I agree but please read this post which better explains my assertive approach for this topic.
All three of us posted to the issue more or less simultaneously I think. At the time I didn’t even realise the person that opened it was the same person that had started this thread - rather I thought it was just some helpful person trying to point this out but I was so shocked by the insanely large number that I expressed some bafflement.
In any case there was no point having the debate in two places so closing it in favour of this discussion would still be the right thing to do as this is the more public form so given the seriousness of the accusation being levelled it needs to be responded to here where the larger audience will see the response.
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A quick close-down of a discussion was quite offending to me. This indicated an unwillingness of continuing of an open discussion from your side.
At the point of closing the issue, you were the only person who responded, I did not even @ you.
I think this is false, you responded “Where on earth did you get that idea exactly?” which quite clearly indicates the opposite.
I agree, but a closed issue may indicate to some people a resolved matter. And none of the @ people responded. I really felt a lack of respect from you in that moment. Would it hurt if the discussion was open for at least an hour?
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I see no seriousness of the accusation here, just a request for transparency. Instead of being dismissed, you would simply have to say please tell us all open questions and we will create an official answer. The argument that we work on a voluntary basis is an excuse that is often heard, OpenStreetMap has long been too important for this, and should have a budget that no longer requires pure volunteer work. The sums mentioned are absolutely ridiculous given the importance of OpenStreetMap, and should include a much higher amount for paid staff.
No, I believe it is clear to many that this was far more than “just a request.” It was, a “coming out swinging,” very “hot,” VERY “serious” accusation that “spending €25,000 on Amazon” is something that must be answered as to “Why?” (with angry “fists pounding on the table” as this was done) — and right now, while the correct answerer is doing his best to say “I can do so on Wednesday after my well-deserved vacation.” Be a reasonable human, please. The truth is that there is no such amount of spending going on (as a quick, short version to “plug the initial hole of inquisition”), this is perfectly reasonable.
“If wishes were horses then beggars would ride.”
Do you (or does the OP) have some constructive way or method ahead to provide the funds for such payments / salaries? We are listening…
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Thank you for not forgetting about me but what exactly do I have to do with this topic? You made it sound like I am somehow connected with that statement.
I’ve read it, and my many posts in response are reminders that excuses are not shields from criticism - expect people to respond to you based on your behavior, not your excuses for your behavior. If many members of a community I cared about were telling me that they didn’t like how I was talking to them, I’d want to take that pretty seriously.
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I couldn’t agree more. I could have approached the thread with more respect, but a crucial aspect was also to critique the excessive use of AWS in terms of finances. I wanted to express my frustration because I firmly believe that there’s no room for such things within OSM. While many individuals raised concerns about my assertive tone, as more information came to light, I found it increasingly difficult not to be astounded by the contradictory statements issued by the OWG. Initially, when I began the thread, I wasn’t fully aware of the extent of this issue. I always assumed that OSM was an organization driven by transparency. I hope you can empathize with my feelings when it turned out to be otherwise.
Additionally, I couldn’t resist addressing attempts to downplay the situation. I view this as a serious matter. I felt compelled to maintain an assertive stance, especially considering multiple instances where the conversation was being redirected, whether intentionally or not. It was crucial for me to keep the discussion focused on this single topic.
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We have a volunteer board of directors, volunteer working groups, and a (tiny) paid staff for a reason: to competently run the organization and its core services.
This dumpster fire of a thread has managed to do nothing more than waste all of those peoples’ time responding to breathless conspiracy theories by a community member that lacked the understanding of how the organization operates – and quite rudely at that – rather than adding value to OSM.
So please, in the future, if something “seems insane to you”, your next thought ought to be “so therefore I must not understand it properly because there’s a bunch of really smart people in charge.”
If you wish to be more involved in the decision-making or direction of the organization, run for a seat on the foundation or a local chapter board, volunteer for a working group, or create something of value to the greater OSM community. As I’ve noted in other threads – your participation is not required.
The manner in which you’ve chosen to interact with the well-respected community members on this thread is so utterly unreasonable that I doubt most community members would want to engage with you. I would suggest that you avoid picking fights like this if you wish to have your ideas heard and respected.
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Okay, 25,000€ in S3, what do I know.
I do believe that making OSM operations transparent is crucial. I don’t consider it a waste of time, and I apologize if you do. I’ve expressed my concerns about certain issues that, in my opinion, are very critical.
I called having 86TB in Fastly logs insane, as I believe it’s an accurate description. Fortunately, this situation no longer persists. However, I urge you to consider the surrounding context. I mentioned this as an example of what might be happening with S3, as this information seems to be not publicized.
This is the only occasion where I’ve characterized something as insane. And in my view, it’s difficult to dispute this assessment. To put it in perspective, 86TB is roughly equivalent to ~666 times the size of a 129GB OSM Planet file. That’s an immense amount of storage space devoted to log files from a CDN alone, which, at the end of the day, are just fancy text files.
