@NorthCrab,

You wrote,

However, one aspect still nudges at me: the choice of Amazon as the cloud service provider. With the wide selection of cloud service providers available, each with its own pricing models and philosophical underpinnings, why was Amazon — a corporation known for its controversial business practices — the chosen one? There are other providers like Backblaze and Hetzner, which, in my research, offer competitive, if not more affordable pricing, and do not have a reputation of commodifying its users to the extent Amazon does.

I believe others have answered that already in the forum, but will reiterate here. Amazon offered it for free. That’s a hard price point to beat. User Iandees explained it thus:

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.

Regarding your statement, “These series of events forced me to confront a bitter truth: OSM’s priorities seem to have shifted,” I suggest that you consult two sets of documents that articulate OSM’s priorities. They are relevant to your discussion in that they partially explain why reliance on cloud services was adopted by the OWG, and the degree to which this has been approved by the vast majority of the OSM community.

First, see the results of the 2021 OSM community survey, posted online at https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/2021_Survey_Results. An easily digested summary is in this PDF file: https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/w/images/2/27/2021_survey_slides.pdf but you are of course welcome to download and delve into the anonymized data as well.

Two highlights from the survey are relevant to your discussion of priorities:

“Just over 81 percent of respondents approved or strongly approved of the Board’s decision to begin raising funds via large donations. 4.3% disapproved or strongly disapproved. The raw mean differed from the weighted mean by 7/100ths of a point.”

Respondents were asked to vote on priorities (methodology is explained in the PDF). Stability of core infrastructure won handily, with 11,249 points. When we broke down responses by various categories, it remained by far the lead concern of the community: “Shifting to the community sentiment questions, the first asked for a sense of what priorities the Board should set for 2021. Stability of the core infrastructure was a clear winner across the three demographics we have checked so far, which are OSMF members, respondents with more than 15 years in the project, and mappers. No other issue comes close.”

The second item I recommend you read is the preamble to the Strategic Plan Outline published in 2021, found online at https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Strategic_Plan_Outline#Preamble. In particular, note these statements contained in the preamble:

“The project and its community seek not growth per se, but rather data quality, consisting of accurate and ever broader, deeper, and more detailed geographic coverage of its database, meanwhile ensuring that this database will remain free of charge and free to use, to allow anyone, anywhere, to create a ‘map of the world that anyone can use’. As a result of this philosophy, however, growth has found OpenStreetMap, and demand for its data now increases by no less than 20 to 30 percent year on year. This growth is straining the project’s volunteer workforce, its hardware and software platform, and it threatens the long-term viability of the project. Unlike most private companies, which seek growth and develop strategic plans to achieve it, OpenStreetMap is in the position of needing a strategy for coping with a growth rate it did not and does not intentionally encourage…”

“A limit on growth of expenditures on administration of the project is also core to OSM’s philosophy: we often hear the refrain that OSM should not become another opaque and inaccessible bureaucracy-heavy NGO, with large paid staff. Adherence to this core philosophy will ensure that OSM remains a free project, independent from influential donors. By empowering volunteers rather than staff, it will also remain a vibrant project that attracts enthusiastic contributors, because it will remain fun as well as useful – and we volunteer contributors, at the end of the day, are why OSM is today the success story that it is.”

@Øukasz Please see the calculations on a spreadsheet, the link to which is here: https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/2021_Survey_Results#Questions_and_answers

@RobJN, under the Slide Show tab, over to the right, click on ‘Always Use Subtitles’ and use the dropdown menu under ‘Subtitle Settings’ to pick languages and position of the subtitles. You have to have Power Point 365, I believe, for it to work.

The Board doesn’t maintain OSM Explorer. You’ll have to ask the maintainer. You can put in a pull request here: https://github.com/onkaraman/osm-explorer

Thanks for taking the survey! Yeah, links in the Junk folder are disabled by just about all email clients now.

@cquest I’ve added that link, thanks.

@gileri My OSMF email address is publicly available on the OSMF website, so individuals worried about something related to the survey may contact me privately without bashing me publicly in in my own diary. Bashing me publicly in my diary constitutes trolling, period. For clarity on this, please refer to the OSMF Etiquette page, which includes these points:

* Don't publicly call people out. Many issues can be resolved by gently contacting the other person.
* Communicate with the same respect you would utilize in person.

Regarding the comment regarding sharing the survey before activating it, in all my years of working in the social sciences (agricultural economics, political science, history) I have never once encountered a pre-release of a survey. In a review of scientific literature on survey sampling, I cannot find reference to such a practice, only to the practice of alerting a population that a survey will shortly be forthcoming (which I did via the talk list). In other words, pre-publishing the survey is not an accepted practice.