Board/Minutes/2018-01-25

Location: Mumble, Thursday 2018-01-25, 21:00 London time

2nd part of the January 2018 meeting. 1st part here.

Participants

Board members

Kate Chapman (Chairperson)
Frederik Ramm
Heather Leson
Martijn van Exel
Mikel Maron
Peter Barth

Guests

9 guests, including one unidentified entity.

Open to all OSMF members.

Guests are welcome to speak at the end of the meeting on the topics that have been discussed. Please note that text messages sent on Mumble chat may not be seen by people who join using mobile apps.

Not Present

Paul Norman

Large Bitcoin donations

We recently received a large donation of 18 Bitcoins - currently worth over €200,000 - from the Pineapple Fund! Some weeks ago we also received over 2.3 BTCs - worth €30,000 (£27,000) - from another anonymous donor. Read more here. Thanks to both for supporting OpenStreetMap! We have cashed out both the 2.3 BTC donation (tweet, osmf-talk) and the Pinapple Fund donation. See BTC transactions here. Please note that the two recent 2.99 BTC inputs are not donations but OSMF Bitcoins, which come from a few failed attempts to cash-out portions of the Pineapple donation.

In addition to the public thank you post, a thank you email will be sent to the Pinapple Fund donor, as their email address is publicly available.

Thanks to: donors, Martijn for the letter, Frederik for finances.

Action item: Martijn to send the thank you email to Pine.

State of the Map Policy

The State of the Map (SotM) conference is the annual, international conference of OpenStreetMap and it is organised by the SotM Working Group of the OpenStreetMap Foundation. Regional SotM conferences (such as SotM-Asia, SotM-Africa, SotM-LatAm) are organised exclusively by local teams, which run their own sponsorship programs and have separate budgets from the OSM Foundation. This distinction is not always clear, sometimes creating confusion (for example, sponsors of regional SotM events mistakenly sending emails to the OSMF SotM Working Group). Additionally, there could be occasions where the regional SotM event dates might clash with the dates of the international SotM and there is the danger that the name "State of the Map" might be used by a corporate player for an unrelated event. To avoid these problems, a document or policy with a very lean set of rules for anyone interested to organise an event and call it "State of the Map" will be created. Related board discussion: Oct 2017 Related policy: LWG trademark policy.
Lead: Mikel

The SotM-WG:

Had asked (2017-12) the board to consider whether it is the right group to lead the creation of any policy or whether it should just be a stakeholder in the policy creation.
Discussed (2018-01) the SotM policy in a recent meeting.
Will probably send a draft policy to the board to review.

It is not clear to the board yet if the SotM-WG will (from now on) be involved on some level with the regional SotMs, in addition to the international one.

Action item: Mikel to go back to the SotM-WG with the board's suggestion to consult and work with local SotM organising teams on the SotM policy.

Circular resolutions - procedure

The Board Rules of Order stipulate: Circular resolutions are board resolutions on time-sensitive issues agreed prior to a board meeting. Any board member has the right to request a circular resolution at any time, by emailing a proposed resolution together with a reasoning to the board mailing list. The reasoning should describe why the proposed resolution is in the best interests of OSMF. The proposed resolution is accepted as soon as at least 50% of board members have agreed by making a clear statement to that effect on the board mailing list. After one week, or two weeks with the request of any board member, any non-votes are counted as an abstain. Circular resolutions will be duly duly minuted in the minutes of the next board meeting. The circulars' procedure will be discussed.
Lead: Mikel

Work on the board is governed by:

Articles of Association (changes require 2/3 majority of members) and
Rules of Order (wikipage that can be changed at any time. Has not been changed since 2015).

Some issues are governed by the Articles of Association, some by the Rules of Order and some by both.
The current issue is covered 100% by the Rules of Order and can be changed at anytime.

Circular resolutions

Help with time-sensitive matters.
Help when participation is an issue: "After one week, or two weeks with the request of any board member, any non-votes are counted as an abstain." Added a few years ago to make sure things moved through when board members did not participate.

Potential issues
Having circular resolutions during holidays, when not all board members have internet access, resulting in:

Not all board members being aware of them.
Resolutions being accepted with very few votes (which might be desirable in cases of active abstinence from board meetings).

Suggestions (they are not all mutually exclusive)

Have a "holiday period" where board business pause, except urgent matters.
If a board member has not voted on a circular, try to reach them by phone.

Suggestions about quorum/threshold/counting votes (some might conflict with point 2)

Change the rule of equalling non-participation in circular resolutions to abstinence.
Change the quorum for circular resolutions (suggestion: same as in normal meetings).
Any circular passing without passing an absolute 50% threshold needs to be confirmed by the next board meeting (suggestion by Christoph on the osmf-talk mailing list).

