Board/Minutes/2021-02-S2S/Discuss rebooting the Engineering Working Group

From OpenStreetMap Foundation

Discuss rebooting the Engineering Working Group

Notes by participants. Might be enriched.

This session took place in parallel with "Discuss Membership prerequisites - steps towards Annual General Meeting resolution". A summary was provided to the other group.

Acronyms

Participants

Board members

  • Allan Mustard
  • Eugene Alvin Villar (facilitator for this session)
  • Jean-Marc

The rest of the board members participated in the parallel session.

Biographies.

Also present: Dorothea Kazazi (administrative assistant)

Collaborative notes

Naming ? Should it be the Software Ecosystem Working Group ?

Roles:
- Architecture of the Openstreetmap infrastructure.
- Core Openstreetmap specifications.
- API standardization.
- Dialog with third parties in the software ecosystem.
- Developer support (including Google Summer of Code).

Standardization role might attract data users. Sufficient number of altruists is needed to balance their lobbying.

Software developers might find a forum beneficial for expressing their needs in dialog with other developers. A role in the working group will help them influence API development. Just announcing that the working group is the forum for discussing API evolution might be sufficient to get developers running to it.

Offer developer bait - the most interesting problems that most benefit Openstreetmap.

Decisions

  • Suggestion: Update Top Ten Tasks to include why it would benefit OSM.
  • Be mindful of conflict of interest (note that Board already tasked Working Groups to adopt the Conflict of Intrest (CoI) Policy in absence of a specific working group policy).
    • Avoid logrolling.
    • Make sure group is large enough (how?).
    • Board makes last decision for EWG members' projects.

Action items

  • Eugene to request Quincy, Sarah, Jochen, Michal, and Richard to join the Engineering Working Group.
  • Eugene to provide some top-line expectations that the EWG should work on (aligned with the Strategic Plan).
  • Eugene to reach out to existing EWG to see their feedback on Board's ideas.
    • Ask them to update the wiki page, add list of members.
  • Eugene to talk to Paul about his efforts to revive the group (has anything happened?).
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