# OSMF Board Communication
**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.

**Reputation**
Before we communicate, we must assess our reputation. Reputation is important to effective communication. It is worth thinking about "What is our reputation?"

The core of reputation is trust. If you are not trusted everything you say is flagged as possibly untrue and nothing you say is going to make much impression. Your communication will be useless. If you are trusted then communication becomes easier and much more effective in building those mutually beneficial relationships that you want.

**Fixing a Reputation**
Improving the reputation of an organisation is a slow process. Calling it a campaign is a good choice of words. Over a long period you have to issue a steady stream of good and bad news which is all sincere. All the news has to be grounded in truth. Slowly your several different audiences will come to realise that you are speaking truth and that OSMF is an honest, trustworthy organisation that acts in good faith. A positive image is a good basis to convey all the other information about good and bad things.

**For example, moving from Before to After**
A starting reputation, before communications, might look like this:

**Terrible World**
*OSMF is an ineffective organisation that really battles to attract human and financial resources and that just limps along with ever diminishing energy in a state of denial of its failures. It lacks the drive or courage to do important stuff like update and modernise its software, build up its Local Chapters, protect itself against predators, and fix a lot of technical problems like tagging systems, vector tiles and cellphone friendly design of the map on osm.org. It does nothing that could be described as cutting edge.*

And the finishing reputation, after first on fixing problems and then telling everyone that they are fixed, might look like this:

**Perfect World**
*OSMF is a slick, on-the-ball organisation, staffed by bright highly motivated and energetic people with incredible integrity and a strong commitment to ethical values. It strives and succeeds to be best-in-class with its hi-tech geographic data offerings, which are free to anybody. It works very closely with its global enthusiastic community of mappers and maintains very high standards of mapping and geo data collection.*

To get from the **Horrible World** to the **Perfect World** we need a hard-working **Strategic Plan** to fix all the underlying problems and a hard working **Communications Plan** so that the world knows that we have fixed stuff. There is a necessary sequence of actions - you assess with a community survey, you repair with the strategic plan and you communicate in 20 different ways. And then you start again with assessing.

**Targeting your Communication**
Thinking about what to communicate and who to communicate to is important. Communication needs to be targeted to the audience.

Each audience has different concerns and a different impression of OSMF. This is related to what the advertising people call market segmentation. A good PR consultant will understand each segment and will offer a different slant on the information when contacting each audience.

Study your audiences. Know what they worry about. Acknowledge to them that you hear what they are saying. Store their publicly stated concerns visibly in a public record and if appropriate create a project to deal with issues. Keep audiences informed about progress fixing stuff. If it's not yet fixed, admit that, apologise, and tell them all about what you’re doing.

A brief reminder: At all times be truthful. Our audiences are mostly pretty smart and they will quickly add “liar” and "distrust" to our reputation if they hear lies.

**What we want to do as fast as possible**
Strategy 1: Work closely with the Communications Working Group
Consult, share, inform, discuss, negotiate, listen. Align the thinking of the Board and the Comms WG. Delegate a lot of control of operations to the Comms WG, but stay within Comms Policy and the Comms Plan. Make sure the Comms WG is well informed and well resourced. Try to organise the Comms WG to work with the Board and perhaps some external resources to prepare the **Communications Plan** and supporting documents. Set some targets. Make sure a Board member or preferably two attend every single Comms WG meeting. Ask for regular feedback to the Board. Give regular feedback to the WG.

Strategy 2: Get excellent at Communications
Three important documents and a survey will greatly support OSMF communications:
1. The **Communications Policy** says what we should do, and the way we should do it, also what we should not do. It sets ethics, directions and limits.
2. The **Communications Handbook** is a somewhat thicker but easy to read guide that explains all about doing communications and public relations. Its purpose is mainly to support on-boarding - to to bring new Board Members and new Comms WG members up to speed, and to explain how to go about communications operations undertaken by OSMF.
3. The **Communications Plan** is a very detailed plan for what we are going to say to what audience with what media, and also how we are going to listen to those audiences and assess their needs. We need to write a tight task specification for that plan to make sure it is done quickly and done properly.
4. We'll also need **Community Surveys** to assess if our communications are being effective and to guide how we will correct, adjust and shift our plan to better meet audience needs. This is called market research in the commercial world.
(Disputed: The OSMF members are our shareholders, not our consumers. Drolbr would also prefer to see the OSM mappers rather in a shareholder than in a consumer metaphor. "Market research" is thus misleading here)

**Some Communication Projects**

Once we know how to Communicate, these are some projects we can consider adding into the **Communications Plan**. Ideally these would be set up as implementable communications tasks with priorities, resources, timelines, deliverables etc.

* Task 1: Communicate our Strategic plan process
Communications for strategic planning is the broad brush variety. It is generic and aimed very wide. It has two aims. One is to inform people and solicit a response to the strategic planning process. The second is to let people know that OSMF still there and is working on stuff to improve their experience.

