Advisory Board/Minutes/2025-01-27

From OpenStreetMap Foundation

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

The OSMF Board of Directorshistoric had an online meeting with members of the Advisory Boardhistoric on 2025-01-27. Meeting not open to observers.

Participants

Minutes by Dorothea Kazazi.

Updates on 2025 infrastructure development plans - Microsoft presentation

Microsoft has been making engineering contributions and has plans for more.

15' presentation by Aleksandar Matejević (OSM profile, profile on community.osm.org), Microsoft Open Maps team.

The presentation file is below (*.pdf, 794 KB, 12 pages):

Microsoft presentation during 2025-01-27 OSMF Advisory Board meeting - OSM improvement.pdf

Microsoft Open Maps team

  • 3 full-time developers (Nenad Vujičić, Emin Kočan, Davit Tsiklauri), working on improving the OSM code and other tasks.
  • 1 engineering manager (David Karlaš), who is also an OSM developer and contributor - responsible to ensure that the code meets the requirements and standards, and suggesting improvements.
  • 1 OSM expert / program manager (Aleksandar Matejević), helping developers understand the wider community, the needs and what results are expected from the community.

Main objectives

  • UI modernisation for intuitive experience (long term objective).
  • Website interaction improvement.
  • Improve user engagement and collaboration (socialisation).
  • Ensure better integration with third-party tools and engage their developers to contribute more to OSM.
  • Upgrade notes functionality.

The objectives aim to help: contributors, developers and maintainers (only 3 volunteers).

Phase 1 tasks

1. Profile page improvements

  • Added info about the user: "Mapper since" and "Last map edit".
  • Added functionality to add social links. Users can now easily share OSM diary entries on social media, which may inspite others to do something on OSM.
  • Added reply button to messages.
  • Changed "Friends" to "Followers" to make the function more clear and to make OSM a more pleasant environment for socialising.
  • Preparing stats to be displayed (active days, numbers of changesets, edits, etc).

2. Creating support for Notes tagging and versioning
Waiting for pull requests to be merged.

3. Reviewing OSM GitHub repository open issues and fixing the code

  • 49 pull requests completed, 4 on hold, 2 in progress, 5 rejected so far.

4. Other tasks

  • Addition of option to filter issues, which is a functionality intended for OSM working groups.
  • Improvements of third-party tools requested by the community, e.g. POI history viewer.

Phase 1 challenges

  • Lack of clear guidelines and priorities from OSM website maintainers. Discussed and agreed how to work (e.g. have every PR is smaller chunks) after a couple of meetings of both teams.
  • Very small code changes requests from OSM website maintainers, as they don't want things to break, are slowing down the process, making it more complex.
  • Limited community involvement (insufficient engagement, slow responses and a tendency to miss important discussions).
  • Need for promotion/communication. New features should be actively promoted, such as through the OSM weekly newsletter).
  • Involvement of other companies. Despite widespread use of OSM by various teams, there is minimal involvement from other companies.

Phase 2 plans

  • After phase 1 pull requests are merged, check for user feedback and improve features.
  • Further development of Notes API: implementing versioning and tagging, work or data migration to a new version, creating support documentation.
  • Create UI with the support for the new Notes features: filtering, following, commenting, region filtering.
  • Mentions: implement feature to changeset comments, notes comments, messages.
  • Reactions (like/dislike) buttons to a changeset comment, notes status.
  • Notification center: unread changeset comments, diary comments, messages, note comments, mentions, reactions.

Additional ideas

  • Add a feedback button.
  • Validation tools for preventing vandalism, spam filters.
  • Deliver WeeklyOSM link to every user.
  • Tutorials for new users.
  • iD editor improvement.
  • Creation of an editor for mobile phones (not for drawing, but for the addition of POIs, notes, change tags).
  • Third party tool improvements
  • Better statistics for users.
  • Create a landing page for developers, where guidelines can be placed and they can exchange ideas.

Questions and comments

Suggestion: Presentation to the Engineering Working Group

Suggestion by Roland Olbricht (board, Engineering Working Group (EWG)) to give the presentation also to the EWG.

> Sure.

The EWG usually meets on Fridays.

Automated tooling for Pull Requests?

Question whether the Microsoft team felt that the change requests were more burdensome than contributing to any other open source project and whether these can be addressed with automated tooling.

> The website maintainers are doing an awesome job and trying not to break anything. There are a lot of dependencies we were not aware at the start.
> The Microsoft team is thinking of developing a set of tests that must be passed before code can be pushed. These tests will automatically check the code, and if no significant issues are found, the code may be merged automatically."

Is there priority on ensuring that osm.org mainly functions as a map, especially on mobile?

