I wasn't initially going to comment on this except to say that there are brilliant Ugandan mappers (317 contributed yesterday!). This community has been super active for several years now, and those folks deserve to have a chapter to strengthen their organisational efforts. Nevertheless, chapters should have strong governance arrangements - and those arrangements should include open membership, community control, recall of Directors, and transparent ways of knowing that the Directors are acting in the interests of the community. I can only assume that the Ugandan community are happy to engage around these issues.
In late 2018 the Ireland OSM community applied for local chapter status with me as Ireland's liaison on the applicant side. Within that there were three junctures of 3-5 week email reply delays, and partial replies that fell short of providing Ireland's community any clear sense of what was driving the deliberation process in the background. As liaison I was given the task or guessing at what was in fact happening for reports back (including the 2019 AGM) Our application didn't appear on osmf meeting agendas for example. It took from December 2018 to August 2019 to get through the application process. I would hope that people commenting here would have the good sense to recognise that a chapter is never frustrated by substantive engagement on clearly advertised criteria, but it certainly will be frustrated by poor communication and inexplicable delays. <http://www.avg.com/email-signature?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail> Virus-free. www.avg.com <http://www.avg.com/email-signature?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail> <#DAB4FAD8-2DD7-40BB-A1B8-4E2AA1F9FDF2>
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