Board/Minutes/2021-03

Date and time: Friday, 26 March 2021 14:00 UTC - Countdown

Location: Video room https://osmvideo.cloud68.co/user/ror-nt7-6tu
using BigBlueButton.

Acronyms

Participants

Board members

Allan Mustard (Chairing)
Eugene Alvin Villar
Guillaume Rischard
Mikel Maron
Tobias Knerr
Rory McCann

Officers and board
Biographies

Minutes by Dorothea Kazazi

Not Present

Jean-Marc Liotier

Guests

22 guests, including Felix Delattre (FOSS Policy Special committee - topic: Nextcloud), Maggie Cawley and Clifford Snow (topic: Presentation from LCCWG subcommittee).

Open to all OSMF members.

You are welcome to ask questions or to comment (via voice or on the chat) at the end of the meeting.

Please mute your microphone when you join, and to preserve bandwidth, refrain from turning on your webcam.
If you are in a low-bandwidth environment, you may benefit from using BigBlueButton's low-bandwidth settings.

Administrative

Previous minutes

2021-02-26 Accepted

Circular Resolutions

About circular resolutions.
Board conflict of interest policy.

2021/Res08 Geosm trademark license agreement

Please refer to the PDF circulated today to board@osmfoundation.org.
Accepted on 2021-03-05 with 4 votes in favour: Allan Mustard, Tobias Knerr, Guillaume Rischard (My concerns about attributions have been addressed, and I now agree with the proposal), Jean-Marc Liotier. 3 not voted: Mikel Maron, Eugene Alvin Villar, Rory McCann.
Circular by Jean-Marc Liotier.

Background:
In December 2020 the Licensing Working Group (LWG) received an inquiry regarding GeOsm and its trademark status. This was a topic of the January LWG meeting and Kathleen Lu (LWG) reached to Willy Franck Sob, the main operator of GeOsm. He explained that GeOsm is an expansion of GeoCameroun, and is now used by 21 African countries. It is a data portal to make open maps for the countries more easily accessible. His hope is that GeOsm will eventually be used by countries all over the world. The LWG suggested that OSMF should come with an agreement with GeOsm. An action item of the February mid-month] board meeting was for Jean-Marc (Board) to communicate with Kathleen Lu (LWG) on drafting something for the board to approve.

2021/Res09 Suspend user immediately and indefinitely

Suspend <user> on all the channels that are under the control of the OSMF.* Email <user> to make them aware of their suspension.*
Unanimously accepted on 2021-03-15 with 7 votes in favour: Allan Mustard, Tobias Knerr, Guillaume Rischard, Jean-Marc Liotier (Damage control first - we'll consider an appeal later), Mikel Maron, Eugene Alvin Villar, Rory McCann.
Circular by Guillaume Rischard

* OSM username redacted. Reason provided: user privacy.

2021/Res10 Nominatim integration in QGIS

The OSMF board is supportive of the Operation Working Group's preliminary plans to serve QGIS traffic from OSMF infrastructure. We ask the OWG to work out the details of the arrangement together with the QGIS and Nominatim teams.
Accepted on 2021-03-23 with 5 votes in favour: Jean-Marc Liotier, Allan Mustard, Guillaume Rischard, Tobias Knerr, Eugene Alvin Villar (I agree with the proviso that this arrangement does not provide any precedent for OSMF to provide more general or bespoke geo-services to third parties). 2 abstained: Rory McCann (My employer provides Nominatim services, so as an abundance of caution, I abstain from this vote), Mikel Maron (Abstain from vote due to conflict of interest, Mapbox provides search services).
Circular by Tobias Knerr.

Previous action items

See Board/Action_Items.

Treasurer's report

Received a payment from Grab (Gold Corporate Member).

Vote on OSMF Japan Local Chapter application

Background

Background:

一般社団法人オープンストリートマップ・ファウンデーション・ジャパン (OpenStreetMap Foundation Japan) has applied to be the Local Chapter for Japan.

Local and membership consultations.

Suggested by Rory McCann.

Voting

Accepted.

