgets work?
If I have “a budget for X” at $dayjob, it doesn’t mean that I get a suitcase of used notes to the appropriate value - it means that the possibility of me needing to spend X during that period is understood.
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Thank you it makes sense. I think some extra transparency by OWG would not hurt. I was not able to find any information about an ongoing free AWS credit system so it caught my eye. Also, this free AWS has never been considered a risk which (I believe) is an oversight: Spending plan for 2023.
I completely agree with that. I never expected to receive an answer today.
Yes, but considering the factual spending screenshot provided here: Estimate cloud costs for 2023 · Issue #788 · openstreetmap/operations · GitHub, it appeared to be genuine expenditure. I couldn’t find any information suggesting that these were ‘free’ spendings. When combined with the 2022 and 2023 budget plans, I believe you can understand where the incorrect assumption stemmed from.
As the conversation progressed, it’s now (clear? - see conflicting information) that AWS is not an ongoing expense. However, it’s intriguing how the OWG never publicly disclosed this fact.
My primary concern is ensuring that funds are allocated correctly. I believe that the lack of transparency from the OWG remains the core issue. On one occasion, they state AWS is free; on other occasions, they indicate it’s not free but will be. The myriad of conflicting statements sets off my internal alarms.
The situation was further exaggerated by @TomH, who swiftly closed the GitHub issue merely 12 minutes after it was opened. I believe this matter shouldn’t be treated lightly; transparency is of utmost importance here. Unfortunately, some individuals (intentionally? I hope not!) fail to see the significance of this issue.
The situation was further exaggerated by @TomH, who swiftly closed the GitHub issue merely 12 minutes after it was opened. I believe this matter shouldn’t be treated lightly; transparency is of utmost importance here. Unfortunately, some individuals (intentionally? I hope not!) fail to see the significance of this issue.
Hey there, respectfully, I suggest you walk away from this discussion for a few days. Come back when you’ve had time to think about it and engage while assuming that everyone is acting in good faith and that your own knowledge deficit on the subject isn’t just because someone has failed to publish some information.
I know you’re here because you care about this project. Please make that same assumption about everyone else. Without that, important discussions like this, especially in large, distributed, volunteer-driven teams, are nearly impossible. I really think the discussion will be easier after taking a break.
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I would recommend you stop replying so quickly and frequently. You’ve now written about 30 posts within the last 4 hours. And I see you start typing replies in a matter of minutes or even seconds.
I suspect one of the easiest steps to improve this conversation would be to wait at least a few hours between reading a post and responding to it. This allows more substantial information to come in, gives you time to digest it, and lets everyone’s emotions calm down.
In this particular case, it would also have been nice to give the guy on vacation the time for a proper reply. I know you said you’re not expecting an answer today, but if you’re going to send a few dozen critical posts and make damaging accusations in the meantime, you’re still creating pressure to respond instantly.
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Sorry but I avoid making any assumptions about people. The only way someone can guarantee something is by being transparent about it.
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I understand you’re trying to defend yourself, but you didn’t respond to my suggestion, and we can see that what you said is false from just reading this thread. You’ve made numerous assumptions about people here, including in the post I quoted - but you’re assuming bad faith actions.
Again, I recommend walking away for a few days. You are harming your own relationship with this community right now. You can achieve your goal of transparency without doing that.
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Potential donors should find maximum transparency in OpenStreetMap. Financial questions should therefore be treated with great respect, which does not seem to be the case here. This is disturbing.
NorthCrab appreciates your effort to bring light, trust and security to this project is extremely important to OpenStreetMap.
Volunteer work is to be welcomed, but if OpenStreetMap has to pay for this with a lack of transparency, this should be rejected.
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Sorry, I meant something else, I don’t assume something is safe/positive until proven otherwise. And transparency is the easiest way of proving something. The same logic can be applied to software. You don’t assume that some piece of software is safe until proven otherwise.
Transparency within the OSM community holds the utmost importance for me. If I didn’t value transparency, I could simply use GMaps or something similar. I would never have become a part of this community if it lacked transparency.