I read the document titled A Call to Take Action and Confront Systemic Offensive Behaviour in the OSM Community and it gave me a flashback to several conversations with our colleagues and team members about the situation in the OSM community, especially the OSMF Board member. I remember asking why no board member from Asia while we know Asia is one of the active regions on OSM and there are a lot of OSM contributions from there both from individuals and organizations. It has been 13 years since the first OSMF board was established yet there is still no representative from Asia.

For me this is the problem that has been laid for a long time and we are all aware about it but so far there are little efforts to solve it. Personally, I don’t really know why this problem still exists while there are many ideas or promotions from OSMF and the community about the diversity and inclusive community. Moreover, the OSMF board that has been dominated by a certain group of people, for me, indirectly gives intimidation to others to give their opinions into the community through mailing lists or even the OSM user diary or even nominate themselves to become OSMF Board. I think because we are afraid to receive offensive feedback/comments. We afraid to receive opinion such as:

• ‘she is not capable to run OSMF Board’
• ‘he is from Asia, his English is not good, his communication to the community would not be effective’
• ‘she is working on company/organization that use OSM, absolutely she only wants to bring her company/organization agenda to the board and OSM community and not really care about OSM as an individual’
• ‘he doesn’t have master/phd degree and his academic background seems low, I am not sure * he will bring any value to the board’ etc

I am afraid this kind of message is going to ruin all the efforts that have been done by other OSMF board members to make OSMF in particular and the OSM community in general a safe place to bring our opinion and really open for diversity and inclusivity. I believe we always can share and deliver our opinion and message strongly without leading them to hatred and disdain, or contempt of other particular people and groups in the OSM Community.

Those examples above now are strengthened by one of the opinions that said on this mailing list thread . But to make it objective, the person also had released a statement and apologized for any inconvenience caused here

Moreover, I also want to emphasize that we should focus on how to make the system better instead of blaming certain individuals because I think we all make mistakes and harassing people would not solve the systemic problem and would create other similar problems instead. Let’s make the system better and it would create a better community where we always can give appreciation to wonderful accomplishments, constructive criticism, and support in any ways that we could to our fellow mappers.

As a conclusion, every cloud has a silver lining therefore I believe this situation will take us to a better place and starting with this document there will be many supports and actions from OSM communities all around the globe.

Peace

Harry Mahardhika M