Vote on OSM Poland Local Chapter application

Background

Background:

Stowarzyszenie OpenStreetMap Polska has applied to be the Local Chapter for Poland.

Local (talk-pl mailing list and forum) and membership consultations.

Suggested by Rory McCann.

Voting

Accepted.

One of the countries where OSMF has the least amount of members per mapper.
Hope that with OSM Poland the Foundation can get better representation for Polish mappers in OpenStreetMap.

Decide on NextCloud

Background

Currently, the OSMF board and Working Groups are using Google and other external services.

The FOSS Policy Special Committee, after a request by a working group and individual board members, had asked cloud68.co to set up a Nextcloud with OnlyOffice instance for OSMF until the third week of March for testing purposes. Nextcloud is a suite of client-server software for creating and using file hosting services. According to the committee, this tool might be useful to replace some services hosted outside of the control of the OSMF:

Google Calendar/Drive/Docs/Forms/Sheets
Etherpad/Ethercalc/HackMD
Nextclouds hosted elsewhere

The FOSS Policy Special Committee had reached out to the working groups, the OSMF membership and the board and invited them to test the Cloud68-hosted Nextcloud instance with OnlyOffice and provide feedback by March 20. The committee will compile the feedback and present it to the board so that they can take further action to proceed or not with the contracting of this instance.

For more background information and reasoning for using Nextcloud, please have a look at the recommendations in the report that the FOSS Policy Special Committee recently published.

Related past discussion:

2021-01 Inventory of free and non-free tools by the FOSS policy special committee.

Suggested by Mikel Maron.

Trial with the same provider (Cloud68) as for the BigBlueButton videoconferencing instance.
264 EUR/year.

Local Chapters and Communities Working Group:

Voted to use Nextcloud and asked the board for its use.
Started using the test Nextcloud instance and they migrated their documents to it (mentioned by Maggie Cawley during the meeting on the chat).
Had to get a survey out this week so they copied that over to another service.
Felt pressured to try the test instance and now they have much of their work on it.

Mikel:

Tried spreadsheets for fundraising.

FOSS Policy Special committee:

Was waiting for feedback on the test Nextcloud instance.

Treasurer:

Amount for Nextcloud to be included in the budget of operations or the board.
Is fine to be budgeting Nextcloud as an ongoing expense.

FOSS Policy Special Committee: feedback on use of test Nextcloud instance with OnlyOffice and recommendation

Overview provided by Felix Delattre.

Brief overview of the feedback the FOSS Policy Special Committee has received around the testing of the Open Source collaboration suite Nextcloud with OnlyOffice provided by cloud68.co as a tool.

Very little feedback received, but this was generally positive. No oppositions have been raised anywhere. It is recommended to purchase [a Nextcloud subscription] to comply with the FOSS Policy and strength the organizational standpoint regarding user privacy.

The FOSS Policy Special Committee reached out to and with:

Two emails to all working groups, committees, the board and the board's assistant.
The osmf-talk mailing list (for OSMF members - become an OSMF member).

14 accounts have been created.

The feedback received:

One Working Group Local Chapters and Communities Working Group voted in favor of adapting the software.
One individual from another working group expressed positive feedback.
The board assistant sees this as a useful tool.

Potential

Replace commercial tools: Google Drive/Docs/Sheet/Calendar/Forms
More privacy aware use for hackpads like freeware hackmd.io and etherpad.
Offer free and open alternatives according to the FOSS Policy.
Strengthen the organization's compliance with the European General Data Protection Regulation. Especially critical for activities around personal data, such as members.

Price: Small instance (seems to be enough for now): 22 Euros/month.

Recommendation:
"The FOSS Policy Special Committee expressed the recommendation to contract two years of the tool and evaluate afterwards the adaption and use (total of 528 Euros). It was well received, and provides a fundamental pillar according to the FOSS Policy to offer Open Source alternatives for an inclusive community. It also fulfills the obligations of the OSMF to comply better with the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)".

Voting

Amended motion to budget for contract with Cloud68 for Nextcloud with OnlyOffice for 2 years.
Accepted, no objections.

