Executive Report from the President 2009

This is a verbatim copy of the "Executive Report from the President" published in the OSGeo Journal - Volume 5 - OSGeo 2008 Annual Report with minor corrections and enhanced with a few links and subtitles that did not go into the paper version.
== From the President ==
During the past year OSGeo has grown and matured. As far as I can tell the past 
year was a thorough success. But how can we measure the success of a nonprofit 
organization like OSGeo? A good measure is always to compare numbers. For 
example the number of graduated projects, the number of subscribers to mailing 
lists, the number of public appearances at conferences, in presentations, trade 
shows and case studies. Also the number of Wiki edits, software releases, bug 
fixes and the evergreen "lines of code". These are only a few quantifiable 
indicators that shed some light on the health of OSGeo. And all of them show 
steady growth, find out more about the details in this Journal.
=== World Economy ===
During the same past year world economy took a hard blow. More and more 
financial experts have to admit that there are very concrete limits to growth. A 
growing number of financial institutes have already collapsed, large industries 
stumble and fall, employees lose their jobs and in the wake of this global 
downfall whole economies have come to a painful grinding halt.
=== OSGeo Ecolomy ===
Eventually the growth curve of OSGeo may also flatten out, but not quite yet. 
There are still too many people left to teach about the viability of 
Open Source Geospatial Software 
and there is still too much profit in learning about the opportunities that 
arise from having access to free spatial data and educational material. But what 
comes to my mind when I look at the quantifiable success of OSGeo is that it 
appears to be yet another business that is driven by
revenue and the need to meet its investors’ expectations. But who are the 
employees and who are the investors?
=== OSGeo's Structure ===
First let’s have a look at who "runs" the fundation. It seems obvious when you 
have a president
and board of directors. 
These directors decide that something needs to be done, 
tells the CEO to do it and then it happens. Unfortunately, it does not work this 
way. As the Executive Director is our only employee, he has to focus on things 
that really need to get done. Beyond that we are dependent entirely on 
volunteers. The most the president and directors can often do is politely ask 
people whether they would be interested in doing this or that. Some believe we
are just a small and "managed" organisation "run" by a few individuals who have 
the power. I can very much assure you that OSGeo does not work this way.
=== Do-ocracy ===
How does it work if everybody has different expectations of what OSGeo is, what 
it should be and what it can do. It works because OSGeo is an active community 
of people who do things. Furthermore, OSGeo does not have a community but the 
community is OSGeo. The community invents OSGeo as it progresses. That needs 
some explaining. Over the past three years OSGeo has developed into a fairly 
complex beast. However, it does not exist out of itself
but is just the collective representation of many individual resources. OSGeo is 
crowd sourced (and maybe even a bit RESTful) and will also grow and shrink 
depending on the interest and availability of its membership.
=== Formal Structure ===
As a legal entitiy OSGeo needs some formal structure. In a nutshell, OSGeo 
consists of currently 73 voted charter members who vote for 9 directors who vote 
for one president (currently me). The board then appoints the Executive Director 
(Tyler Mitchell) who takes care of a whole stack of required formalities like 
handling finances, signing contracts in the name of OSGeo and communicating with 
sponsors. The board has to approve the budget and find ways to actually
fund it, for example by inviting sponsors (the investors) and promoting FOSS4G 
(acquire funding). Formal committees are created to address different topics, 
each of them has a list of members who vote for a chair who becomes an officer 
and Vice President of OSGeo. Thats it.
=== Volunteers, Commercial Interests and Business ===
All the RESTful action in OSGeo is done by folks who either have a commercial 
interest or simply find it fun to do things. Some (like me) are in the lucky 
situation that they can combine the fun part with the money making bit and can 
thus afford to spend some time on nitty gritty details of "running" OSGeo. If 
you are interested and have the capacity to also do this kind of job then please 
pay attention to the upcoming elections. Anybody (that includes you) can
nominate Charter Members, this year as every year it will grow by 15 
individuals. Then the Charter Members will vote for the board of directors who 
will vote for a president. Same story, each year.
=== Bottom Line ===
Please note that the grunt work within OSGeo is done by people who have no 
formal role and who couldn’t care less about having one. If you want OSGeo to do 
something then you will just have to do it. Want more education? Go teach 
people, create training material or design courses. If you want to formally 
change something then please join the corresponding committee. Think that we 
need better spatial data licenses? Go make them. Think we need more case 
studies? Go create them. Can you see it now? OSGeo is nothing without you. 
Correction: ...nothing without you doing it.
Thank you for a cool year of "running" the organization.
: Arnulf Christl
: OSGeo President
: Bonn, Germany
: arnulf@osgeo.org
Category: Reports 2009