The United Kingdom has passed a new law, the Online Safety Act 2023, on 26 October 2023. The law aims to control a number of problems encountered on the Internet of which the most serious is child sexual abuse material or child porn. In the process the Act has thrown a very wide net that has picked up a lot of other content deemed harmful to children. On the list are depictions of harm to images of animals - think of the Road Runner (beep-beep)and Wily Coyote and their experiences with clifftop plummets and ACME dynamite. The BANG! is Banned. If the Act was less broad, and stayed focused on the worst offences it may have been more acceptable and more implementable, but sadly it is very far from focused. The new Act applies to any internet service provider across the globe that serves users in the United Kingdom. The OpenStreetMap web services are squarely within its sights as the OSM Foundation is registered in the U.K. and we have a big U.K. user base. One does not think of OSM services as offering harm to children but we run foul of the act as we do run user-to-user communication services; the comments you can make on someone else's web contributions or your comments and chit-chat on the very many OSM community discussion services. In particular the OSM Discourse channels, IRC channels and our Mastodon instance are affected. It is always a possibility that someone may post harmful content in a chat group, so the Foundation will need to take steps to side-step the legislation or to comply with it. Note that our many email lists are not affected as emails are considered private communications. There seem to be two options. Compliance or avoidance. Of the two options, an avoidance side-step may be easier to implement. The most radical side-step is to stop serving UK users altogether. The messaging app Signal has suggested that approach. Taking that tack and IP blocking our UK users is probably over-reacting.

REGISTERING WITH THE DIGITAL PUBLIC GOODS ALLIANCE 30 March 2023 The OSM was approached by Bo Percival, who is now working for the Digital Public Goods Alliance. He recommended that the OSMF should join the registry of public goods maintained by that organisation. Public Goods First some economic vocabulary. The term Goods typically includes services. OSM is a service which is an information good. It is a good because it is clearly something of value which people can use. Information goods like OSM are considered non-rivalrous when their consumption by one person does not limit the availability or quality for others. In simple terms, nobody fights over access.

Introduction Communication has a purpose. It is worth spending a lot of time thinking about "Why are we communicating?". "Public relations is a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics” As a starting point, it in the interests of OSMF and the OSM movement to communicate with our various communities about our activities and to spread the news of their activities. By doing this OSMF will gain support in many ways from a broad range of actors and in addition community activities in the global OSM movement will also gain support as they are seen to be part of a huge movement with a good reputation. What is the benefit of Communication to us? As the quote above says, we will build mutually beneficial relationships. We will become attractive to work with. We will attract mappers, developers, sysops, skilled board members who want to be part of the cool organisation. We will attract funding. Smart people will want to help us be good. It will be a virtuous cycle of excellence breeds excellence. There are downsides being attractive: Self-interested people will want to take advantage of us. Resentful people will want to destroy us.