Board/Minutes/2021-10-15

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Draft minutes.

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

Please note that this video chat is not open to observers.

Date and time: Friday 15 October 2021, 14:00 UTC - Countdown
Acronyms

Participants

Board members

  • Allan Mustard (Chairperson)
  • Amanda McCann  
  • Tobias Knerr
  • Eugene Alvin Villar
  • Jean-Marc Liotier
  • Mikel Maron

Officers and board
Biographies

Minutes by Dorothea Kazazi

Not Present

  • Guillaume Rischard

Guests

Not open to observers.

Microgrants  

What now?

Suggestions

  • Let the new board decide if there should be a second round of microgrants.
  • Vote at the next board meeting and give instructions to the Microgrants committee (set the parameters for the second round as upper limit for funding/the number of proposals).

On technical work and community work

Should the next microgrants round include both technical work and community oriented work? Or should the Engineering Working Group (EWG) be involved with the technical work?

Points mentioned during discussion

  • Management of technical work be good to be given to the EWG, as it is related to their core remit. They were asking for possible funding and they are probably interested.
  • Microgrants program already has a structure in place and knows how to run it. Requiring the EWG to establish a new process is a lot.
  • EWG is going to look closely at the Microgrants final report.
  • Some projects do not fall neatly into either of the categories.

Suggestions

  • Keep the microgrants structure. Give assessment and work to attract technical microgrants to the EWG.
    • Comment that thIs is one of the recommendations of the microgrants committee.
  • Keep the scheme small and focused.

On budget and financial source

In the trial round, microgrants were intended to distribute the money from the Pineapple donation. If OSMF is going to have regular microgrant rounds, they should be funded from the general budget.

Suggestions

  • Ask the Microgrants committee members if they are willing to continue.
  • A board member needs to owe the second round (communication with the microgrants committee and EWG, formulating parameters, budget).
  • Decide which recommendations by the committee to adopt for the next round.

Action item: Jean-Marc and Amanda to draft a proposal for a second microgrants round, including parameters (amount of money, source of funds, and selected recommendations from the final report (.odt, 29 KB) by the microgrants committee) to be voted during the October board meeting.

Delinquent projects

  • Video project - agreement that it did not deliver.
  • OSM-UK did not seem to meet the criteria, as not all material was provided on an open licence.

General suggestions

  • Ask for money back or make a clear statement that the project(s) did not meet the criteria.
  • Not make a conflict and assume good faith.
    • Comment that failure to respond to communication outreach shows a lack of good faith.
  • Microgrants committee should be monitoring and evaluating progress.

Suggestions on updating the microgrants framework for the next rounds

  • Decisions on denying future grants for the next X rounds to delinquent project(s) can be decided by the microgrants committee.
  • Clear statement about licensing of any works.

Points mentioned during discussion

  • Not an enforceable contract in most jurisdictions.
  • In this trial round (2020-2021) the board chose to not take the Microgrant's committee recommendation of funding more projects.

Membership prerequisites

Some points have been reordered.

On the 2020 Annual General Meeting (AGM) resolution

  • 2020: The board wanted to propose a change fto the membership prerequisites that would be voted by the membership during the Annual General Meeting (AGM). It was argued that it was not clear if the community would want that and that there was not enough time for the board. To resolve the first issue, the board asked the community to vote on this proposal during the 2020 AGM:
    • The board of directors shall, together with the OSMF Membership Working Group, work on a set of proposals to ensure that all successful applicants for membership or associate membership in the OpenStreetMap Foundation have made a reasonable amount of contributions to OpenStreetMap. The specific form of the contributions (e.g. mapping vs. non-mapping) does not make a difference for the fulfillment of these prerequisites. The board shall submit these proposals as possible resolutions at a general meeting in 2021.
  • The proposal was approved by the membership and the board had handed the mandated action to the Membership Working Group (MWG)

On current status

  • Recently, it was suggested for Tobias to join the MWG communication channel and help the MWG to formulate the membership prerequisites that would be proposed during the 2021 AGM.
  • MWG does not have any free capacity to work on this.

