[tetris11]

I'm just hoping it doesn't turn into the Wikimedia Foundation, yearly begging for substantial funds whilst its many thousands of diligent contributors continue to work under the impression that they're doing a public good, but instead are enriching someone else's product

[mtmail]

Wikimedia has about 350 employees. OpenStreetMap foundation afaik 2: one remote office admin and one system administrator. No offices. It’s very lean budget wise.

[matkoniecz]

If anyone is interested in general budget see https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Board/Minutes/2023-02/Bu...

For paid staff see https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Contractors_and_employee... (note that for example accountant is not contracted full-time)

(and yes, donations are welcome! See https://donate.openstreetmap.org/ if you want to help)

disclaimer: I am an unpaid volunteer on OSMF board

[stereo]

Hi, I'm the OpenStreetMap Foundation chairperson. We have one employee (our site reliability engineer), one external admin assistant, one external developer for the iD editor, and one external bookkeeper. We do indeed run very lean, thanks to our amazing volunteer community.

[Helmut10001]

Here it says 8 [1]. Still very interesting, I did not know!

[1]: https://www.datanyze.com/companies/openstreetmap/353811364

[stereo]

Hi from the OpenStreetMap Foundation chairperson. We have one employee (our site reliability engineer), one external admin assistant, one external developer for the iD editor, and one external bookkeeper. The "8" on that site probably counts the board of directors, who are seven volunteers.

[mtmail]

Yes, 8 might be correct. https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/w/images/3/3c/FY2021_Full_acc... "The average number of employees during the year was 7 (2020 - 7)"

I doubt the 12.4 million revenue. The 2021 financial report listed turnover of £350,000 with surplus of £160,000 and £740,000 in reserves.

[stareatgoats]

One can't do public good without enriching someone else, it comes with the territory. It's ok.

[dandellion]

Maybe one would prefer to enrich those with limited resources like students and low-income people, without economically enriching a bunch of elites encroaching some non-profit organizations.

[kaba0]

This also comes up regularly and I believe it is completely mistaken: wikipedia does ask for more funds than necessary, which is actually a sane tactic when you can never know what will happen a year later and when you don’t have any other kind of income.

Also, how is it not public good, and how does it enriches someone else’s product? I’m fairly sure the world’d biggest encyclopedia that is freely available to anyone on the Earth can be considered a public good, can’t it?

[james_in_the_uk]

Wikimedia is mostly Creative Commons licensed. Not sure that "enriching someone else's product" is entirely fair?

[NoboruWataya]

The two are not mutually exclusive. It's not like corporations are paying the Wikimedia Foundation to deprive others of your contributions. And you are also benefiting from the fruit of corporate donations.

[Borg3]

Now worries. OSM have open data. Just mirror PBF files. Once something bad happen to OSM itself, you can easly respawn new instance. All building blocks are open source.

[Aachen]

That was also the first thing that came to my mind, but then I realised the same goes for Wikimedia

The power is in the brand/execution, not the code/idea

Either way, I'm glad that it's both open data and open code (Wikipedia: creative commons; OpenStreetMap: open database license; both: some open code license) so that we at least have options, should it be necessary, even if it's an uphill battle to divert attention from a spoiled brand

[matkoniecz]

Sadly, coordination problems are not so easy to solve.

"Just mirror PBF files." is easy, mirroring community is harder.

But, yes it reduces some risks. And enables for example https://www.opengeofiction.net/ and https://www.openhistoricalmap.org/ which use OSM stack for fantasy and historical mapping.

And OSM open data is used very widely.