Local Chapter survey: paid work

Introduction

In a discussion between some members of the Board and the Local Chapters and Communities Working Group, the subject of paid work policies at the Local Chapters came up. Both us at LCCWG and the Board would like to get an idea of your policies and opinions on the topic. The LCCWG sent out the following questions via mail:

  1. Do you pay someone for organizational support? What kind of work do they do?
  2. Is there other work you pay for with the Chapter? How do you finance this?
  3. Do you help people who need someone to do paid work for them? If so, how? And what kind of work? What about paid mapping?
  4. If you're with an umbrella organization, do people work for OSM or for the umbrella?
  5. What do you feel is appropriate for Local Chapters to do? How far can Chapters go? Is this something the OSMF should set policy for?

Summary

  1. Do you pay someone for organizational support? What kind of work do they do?

No paid work: CZ, FR, SK (but they would if they could!)
Just for finance/taxes: Oceania, UK
Italy: Project manager
Germany: full time employee that historically organized the annual conference, now also takes care of paperwork, membership management, communication with members and scheduling
Belgium: organizational support through the umbrella

  1. Is there other work you pay for with the Chapter? How do you finance this?

Other work:
Graphic design (FR, Oceania), programming (IT, UKn BE), IT services (DE, SK, BE), conference related work (DE, Oceania)

Income:
Membership fee (DE, SK), conference profit (DE), sponsoring (UK), donations (SK, BE), corporate membership (UK, BE), project funding (UK, BE), OSMF microgrant (BE)

Other costs: microgrants (DE), expenses (UK, BE)

  1. Do you help people who need someone to do paid work for them? If so, how? And what kind of work? What about paid mapping?

List on the wiki (FR)
Talent Pool (UK): OSM UK helps write bids and shares it with a network (anyone can join, only network members can see proposals)
Do work themselves: physical maps (SK)

  1. If you're with an umbrella organization, do people work for OSM or for the umbrella?

Umbrellas:
IT, Germany (more or less), BE
(all of them do the work through the umbrella)

  1. What do you feel is appropriate for Local Chapters to do? How far can Chapters go? Is this something the OSMF should set policy for?
  • Up to the LC itself: CZ, DE, UK (but set out 'best practices' to avoid elite boards), BE
  • IT: clear preference for facilitating only, not directly competing with commercial offers
  • Advice from Oceania: Volunteering first, paid work as complexity grows
  • No opinion: FR, SK

Partipicants

  • OSM Czechia, Tom Ka
  • OSM Oceania, John Bryant & Eduardo Neerhut
  • OSM France, Christian Quest
  • OSM Italia, Stefano (sabas)
  • OSM Germany, Thomas Skowron
  • OSM UK, Rob Nickerson
  • OSM SK, Peter Vojtek
  • OSM BE, Joost Schouppe

Full responses

OSM Czechia, Tom Ka

there are no paid work/possitions for CZ. For the last questions, I
thinkg it should be up to the local organization as it may make sense
in some environmnet/country.
In fact for CZ as long as all work will be done by unpaid volunteers,
there will be no reason for troubles connected with money.

OSM Oceania,

John Bryant

The OSM Oceania local chapter hasn't evolved to a point where we need paid support. As far as I know, the only paid support engaged by OSGeo Oceania is preparing annual financial statements and tax returns etc. Otherwise there are no staff or contractors involved.

My personal feeling is that local chapters should focus on volunteer community building first, and then only consider paid support where it's a specific bottleneck. I tend to think community groups should only engage paid support when they've evolved to a level of effort and complexity where they need someone to help keep it together. I don't feel we are there yet in Oceania.

I would aim first for building a significant local chapter membership, with widespread volunteer involvement, and ongoing activities, before considering paid help. Every task that can be done by a volunteer is an opportunity to build a network of engaged people and future leaders.

Eduardo Neerhut

This is a good question and it's nice to hear how different chapters are approaching it. I echo John's comments that our focus at the moment is growing the volunteer contributor base first.

Some additional paid work that OSGeo Oceania has utilised in the past includes a conference logistics organiser (part time) and graphic design. The former actually donated her pay back to the organisation which was generous, but the intention was there from OSGeo Oceania to pay for the work.

I wouldn't be surprised if we opt to pay for conference help again in future years, but mainly the logistical stuff closer to the event which requires a lot of people hours.

OSM France, Christian Quest

  1. No
  2. It happens from time to time… for example to create some graphics for our SOTM-France to print banners, posters, etc
  3. We redirect them to a list of professionals, mainly on OSM wiki to stay neutral.
  4. Is there a rising problem that needs to be addressed by a policy ?
    If not… no policy needed (so far), maybe advices based on other older LC longer experience ?

OSM Italia, Stefano (sabas)

  1. We have one position as project manager for OpenStreetMap
  2. We paid for some work on tools (i.e. a new instance of Tasking Manager)
  3. I think not at the moment…
  4. For the umbrella
  5. Some examples?