Question whether the Microsoft team felt that there is a need to prioritise that osm.org mainly functions as a map, especially on mobile, given that i) the best way to convince people to contribute to OSM is probably if OSM is first useful for them as a map and ii) it seems that the Microsoft team is focusing more on the rest of the user experience.

> The main idea is to make the osm.org website attract new mappers and to make it useful across devices.

From the Advisory Board coordinator

  • The philosophy behind osm.org has always been to make it a website for mappers.
  • The Microsoft team is prioritising on improving the mapper experience, but this is also related to getting new users.
  • As OSM is a data project, there is a need to make this and the value of OSM more obvious when one visits osm.org.
  • Some features which are currently worked on, e.g. vector tiles, will improve the user experience.
  • If part of the goal is to convert users to mappers, then we have to find creative ways to show off osm.org.

Onboarding of new mappers

  • Appreciating the idea of improving the onboarding experience for new mappers and tutorials.
  • Adding stats and leader-boards, as done by many other apps, will get a lot more people mapping and active.
  • Coordination: It is important to coordinate efforts. In the US they have created Teach OSM, which is an onboarding resource for new student mappers.
  • Challenge: maintaining the onboarding content and a question where the support comes from.

Adding turn-by-turn navigation on mobile

Interest in connecting to add turn-by-turn navigation on mobile for the OSM.org site. Last year Ian Wagner led a Google Summer of Code project under the OSM Foundation to build PWA support for an open-source turn-by-turn navigation library which has backends for Valhalla and OSRM already: https://github.com/stadiamaps/ferrostar.

Any other business

Sovereign Tech fund

The OpenStreetMap Foundation is receiving EUR 384,000 from the Sovereign Tech Agency for the osm.org website and the constellation of other projects which are core components of it.

The funds will be spent in the next two years in two roles.

Role 1

  • Someone who's going to work very closely with the maintainers, but not a maintainer, and set up the things so that people can make code contributions.
  • The job description was posted three weeks ago. We got a good amount of applicants, and we are proceeding with some of them through the interview process.
  • The person will probably get selected next month. During their first year, they will create the job description for the maintainer (role 2), who will work for the following ~ 15 months.

Role 2

  • Maintainer.

Pro bono hosting support from Equinix

Equinix is one of our hosting providers, and we were able to get pro bono support for our hosting in several of their data centers, which is a great cost savings for OSMF. This turned out to be very helpful during the downtime last month when our older hosting providers had an issue.

The pro bono support has not been publicly announced yet.

New OSM Foundation board members

The OSM Foundation had a board election in October 2024. The new board members are: Héctor Ochoa Ortiz, Laura Mugeha and Maurizio Napolitano.

Maurizio Napolitano - "OpenStreetMappers in Residence" proposal

Maurizio Napolitanohistoric (new board member) proposed the "OpenStreetMappers in Residence" program, connecting institutions with OSM community members through data. Maurizio wrote this up when he was involved with Wikimedia Italia (Local Chapter) and the program is modelled after Wikipedia's program "Wikipedian in residence".

The program is aimed at institutions that want to have someone from the community teach how the organisation can work with OSM, import data to OSM respecting the import guidelines, etc.

Financing
In Italy, it is possible to use money from the municipality to pay volunteers for some activities.

Héctor Ochoa Ortiz

Héctor Ochoa Ortizhistoric h emphasised the importance of the Advisory Board and of the diverse contributions from local chapters, corporate members, and technical teams like Microsoft to improve the OSM ecosystem.

Laura Mugeha

Laura Mugehahistoric highlighted the need to bridge with the Communication Working Group (CWG) to share updates such as the ones provided by Microsoft. Laura expressed interest in growing the OSM developer community, particularly with participation to the Engineering (EWG) and the Operations Working Group (OWG), and support of such efforts.

EWG: Mikel commented that the EWG is very productive, Héctor Ochoa Ortiz (board) recently joined, and the group could use more help.

OWG: Mikel also mentioned that it is more difficult to get involved with the OWG, but that they are interested in expanding and that is something that Grant Slater (SSRE) has been thinking about and that help is welcome.

International State of the Map 2025 conference in Manila

The international State of the Map 2025 conference will take place in Manila, from 3 to 5 October 2025. Video teaser and page on the OSM wiki.

Any other business

Involve the OSMF board in opportunities where policies are discussed

Maurizio Napolitano (OSMF board) suggested people to contact the OSM Foundation board (board@osmfoundation.org), when they become aware of discussions related to policies (e.g. in the European Commission), where someone from the board could attend.

Meeting adjourned 47 minutes after start.

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