Other suggestions

Migration of all Google spreadsheet documents.
Budget related: Re-establish the default EUR 1000/year budget for each Working Group, if a Working Group does not mention any higher requirements when asked for their next year's budget.

Operations Working Group budget

The Operations Working Group proposed to the board a 2021 budget with low, medium, and high options. It starts at 2021Q2 and runs for one year. The OSMF Board has talked about this at the March mid-month chat, and is going to vote during this meeting.

Background

Suggested by Tobias Knerr.

Past year: budgeted for amount similar to the high option.
Stability is the top priority of the recent survey participants.
Treasurer in favour of adopting the high option.

Voting

Motion to approve high option of Operations Working Group budget.
Accepted, no objections.

Articles of Association: Count time as associate member for board candidacy requirements

Background

The board discovered an Articles of Association (AoA) oversight during the preparations for last year's elections: People who have been part of the OSMF for a long time, but spent much of that time as associate members, may be prevented from running for the board because they do not formally meet the requirement of having been a member for 180 days. This is because "associate members" are, counter-intuitively, not treated as a subset of "members" in the Articles of Association. The board is considering to propose to the membership a change to paragraph 79 of the Articles of Association.

Past discussion:

2021-02-12 Updating Articles of Association (mid-month board chat)

Suggested by Tobias Knerr.

Draft updated to include a requirement to be a regular member for 28 days.
There was a case last year with a community member who wanted to be a Board candidate and while they switched from associate membership to normal membership as required they couldn't run for the board, as the duration of the associate membership did not count towards the 180 days of membership (see the background section above).
Text on join.osmfoundation.org is not clear on that you cannot run for the board if you are an associate member.

Suggestion: Start a circular to submit it to the membership at the next General Meeting.

Action item: Tobias to send the proposed text to the membership and ask people how they want to clarify the wording on join.osmfoundation.org.

Advisory Board - monthly update

Background

The Advisory Board members are separate from the OSMF board of directors - individuals are either nominated by Local Chapters and Gold or higher 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 members. This monthly section is reserved for this purpose.

Overview of board communications with representatives on the Advisory Board.
(single page displaying all the monthly updates that are linked below)

2021 Jan, Feb
2020 Jan, Feb, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec
2019 Jan, Mar, Jun, Jul, Aug, Oct
2018 Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Dec
2017 Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May (F2F), Oct

Rory McCann

Planning meeting in 2 months.
Asking new or recently accepted Local Chapters to nominate people as Advisory Board representatives,

Presentation from Local Chapters and Communities Working Group moderation subcommittee

Background

The Board has requested from the Local Chapters and Communities Working Group (LCCWG) subcommittee to complete community consultations in a timely manner and provide to the Board a draft implementation plan (i.e. steps that the subcommittee will take and time frames) for the subcommittee recommendations included in their January report to the board.

The board also

urged the LCCWG subcommittee to accelerate implementation of moderation of the talk (community) and osmf-talk (membership) mailing lists.
encouraged the LCCWG subcommittee to add members to fill any gaps that might prevent the subcommittee from being as representative of the OSM community as is practical.
encouraged the LCCWG subcommittee to consider some kind of approval mechanism that ensures selection of moderators who have the trust of the community subject to the moderation.

Background:
On 9th of December 2020 a group of community members sent to the osmf-talk* mailing list a statement Calling People to Take Action and Confront Systemic Offensive Behavior in the OSM Community (.pdf on the wiki, Gdoc here) asking amongst others:

people to support the statement, help co-write and translate it and
OSMF to implement the suggested changes.

The content of the statement was locked on December 16th and it includes the names of 310 community members and 47 organisations in support.

The board has asked the Local Chapters and Communities Working Group (LCCWG) to work with other parts of the community and come back in January with a suggested course of action. The LCCWG subcommittee which was formed for this task presented this report on the 29th of January.

The board discussed its response during the February screen-to-screen board meeting and asked the LCCWG to present an implementation plan (steps and time frames) at the March board meeting. The board also urged the LCCWG to accelerate implementation of moderation of the talk lists in less than six months and clarified that it does not expect a rewrite of the etiquette guidelines in that time frame.