OSM Germany, Thomas Skowron

In Germany, as you probably already know, we join forces with the free GIS sphere, “for historic reasons“. Thus there is some overlap between OSMers and people in FOSSGIS, so you could call it an umbrella, or not.

  1. We have paid someone for work for the our annual conference for many years. Since last year she’s a full time employee that now also takes care of paperwork, membership management, communication with members and scheduling.
    We also pay for IT services, mostly maintenance of mail/git/web/… servers.
    For our conferences, we pay for helper staff, mostly students.
  2. We have a grant scheme, mainly for servers and events. We‘re financed through membership fees and profits from our conferences.
  3. Neither.
  5. The german community is quite rich, but also much stingier than most, e.g. we did have discussions about picking slightly cheaper options even though this would mean spending much more volunteer time. So, if there would be a model, it would need to give LCs a lot of autonomy, because I believe that others have a different culture around this.
    When we planned to employ someone full time, a lot of thought went into long term financial feasibility: How would we need to manage income growth, through higher fees and expanded sponsoring to be able to finance this position for several years.

OSM UK, Rob Nickerson

  1. We pay for accountancy services (i.e. producing our annual reports and submitting these to the authority). Directors can claim expenses (e..g train tickets to an agreed event where they will promote the Chapter) but are otherwise blocked from taking payments from the Chapter as per our Articles of Association. Personally I think that this, whilst well intended, may create a problem in the future as it limits our ability. In hindsight I think we should have just adopted the template AoA with no changes.
  2. We will shortly kick off a UK address project in which we will pay two people for technical support (web and database development). We have secured funding for this project from sponsors so in effect OSM UK is just the vehicle in which money goes from sponsor to developer.
  3. Yes. We have a Talent Pool which anyone can join. If someone or some business needs OSM support they can contact us. We work with them to develop a project scope (typically a couple pages). This is then shared with the Talent Pool and interested members can bid for this work direct to the person/company. OSM UK does not review or see the bids. Directors of OSM UK can bid themselves so long as they have stayed out of the earlier scoping discussions.
  4. We are not part of an umbrella org.
  5. The purpose of the Chapters should be to support their community. If some Chapters feel like they can do this better if they can make profit from paid work then this is ok by me so long as that profit is fed back into the community and not taken by the Director(s) of the Chapter. This is not to say that the Directors cannot be paid, but if they are to take out a salary / consultancy fee then it should be the market rate.
    The OSMF should refrain from setting rules / policies as much as possible as these only hinder the flexibility of the Chapters. Instead I suggest that OSMF set out best practice guidelines at first if it is concerned. Competitive access to paid work (i.e. like our Talent Pool approach) might be worth considering as it ensures the Local Chapters offer work to their community rather than acting as an elite group of Directors. It would ensure that Directors are only able to take the market rate for work as it is competitively tendered and if they try to charge more than the market rate, they (should) lose the bid to someone else.

OSM SK, Peter Vojtek

  1. No, but we have considered hiring a person who would work on the PR side of our efforts, help organize public-facing events geared toward increasing awareness about our work and recruiting new mappers. We agreed that making this plan a reality would depend on having resources to pay for such a position. We would either had to find an “intrinsic” source of regular income (selling our services say), or hire a person like the one I am describing above and whose duties would include also fundraising (to pay for own salary)
  2. We pay for server hosting. Financed via memberships fees and donations.
  3. We occasionally create maps for information boards for other organizations. We sometimes do it for free (for NGOs), in other cases for up to 100 Euro.
  4. N/A
    5 )No opinion.

OSM BE, Joost Schouppe

  1. Yes, the umbrella helps us with administrative tasks as well as with communication efforts. For example, they might bring in leads for potential projects - on their company time.
  2. Yes, we have done paid work on several of our projects that require software. There have been at least 4 Open Summer of Code projects that involve improving OSM data. For those, we managed to convince external organizations that a tool built on OSM is the tool they need for a problem they percieve (e.g. "the best digital way to promote your cycle networks is for them to be mapped in OSM"). These projects are financed by those "external clients" and organized by the umbrella.
    Our Road Completion project got an OSMF grant.
    Apart from that, we sometimes pay expenses and will start giving a small financial incentive to volunteers.
    We also have some server costs.
    We want to expand the amount of paid work, and are looking into charging a small overhead on projects run through OSMbe and have started a corporate membership drive to get more income.
  3. Yes, but we are still setting up a system. Answering questions about OSM has led to specific projects for some of our members (e.g. route planning, MapComplete themes). There was also a paid mapping project in the works, but in the end this was organized by the "client" themselves.
  4. All work is organized through the umbrella.
  5. Chapters should be non-profits, but that just means the profit should stay in the organization. Other than that OSMF should just support best practices and not set too many rules. Chapters should be able to grow their communities, and if that involves money, that's up to them.
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