OpenStreetMap
Investigating the unusual coordinated member signups close to the OpenStreetMap foundation's election
Posted by Stereo on 26 January 2019 in English. Last updated on 5 November 2019.
100 persons employed by one company joined the OSMF in an orchestrated, directed campaign on 15 Nov, which has been discussed on the [osmf-talk] mailing list and elsewhere.
The Membership Working Group’s investigation has uncovered evidence that the company behind the campaign, GlobalLogic, is not being truthful, and that the members did not sign up individually. GlobalLogic has provided versions of the event that are contradictory and not credible.
We do not know the motivations for this campaign, but strongly suspect that this was an attempt, luckily unsuccessful, to influence the recent OSMF board election.
Our intensive research took two main investigators more than a month, with the precious help of many in the community. On 2018-12-26 we presented our detailed report to the OSMF board. We are now releasing it to the membership.
Some key points of the investigation are the fortuitous French control group (p. 7 and onwards) and the lowercase anomaly (p. 14).
We expect this will raise a number of questions in the community: some concerning the incident itself, others related to wider governance. The report makes several recommendations.
MWG and the authors will try to answer any questions you have about the report here, but can also be contacted at membership at osmfoundation.org.
The full report is here (PDF)
— Steve (.US) & Guillaume (.LU), for the Membership Working Group
Discussion
Comment from alexkemp on 27 January 2019 at 00:33
These are the options that (it seems to me) MUST be adopted:
The last one, in particular, seems vital. Why on earth non-mappers, or those that mapped a little then gave it up, are allowed to be on the Board is beyond me.
My extra suggestions are:
Comment from amapanda ᚛ᚐᚋᚐᚅᚇᚐ᚜ 🏳️🌈 on 27 January 2019 at 12:21
How should that be defined? It would be very easy to game and fix with a bot.
Comment from alexkemp on 27 January 2019 at 12:59
Hi rorym 🏳️🌈
First, let’s point out that this is one option promoted by the OSMF Membership Working Group (MWG) in their PDF as part of a suite of actions to try to stop future influence campaigns from rendering OSMF elections unfair and/or distorted and/or utterly corrupted.
Second, yes indeed, agree totally. For that reason I assume (and sincerely hope) that rate-limiting is normal on the OSM servers to prevent classic bot-spam activity. I dealt with this on a daily (hourly!) basis 15 years ago when I ran a website + forum on an internet server. It is reasonably trivial to stop bots by this method (they always run as fast as they can) although I found that the SEs can tend to also mimic bots as they scrape the site, which then leads to difficult decisions on whether to white-list those SEs.
Third, if the premise of active, verified mappers is accepted, then it becomes necessary to compile a list of bots to form a further blacklist to prevent signups. I’ve actually advocated this before by pointing to SFS as an open-source compiler of sources of both bot- and human-spam which has proven itself as both safe and successful in stopping such malign behaviour.
Comment from Rovastar on 27 January 2019 at 13:20
rorym,
Are you saying it is easy for a bot to create an active account? Maybe thousands of edits and tens of thousands of nodes over a period of time? If so maybe OSM has bigger problems.
alex,
“Allow only verified active mappers to vote and run for the board” This will never pass here. More and more often board members (and those running) have done very little (some a handful of token edits) and will probably complain about discrimination/human rights if this was to come into play. == On a boarder point from reading all of this pdf
What about this as a suggestion.
Maybe that will not stick as small white western companies who provide bespoke OSM mapping services would be left out as they want bigger browner Indian companies to be.
I suppose difficult questions.
Even in the most democratic countries companies can still encourage the way people vote in national elections. They just can’t pay for them to vote a particular way.
Companies and influences can encourage people to sign up to be eligible to vote in democratic national elections.
Is that what is happening here?!
in this case a company probably encouraged employees to sign up to vote. They probably payed for there for the right to vote (comparing it to national democratic elections where you don’t have to pay to have the right to vote).
and here no-one even voted in this case just allowed the right to vote
Maybe we should say no membership fee and everyone over x thousand nodes is eligible to vote and you do so via OSM?
Or maybe let OSM company sponsors have more say on how things are run in OSM? Maybe these companies are doing a lot of edits to OSM and feel they don’t have any voice (which is alluded to in the pdf). Sometimes it helps to look within and think about how OSM board/working groups need to change their behaviour to accommodate a changing world.
Comment from alexkemp on 27 January 2019 at 21:09
@Rovastar:
Ask yourself a simple question:
“Do I want anyone that does NOT have OSM’s best interests at heart to have a say in it’s governance?”
I would suggest that the answer is that you want all those that govern what & how OSM does what it does should have OSM’s best interests at heart. If you agree with this, then the next question becomes:
“Is there a way to measure whether a person has OSM’s best interests at heart?”.
The answer is “Yes there is”. If they want OSM to succeed, then they go out and do some mapping. If they do NOT map for OSM it does not mean that they hate OSM. It just means that they do not like mapping, and therefore are (at best) indifferent to OSM. Now, I don’t want folks that are indifferent to OSM on the OSMF Board. I want folks that are committed to OSM. And if they are committed to OSM then they will, of their own desire, go out & do a little mapping each month (at the very least).
Finally, if they are NOT committed to OSM and they are on the OSMF Board will they please go off and do something else that they are committed to because, frankly, we don’t want them here.
Comment from RobJN on 28 January 2019 at 00:16
There are a number of skills that are useful in a board which don’t require you to be an active mapper. For example, it seems the current board are struggling with basics such as communicating their decisions (e.g. Crimea border dispute). And in any case, the OSM ecosystem is huge: why should someone who has decided to spend the last year focusing on promotion, software or documentation not be allowed to try for a board position? It’s up to the voters to decide who they vote for.
Perhaps draw some inspiration from the executive director and non executive director arrangement at large companies.
Having said that, many of the other suggestions made in the pdf are good and reasonably easy to implement. Beyond those we probably need a proper debate about what direction we want for OSMF. Personally I’d like to find some arrangement that allows for inclusiveness. Heading further into the “us versus them” mentality isn’t my cup of tea.
P.s. there have been times during my OSM years where I have struggled to map as often as I would like. For example when committing time to organising SotM or my OSM UK board duties. At no point during those times have I not been committed to OSM.