Please don’t hesitate to present counterarguments if you disagree with the characterization of this situation as insane. I am open to engaging in a discussion about it. And please, don’t focus on out-of-context statements alone, please consider the complete picture.
Again, I don’t want to focus too much on the matter of 86TB log files. I brought it up once more primarily because you disagreed with my characterization of it. If you have any objections, I kindly ask you to share your reasoning.
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I hope everybody has cooled off a bit overnight 
It is a truism that people will get upset over financials, sometimes over sums that in the grand scheme of things are small. The OSMF is proud that it is a cost-efficient and frugal organisation, and that makes accusations of throwing money out of the window bite a lot harder than it would for other comparable orgs. But definitely the time to provide input on the budget be it policy (“no AWS”) or financial (“that can be done far cheaper”) is during the budget process, and I respectfully suggest if there are questions later in the year they should be directed to the treasurer (in a friendly non-accusatory manner).
We do have a bit of a financial reporting / control weakness in that currently we are are only producing annual financials. On and off there have been attempts to do this for each quarter however these have always fizzled out after a while, mainly because they are a lot of work, nobody ever looked at them and the relevant sums were small in any case. But the reason to produce them is exactly for situations like this thread, where it would be helpful to have a current comparison of financial performance vs. budget that could be pointed to when questions arise. I would consider it a good idea, particularly given that the budget has grown substantially over the last couple of years, that the OSMF would (re-)commit to producing quarterly financials again.
PS: how to account for Amazon credits and the spending of them is an interesting question, just as accounting policy wrt other in kind donations (for example Fastly). How we do this depends very much on local legal requirements, but I would suggest not to claim that there is no cost associated with any specific line item if it isn’t actually a free service.
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I would honestly recommend that people stop feeding the troll. Discourse has a great “ignore” function.
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May I ask active volunteers why they think that essential functions of OpenStreetMap should work on a voluntary basis, if at the same time the functionality of OpenStreetMap has to be significantly restricted to avoid overloading by end users. These limitations only drive a divide between contributors and users, and users are then left to rely on commercial users of OpenStreetMap data. As a result, end users of OpenStreetMap data often do not recognize the origin of the data, and a break occurs because corrections then do not flow into OpenStreetMap.
In practice, I see that many entrepreneurs, for example, update their business data very quickly in Google Maps, but do not even think of maintaining it in OpenStreetMap.
Also my question, how the influence of commercial OpenStreetMap data users on the management of OpenStreetMap is to be assessed, and how willing they are to grant OpenStreetMap more core functionality.
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I think the core idea is to treat everyone equally, meaning, almost nobody gets paid for doing anything. This of course, has its ups and downs. I think this topic would require a broader discussion, outside the scope of this thread. Let’s focus here just on the AWS and transparency issues.
I recognize here the diligent attempt to get the appearance of pure voluntary work, probably to keep actual total costs apolitical. Proper financial management makes political influence visible. The trumpeting that everything is voluntary work is supposed to keep the political influence of commercial data users opaque.
One could argue that offering work for free is a way to evade certain responsibilities. When people receive something at no cost, they often have lower/no expectations. However, when they know it’s a premium or paid product, their expectations naturally rise. But let’s not deviate from the original thread too much. You can always start a new one to discuss other topics.
So the title of this topic should really be 'why does OSMF reserve 25,000 on Amazon services?
(JIC the emergency occurs needing their services). When not used almost a gain that can be carried over to the next year, so the donations/new funding needs the next year are minus 25,000.
There’s is some confusion thrown around but this 25,000 has as I read it not made it to the P&L statement, is merely a reserve item on the BS / an item on the ‘Business Forecast’ (if one can call it that), only a projection of possible cost to operate.
To my understanding, the free AWS service are a relatively new thing. So just last year this has been a real, actual spending. Originally I found no information about the free AWS service, as all publicly available information indicates that this is still in ‘planned’ status. It’s hard to resonate on the budget when the exact terms are unknown. We can all just speculate at the moment.
I just wish OWG was more transparent about their S3 operations. Take example from https://hardware.openstreetmap.org/. Right now the public does not know what’s exactly being stored on the S3, nor what are the terms of the free AWS sponsorship.
Yes - there’s not a great way to handle the accounting. Using the two examples you gave, we can see the problems.
If we didn’t have Fastly sponsorship, we’d have to pay a CDN. At our volumes, we’d never pay the listed commercial rates, but we don’t know what price we’d get actually doing the negotiations, which we wouldn’t do unless we had to switch. We’d also probably change our usage policies, so we’d have different traffic levels. At this point, we put the risk in the budget request with a maximum cost.
The AWS render server is different. It’s important for capacity right now, but if we lost the credits, we’d go with a cheaper option than EC2. We also have a very low risk of losing credits compared to donated servers, since once the credits are in our account they’re good until they expire at a known date. If we put a cash value on the risk, it would be the capex cost of replacing it, not the dollar value of AWS credits it uses. We didn’t call this risk out in the budget, because it is minor compared to other risks, and substantially less than other donated servers.
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