Action item: Mikel to work on potential updates to vote on.

Board representative on the trademark license subcommittee

The board has accepted the LWG proposed trademark license subcommittee structure with two members of the Licensing Working Group and one board member. Discussion about who the board representative will be.
Lead: Kate

Paul is on the LWG, as well as on the board.

The rest of the board members don't know if he is interested to be on the trademark license subcommittee.
On whether being a LWG member could be reason for exclusion, no objections were voiced.

Heather would like to know about the position's related time commitment and requirements and might be a backfill for Paul, if he's not available.

Action item: Heather to talk to Paul and get more details and then contact the LWG, if required.

Directed Editing Policy

There is an increased interest on OSM from corporations who have employees that edit in their daytime. This might create communication problems between paid and volunteer mappers, or even an imbalance of power. Out of this situation the question arises on how to regulate this to ensure fair play. The board had asked the Data Working Group (DWG) to work on a corporate editing policy, in a manner that it has sufficient community input, and before anything is decided to come back to the board. The views of the community members were collected through a DWG survey (2017-Sep) DWG issued a draft Directed Editing policy (2017-Nov) The Advisory Board discussed an alternate version There was discussion on the osmf-talk mailing list Previous board discussions: July 2017, June 2017, April 2017
Lead: Frederik

Feedback
A lot - received from:

People currently involved in directed editing,
Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT),
Projet Espace OSM Francophone,
People from the Advisory Board presented draft with slightly different direction

Feedback was mostly constructive and there were many suggestions.

Main question: Who is this policy going to apply to.

There are certain things that is clear the policy will never|always apply to.
Some kinds of editing activities require more thought. Such a complicated example has been provided by HOT.

Timeline
The Data Working Group:

is processing the feedback and working on a updated version of the policy.
will run the new version by someone who is professionally tasked to write understandable texts.
will either ask for feedback on the mailing list or show it to the board.

Time estimation: at least 1 month.

Suggestions

One more round of community feedback.
Publishing the minutes of the DWG discussions.

Dorothea's contract 2018

Dorothea's contract is up in March. We need to make a decision to extend it for a year (or some other period) and any terms that may need changing, if any. We invite feedback from members, either on osmf-talk or at board@osmfoundation.org. Related discussions: Mar 2017 (closed portion), Apr 2017 (Voting - closed portion)
Lead: Martijn

Feedback requested from the membership about having the position. Response positive.

Next decisions

Whether to renew the contract.
Whether the contract will be any different.

Suggestion: round of consultation from Working Groups to see whether they would benefit from assistance.

Action item: Martijn to ask the Working Groups if they would like administrative assistance.

Belgium Local Chapter application

OpenStreetMap Belgium has applied to become the OSMF Local Chapter for Belgium. All necessary documents and translations have been received. Related discussion: Sep 2017
Lead: Martijn

Next steps

Martijn to review the submitted documents.
Local community consultation.
Membership consultation.

Action items

Martijn to review the submitted documents to be considered for the OSM-Belgium Local Chapter application.
Martijn to initiate the local community and membership consultations regarding the OSM-Belgium LC application.

Prioritising 2018

Prioritising 2018 tasks. Some ongoing and potential tasks are listed on the 2017 overview.

Action item: Kate to initiate discussion about 2018 priorities over email.

General Data Protection Regulation & Licensing Working Group (tangential discussion)

GDPR is one of the topics the LWG is working on.
The LWG has consulted a legal expert in the past (pro bono).
An amount has been included in the LWG 2018 budget to counsel with real lawyers on the issue.

Heather has experience with GDPR and will ask the LWG if they need any help.

Advisory Board - monthly update

The Advisory Board (AB) is an entity separate from the OSMF board of directors, composed of individuals - either nominated by corporate members of the OSMF or invited directly by the OSMF board of directors. The OSMF Board of Directors will publicly minute, in the board meeting minutes, any communication sent to, or received from, the AB. This monthly section is reserved for this purpose. Related discussions: Oct 2017, May 2017 (F2F), Apr 2017, Mar 2017, Feb 2017, Jan 2017.
Lead: Martijn

In January 2018, the OSMF Board of Directors invited the Advisory Board to contribute to the draft of the Welcome Mat to Organisations.

Any other business

Updating board member bios on the OSMF wiki

Suggestion by Imagico (guest) to all board members, especially Paul and Heather.

Board member biographies are on this page.

Next meeting

Meetings now take place on the 3rd Thursday of the month, at 21:00 London time, unless rescheduled.

The next monthly board meeting will be on the 15th of February, at 21:00 London time, unless rescheduled.

Meeting end

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