Advisory Board/Minutes/2023-05-09

From OpenStreetMap Foundation

Draft minutes. Please note that these minutes do not go through a formal approval process.

The OSMF Board of Directors had an online meeting with members of the Advisory Board on 2022-05-09 at 13:30 UTC.

Some points have been reordered.

Participants and stats

Affiliation - Name (role, notes)

OSMF Officers and board - Biographies

Minutes by Dorothea Kazazi.

Not Present

Development of the OSMF strategic plan

Also see the Strategic Planning Home.

  • Early in the process of the strategic plan development.
  • Process will be collaborative/participatory.

Introduction by Craig Allan

Collaborative, participatory process.

Strategic committee members: Craig Allan, Sarah Hoffmann, Allan Mustard (previous Chairperson).

History related to strategic planning

  • 2012 round: did not result anywhere.
  • 2021 round: led by Allan Mustard and produced a list of strategies that OSMF could implement. There was no time at that stage to work out the projects/tasks.

On 2023 strategic planning

  • Refining what Allan Mustard did and turning the list into actual projects.
  • Trying to build a sense of urgency.
  • Current stage: get the general projects approved by the community.

On projects

  • Will look into prioritising the projects, implementation, timelines and deliverables.
  • Expectation: a lot of projects will be dropped due to prioritisation and non-affordability.
  • On project management: necessary to do to keep people accountable and provide information about project completion time to the community, the donors, and people using our products.

Cluster A - Technical

  • Goal: keep OSM running (hardware, network, associated software which needs to be upgraded).
  • Looking into cases of server accidents in our data centers, at vector tiles, redoing the database.

Cluster B - Building community

  • All data that companies use comes from our community.
  • Have local communities in various countries, but they are usually under-resourced.
  • Need: build our community - a lot of management of communities has to be done.

Cluster D - Financial

  • Have been running only on donor funds, so we need to keep soliciting donations.
  • Have a project to push donations to get a funding team together, which comes into the plan as part of the finance committee.

Cluster C - Organisation of the institution

  • Hot topic.
  • Should we have paid employees/executive director/turn into a company.

Discussion

Clarifications provided:

  • Sub-initiatives are not well-developed at this stage, getting feedback about them.
  • May take a bit of change of OSMF management, which is a slow process.

Suggestions by Corporate Members

  • Feedback and support: Make it known when it is possible to provide feedback and support, as companies on the Advisory Board have several partners, customers in many countries and can get the message to local governments to participate.
    • Any help to move our field organisation – the community – in as many countries as possible is greatly appreciated.
    • Companies are good at working with governments and many use our (OSMF's) products.
  • On policies or practices: Have a cluster or a part of another cluster that defines policies or practices e.g. for import processes, as none of the clusters are about data and policy.
    • Invitation to contribute and to send a suggestion to the strategic planning team. It will get incorporated and go through the process of prioritisation.
    • This is about flexibility in licensing and it's not the first time we have been asked to look at this.
    • If a policy is missing from the strategic plan, you can write in and make a difference.
  • Have an Executive director: Having an executive director will facilitate getting imports from governments, as high level discussions with the government are needed (see below). With the current situation, governments get letters from random people, asking them to sign letters of understanding, so that datasets might be imported.
  • Have executive directors for regional chapters: The chapter can select the person to be their official representative and can make executive decisions and participate in discussions (i.e. with the board or other entities) (proposed during the discussion on how to build consensus)
  • Organisation's governance to be tackled first and then the data stuff will trickle down.
  • Tasks: Containerisation and improving back-up procedures: Are some of the least controversial, valuable and most trackable tasks - just a question of resourcing.
  • Project implementation: Some projects could be applied on a per-chapter basis with some variations.

On government engagement and Serbian governmental dataset case

  • The Licensing Working Group (LWG) is looking into a request regarding integrating a governmental dataset from Serbia, which might (or not) carry an attribution requirement. The intent of the underlying law seems to be to enable users like OSM to incorporate the data. The lack of precision with which the licence has been conveyed through the governmental sub-agencies makes it ambiguous, might make an import impossible. Typical case.
  • The only path to resolving it, as it is not practical to amend data laws, is to have a high level discussion with the government and get a letter of understanding.

Questions by Gold/Platinum Corporate Member representatives

What does OSMF want to be and what it doesn't want to be and how you prioritise that

> Data project? Data governance/licencing/community involvement.
> How deep does OSMF want to go into tech stuff?
> Vector Tiles service? Whole different set of problems.
> Is OSMF a primarily a volunteer organisation or does it need a slightly more corporate governance?

  • "What does OSMF want to be?" You're asking for our Vision statement and if you look on our website, we don't have one.
  • Part of our process is to ask people what we want to be in 5 and 10 years time - visioning process, which we haven't done yet.

What's the plan to build consensus across the community

> In strategic planning workshops building consensus takes a couple of days. OSM is spread-out and that is harder. Luckily there are events like SotM and FOSS4G.

  • Getting consensus over 1 million users is an extremely daunting task and advice is welcome.
  • Current formal process is to get the board to agree.
  • Craig Allan has previously run workshops up to 140 people and will talk to Allen Gunn (past board facilitator), who is skilled.
  • Hope to get feedback from the community and the feeling on the ground but hard to get consensus on a large scale.
    • A few users seem invested in governance issues and the OSMF elections.

Question from the board: Would local communities be interested to built consensus on a local level?
Representatives of local communities could then relay the key messages and patterns seen in local conversations to the board.

  • Even if there is consensus, people must really want to do things, otherwise nothing will be done.
  • Suggestion: find the volunteers who really want to do particular tasks - these people define the future on a local level. Of course, this might not scale on a global level.

Other comments by Corporate Members

  • On expectations regarding governmental data: Making OSM a welcoming place for governmental data, means that you're welcoming government expectations by territorial representation, which the project is not going to satisfy across the world.
  • Some of the technical projects, like vector tiles and the data model, might be productive ones but also thorny.
  • Takeover protection interventions might make change more difficult to happen.

Prioritisation suggestion

Add assessment indicators to projects about:

  • "Consensus" - Designate parts of the strategic plan which we feel are not-controversial and consensus has already been built on them.
  • "Effort needed" or immediate action is possible.

The above are related to the prioritisation of the projects.

Other points mentioned during discussion

  • Don't see the strategic plan as a top-down development. If people are interested, we're there to support them.
  • There are only a few people committed to think about topics like strategic planning.
  • Would be great to get a group of 100-200 people interested in strategic planning and get responsibility for decisions.

Next meeting

Probably in July.

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