Board/Minutes/2020-10-S2S/Supporting API

From OpenStreetMap Foundation

Notes by participants. Might be enriched.

This session took place in parallel with "Regulating corporate participation in foundation bodies". A summary was provided to the other group.

Participants

Board members

  • Paul Norman
  • Joost Schouppe (Secretary)
  • Guillaume Rischard (Treasurer)

The rest of the board members participated in the parallel session "Regulating corporate participation in foundation bodies".

Biographies.

Notes

We suppose that the intent of this discussion was on the rails port (the code that runs openstreetmap.org)
Rails port has been neglected and stagnant
Improvement is needed to make it easier to contribute.

Rails port is >10 years old. Best practices now aren't what we did at the time.

Most of Andy's work is on modernising that in the background - mostly transparent to the user. Lots of ruby/rails knowledge required, not a lot of OSM knowledge necessary.

https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/pulls 39 pull requests

No shovel-ready project where someone wants support to work on it.

Rails diminishing in popularity

Would Andy be willing to coach new (paid?) contributor(s), or work (paid?) on the rails port one day a week?

Capacity within the OSMF to monitor such a project? New for us to be doing this stuff, and we're already doing a bunch of it. Priority should be on what we've got going.

Should Engineering Working Group (EWG) be taking care of this? We said we'd pick three projects as a pilot project to learn from, and then pass this over to EWG.

Current website doesn't cover basic community needs : sharing the news, meeting the neighbours...

MicrocOSM pull request seems to have gone dormant. Big project, a lot to chew on, and still not ready for review.

Tom (OSM sysadmin) works on the Rails port and might have more time to work on it when we have a full-time Site Reliability Engineer?

If someone were to present a plan on how to do this, we would probably go for it anyway.

Decisions

  • Board cannot take on even more project management (prove us wrong!) and should finish and learn from the current three projects (Nominatim, osm2pgsql, Potlatch) and the microgrants first.
  • This stuff needs doing.
  • We do need to have long-term plans about where we want the project's software to go.
  • We need to find volunteers to run projects (EWG).
Retrieved from "https://osmfoundation.org/w/index.php?title=Board/Minutes/2020-10-S2S/Supporting_API&oldid=7673"