Related discussions:

2021-02-12: LCCWG moderation subcommittee (mid-month board chat)
2021-02-06: Decide on our response to the moderation subcommittee report (board screen-to-screen meeting)
Messages on the osmf-talk mailing list.
2020-12-10: Question by Rebecca Firth (guest), as a representative of the group that has drafted the call to action.
2020-12-18: comment by Nicolas and comment by Pierre Béland (guests).

* osmf-talk is the mailing list for OSMF members (Join). All past messages are available here.

Suggested by Allan Mustard and Rory McCann.

Implementation draft and call for participation

Presentation by Maggie Cawley (Local Chapters and Communities Working Group (LCCWG) subcommittee).

4 groups:

Subcommittee group: development of draft documents, regular meetings.
Reviewer group: feedback on initial drafts.
Community group: will be notified when the final texts are available. Email address required.
Research group: People/organisations with experience in developing moderation/codes of etiquette/etc who want to share experiences/recommendations.

Other point mentioned:
Do not recommend necessarily that the OSMF approves the moderation guidelines, but definitely the etiquette guidelines.

Action item: Secretary to add "Interim update from the LCCWG subcommittee" to the public board meeting agenda every two months.

Questions and answers

Answers by Maggie Cawley (Local Chapters and Communities Working Group (LCCWG) subcommittee).

On representation

Question by Guillaume Rischard (Board):
The Board expressed concerns through Rory [McCann] at a previous meeting. Can you remind us and remind the audience what those concerns were and tell us what you've done to address them?

Rory McCann (Board) clarified that he expressed personal concerns at a previous LCCWG subcommittee meeting and was not representing the board. Guillaume Rischard commented that the concerns were shared by other board members and there was concensus on the board chat.

Issue: Representation on the LCCWG subcommittee, who's not completely representative of the OSM community in terms of geography, gender, roles.

Maggie Cawley, on behalf of the LCCWG subcommittee:

The subcommittee:

Wants to be as inclusive as possible
Wants to make anyone who wants to be involved feels invited to do so.
Is addressing the issue via the call for participation.

On community acceptability of the guidelines

Question by Guillaume Rischard (Board):
Is that also how you want to address acceptability of the guidelines? There was concern that it would be just a couple of people working on the guidelines and that they would be rejected by the wider community if there was no community involvement.

Maggie Cawley, on behalf of the LCCWG subcommittee:

The volunteer committees that can be very difficult to generate participation.
There's always going to be a few people carrying more weight than others, especially in the development of documents.
The built-in community feedback is meant to balance that out.

On publication of participants list

Question by Mikel Maron (Board) if the LCCWG moderation subcommittee plans to list the people who are participating in the working group, on the OSMF website or elsewhere.

Maggie Cawley, on behalf of the LCCWG subcommittee:
Sure. The subcommittee keeps its notes in hackpads and happy to do that.

On process and timeline to get moderators in place

Question by Mikel Maron (Board) if the LCCWG moderation subcommittee has a sense of what the process and timeline would be to actually recruit and get moderators in place, assuming that after June 21st the Board says "this sounds good"?

Maggie Cawley, on behalf of the LCCWG subcommittee:

Ideally, an ongoing process.
The LCCWG moderation subcommittee is going to be reaching out to existing moderators to see if any people want to get involved.
It's going to depend on the response to the call for participation.

Part of that recruitment is also going to talk about how the committee would work together, and conflicts of interest.

On board members' participation

Question by Eugene Alvin Villar (Board) regarding the community participation, whether the LCCWG moderation subcommittee would be ok if board members individually would want to participate.

Maggie Cawley, on behalf of the LCCWG subcommittee:

Caution expressed that inclusion of board members within committees can create confusion, if it's not clear whether they are representing the Board or participating due to personal interest.
If you're a prominent member of your local community, is there someone else that you could perhaps get involved in this process, that might represent similar interests?

