This was my original question on the Wiki :

The OpenStreetMap Foundation ("OSMF") already had discussions and even a committee on takeover mitigation and this question focuses on this topic. The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team United States Inc ("HOTUSI"), which it's grow up over 100x OSMF budget (using 2020 as year, 26,562,141 USD vs 226,273 GBP), on its board minutes date 2022-01-24 (archived version here) already admitted interest on trademark agreement "with clear, irrevocable rights to the name" as option to "Ensure that the HOT Brand name is not in danger and is formerly in HOT’s hands", however this explicitly require OpenStreetMap Foundation approval at least once in its history. Already before this election, the new discourse community, which is public know have receive support from HOTUSI, had a paid HOTUSI employee closing a discussion about HOTUSI which also asked why the site redesign still being delayed to a point of know to not happens before the OpenStreetMap Foundation election, even if this already was asked on OSMF mail lists, and the incident sparked a discussion on handling conflict of interest on moderation channels. At this very moment of the history of OpenStreetMap, majority of candidates in this election do have links with HOTUSI, so it is viable that the result will allow a single corporation to make decisions in self interest against OSMF, in which you hopefully will win as a candidate. So the question to you is: how will you handle conflicts of interest in the OpenStreetMap Foundation board itself under this challenging context?

Regardless of this, I’m actually very okay with the set of official questions proposed for candidates to be asked to answer, since common themes were grouped. And the fact to point to the Trademark Policy was better than the ones I used to contextualize. Fantastic!

New absurd events

Because the last date to send questions was 2022-11-01, sadly I was not able to cite a real world example (like one sentence more with links on my original question) about how absurd things can get when an organization has so much money that can simply focusing on whoever is willing to be bought to disrupt regional groups without remorse.

As a sort of public response for a complaint by Mario that I wasn’t aware about the #communities:latam on 2022-11-02T17:48 happened at 2022-11-05T02:31: a moderator of the forum, despite use of euphemisms, actually wrote in the that the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team United States Inc was willing to pay money for projects in the LATAM region to get more support. While I wasn’t expecting much based on what happened in Philiphines, no discussion at all of the bigger issue Mario was discussing in Spanish in several threads. Just this.

Let me repeat: the response to perceived conflicts of interest by moderators in a subforum of community.opensteetmap.org was one of those moderators going to the same subforum and offering money from the very same organization while in the role of moderator.

“Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig; es ist nicht einmal falsch!” – Wolfgang Pauli