* Task 2: Communicate in support of fundraising
Fundraising benefits a lot from reputation management. OSMF needs to have a good reputation. Within that reputation Donors will look for honesty, working smart, working hard, financially cautious, transparent and ethical in a couple of ways. If the reputation passes the smell test then the business case motivating for the funds has a chance of success.

* Task 3: Increase mapper engagement with OSMF
Mappers will engage only if they believe someone is listening. Engagement only happens as a dialogue. So OSMF has to ensure that channels of communication are open and someone is listening to many of them. Responders must speak with one voice, so a lot of co-ordination and preparation is needed. It takes work to make it work.

* Task 4: Regular transparent outward communications to community
One-way news messages are simpler to send out because if you don't really want feedback you don't try as hard to craft your message in a simply and clear way. The point is that all communication must be carefully written, even if it is supposed to be one-way communication.

* Task 5: Regular direct touch point with key stakeholders
As above. Write the outgoing messages carefully. Touch points will work best as a dialogue. There must be someone reliably listening to all the key stakeholders and responding in a supportive way.

* Task 6: Effective and productive feedback mechanism flow
Yes this would be great. Given that OSM mappers and other role players use about 12 different communications channels around the globe, a system that can combine the feedback stream into one place would be awesome. It might be as simple as a text document and hand capture or as complex as a database linked to the APIs of the dozen or so comms applications.

**Further Thoughts on Understanding your Audiences**
So, it is important to know your audiences very well. We should do thorough audience analysis in a professional manner and then link it our Comms plans to guide how we should most effectively communicate with each different group.

*The fake profiles provided below as examples have been correctly criticised as being negative, so have been deleted.*
*I do apologise to anyone who I offended. - CA*

* OSM mappers:
* OSMF Members:
* GIS Users:
(Side note: Drolbr also have met quite a number of GIS professionals who were delighted of the ease of use of OSM data. We might need to subdivide the group to capture the mood in a meaningful way)
* Mapping Companies:
(Again, a full spectrum of opinions about the data exists here)
* Software Developers:
* Systems Operators:
* Donors:
(Needs rework by Grischard, Mikel, and Drolbr, because the workshop characterized them in a substantially different and much more detailed way.)
* And the rest - Other audiences include Board members, WG members, Journalists, Governments, Spatial Academics, Aid agencies, Multilateral Agencies, Other NGOs.

**Channels We Might Use**
(Organize by intended audience?)
1. Direct one-on-one conversations, in-person and virtual
2. Meetings, in-person and virtual
3. Discourse
1. community.openstreetmap.org
4. OSM Diary
5. osm.org/blog
7. Structures
1. OSMF Board
2. Working Groups
3. Advisory Board
1. Corporate Members
1. Donors
1. Local Chapters
4. User Groups (organised mappers not accredited as Chapters)
5. Second Tier Groups
1. UNMappers
1. YouthMappers
1. GeoChicas
1. HOT
1. Crowd2Map
1. Women+ in Geo
1. Open Heroines
1. Geoladies PH
2. Mapbuds Nepal
3. OpenStreetMap Girls Africa
4. ... and many more ...
7. Podcasts
1. geomob
2. African Geo Podcast
3. Geospatially
4. ... and many more ...
8. weeklyOSM
9. IRC (via Matrix)
10. mailing lists
1. https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo
1. talk
1. osmf-talk
1. ... and many more ...
11. Conferences
1. State of the Map Global
1. State of the Map National
1. State of the Map Regional
1. FOSSGIS
1. FOSS4G
12. Social media
1. Facebook
1. WhatsApp
1. Telegram
1. Slack
1. Mastodon
1. Twitter
1. Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/openstreetmap/
2. stackoverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/openstreetmap

# Feedback

## Courtney

Comments on the plan in advance of our call:

The board is going to need a lot of help—that is a very big strategic wishlist, given the number of channels, the proliferation of social, the need for localization, the need for regular, clear, comms—which does not come cheaply in terms of time. Just to state the obvious.

As Pete pointed out, our remit is to support this effort. Given that this is true, what are the goals for this group this year? Could it be as simple as to support the Board’s strategic comms plan? Should we convene and set our own 2023 priorities and talk about how to achieve them?

Some data-backed decisions need to be made about which channels and how often. The human impulse is to post everywhere “just to be sure”. This is not a strategic impulse. More signal, less noise is the only way out of the social media thunderdome. Inclusivity is not antithetical to this. There is good data to support that ‘more’ is not necessarily ‘more inclusive.’ Rather, “strategic’ and ‘data backed’ is the best way to make sure that as many people as possible see messages.

If we can get our /copyright and /about pages fixed, it will help because they can point to the prioritized channels. Are there other pages we should roll into this effort?

## Andrew

Thanks. I let a couple comments on the document. One thing that isn't too clear is if this plan also includes outreach to non-OSM people, which is also part of the goal of CWG -- more blog posts that are't just internal OSMF news, but general mapping content that is interesting for OSM mappers but also other people who might be interested but don't currently map -- milestones, projects, and so on.