On start of moderation team and drafting guidelines

Concerns by Guillaume Rischard (Board).

Time: the request from board to enforce the etiquette guidelines as soon as possible was made in December.
- The LCCWG implementation plan suggests that the moderators team might be ready in June.
- There is no firm deadline.
Too many groups/subgroups - potential communication problems.
Drafting guidelines: The people doing the moderation have the best domain knowledge on what should be moderated and how should be moderated and should be drafting the guidelines (Data Working Group work mentioned as a model that works well).

Maggie Cawley, on behalf of the LCCWG subcommittee:
- Given the concerns and weight of the conversation within the community the subcommittee wants to give the issue the respect and the time that its members think it deserves.
- Will work as quickly as possible.

On communication with current moderators

Question by Paul Norman (guest) on the chat on whether the LCCWG subcommittee has talked to the existing moderators of the osmf-talk list, the Membership Working Group (MWG).

Clifford Snow, on behalf of the LCCWG subcommittee (on the chat):
The subcommittee will be reaching out to the existing moderators.

On process for joining the subcommittee

Questions by Rory McCann (Board)
- what is the process for joining the subcommittee (is there voting for people joining) and - what is the process for making decisions, does the committee have rules like the board, for example defining how many votes are needed for something to be decided.

Maggie Cawley, on behalf of the LCCWG subcommittee:

You just have to come to the meeting and want to help the subcommittee.
Reminder that this is a short-term subcommittee that it is just getting itself together and not a long-term board or membership organisation that is going to be making decisions for a very long time.
The best that the group can do with people from all over the building who work very differently.

Points mentioned by board members during discussion

The subcommittee should not feel obliged to take everyone - most working groups tend to have a vote on new members.
A majority vote of the group's membership can expel somebody who's being disruptive.
The board should step back and leave the LCCWG subcommittee to continue.
Appreciation for the enormous amount of work of the subcommittee and thanks.
Next interim report in 2 months.

Any other business

Default EUR 1000 budget for Working Groups

By Guillaume Rischard (Board/Treasurer).

Consensus seems to be that providing a EUR 1000 budget for Working Groups is a good idea. Formally approve it?

Suggestion: Get budget done by next week and include EUR 1000 budget for Working Groups that have not mentioned any amounts when asked for their next year's budget.

Action item: Guillaume to send budget to mailing list and then do a circular.

Guest comments or questions

You are welcome to ask questions or to comment (via voice or on the chat) during this section of the meeting.

Please mute your microphone when you join, and to preserve bandwidth, refrain from turning on your webcam.
If you are in a low-bandwidth environment, you may benefit from using BigBlueButton's low-bandwidth settings.

Status of the MapUganda Local Chapter application?

Question by Geoffrey Kateregga (guest).

Topic discussed during board mid month chat.
The board is concerned about some ways that MapUganda is getting income - specifically peculiarities of licences of data being collected - which might stall the Local Chapter application process.

Action item: Rory McCann (Board/Secretary) to email MapUganda.

Status of the OSMF Japan and Poland Local Chapter applications?

Question by Mateusz Konieczny (guest).

Both Local Chapter applications were accepted.

User suspension question - had they requested anonymity removal?

Question by Mateusz Konieczny (guest), related to the board decision: 2021/Res09 "Suspend user immediately and indefinitely" and the following closed part of the meeting.

No.

Next meetings

Mid-month chat (closed to observers): April 9, 14:00 UTC
Public board meeting: April 30, 14:00 UTC - Countdown

Open board meetings take place online once a month.
New recurring date and time: Last Friday of the month at 14:00 UTC.

See the Monthly Board meetings page to find out where board meetings are announced and for a subscription link to have future board meetings automatically added to your calendar.

Closed session

This part of the meeting was not open to attendees.

User suspension appeal

Background

Related to the recently approved circular: 2021/Res09 "Suspend user immediately and indefinitely". (About circular resolutions)

Reason provided by the board for session being closed: user privacy (board decision - not requested by the user).

Suspension appeal rejected and ban remains.
User to be asked to take a few months off, after which they can appeal again.

Acronyms