[Osmf-talk] Membership Working Group report on unusual signups before OSMF election

Hello fellow OSMF Members, 100 persons employed by one company joined the OSMF in an orchestrated, directed campaign on 15 Nov, which has been discussed here on [osmf-talk] and elsewhere. We have 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. Report (PDF) https://openstreetmap.lu/MWGGlobalLogicReport20181226.pdf --- Steve (.US) & Guillaume (.LU), for the Membership Working Group