On corporate members' uneasiness

There is suspicion that this is a proposal to block people who are mapping professionally on OSM from becoming OSMF members.

Points mentioned during discussion

  • None of the drafts include anything on paid mappers.
  • If becoming an OSMF member will get based on mapping days, paid mappers easily fulfil that requirement.
  • [[100_new_OSMF_membership_accounts_on_2018.11.15] A corporation tried to sign-up many of its employees as OSMF members]] before the 2018 board election, which was one of the factors prompting to change the requirements to become an OSMF members.

On paid mapping and organised mapping

  • We have a clear definition for organised mapping but not for paid mapping.
  • There are people in hierarchical relationships within organisations and people who get renumeration for mapping. Difficult to set a hard criterion.

Suggestions

  • The board to propose changes to the membership prerequisites, to be voted by current OSMF members on this year's AGM.
  • The (new) board to propose changes to the membership prerequisites, to be voted by next year's OSMF members on next year's AGM.
  • The (new) board to propose changes to the membership prerequisites, to be voted by the OSMF members in ~6 months on a General Meeting, which will take place within the next 6 months.

On suggestion to propose changes to the membership prerequisites, to be voted on this year's AGM

  • The board had a year to think about the issue.
  • The board has not used the previous year to think about the issue and there is not enough time to work on this to be ready for the upcoming AGM.
  • The board will not get closer to the agreement on the metric used (e.g. mapping days), if it waits for another 12 months.
    • Comment that there is no agreement on whether mapping days is the right metric.
  • We do have some legal advice on the issue from our pro-bono lawyer, so propose changes for this year's AGM is doable.

On suggestion to propose changes to the membership prerequisites, to be voted on at a General Meeting in 6 months

  • Seems fair and reasonable compromise.

Other points mentioned during discussion

  • This is a failure of the board.
  • The board has not heard anything from the Takeover Protection special committee.
  • Do we have a legal responsibility?
  • Not sure if the membership requirements should be more or less strict than the active contributor membership program.
  • We have not settled on what we're trying to achieve and implementing this is going to be complicated.

Action item: Tobias to have a motion ready to be voted by the board during the October board meeting. The motion will mention that the next board must write the text for a special resolution regarding membership requirements, to be voted by the membership at a General Meeting that will take place during next Spring (Northern hemisphere) / Autumn (Southern hemisphere).

Board members' election candidacy plans

Request to not minute a few minutes of the meeting.

  • M. Maron: Undecided. Will decide after seeing who puts themselves forward. Prefers not to be a candidate , due to the spirit of term limits, but feels the responsibility.
  • A. R. McCann: Undecided. A lot of effort but someone has to do the gardening. Mention of Amanda's name issue.
  • G. Rischard (not present during the meeting): Undecided (as relayed by Allan).

Attribution guideline messaging and enforcement

Mikel Maron asked the board members if they wanted him to stay during this discussion. There was no objection. A member mentioned that they would be interested in the views of Mikel/Mapbox.

On Mapbox attribution

  • Current Mapbox attribution page.
  • A Mapbox customer was mentioned, where the OSM attribution exists behind an i. The customer previously had no attribution, and when Mapbox was notified about it, they asked the company to add attribution.
    • Comment that the customer is in line, as current OSM attribution was based on the width of the map.
  • There was a previous suggestion by a board member for the board to talk directly to Mapbox, but comment that Mapbox knows (Mikel is a board member and Kathleen Lu is on the Licensing Working Group). Comments:
    • There has not been a discussion between OSMF and Mapbox about the recent change related to attribution.
    • The right person to talk to is the Mapbox representative on the Advisory Board (Tom Lee).
    • Suggestion by Allan to visit the office of Mapbox.

On members of OSM french community and attribution concerns

  • Jean-Marc met with members of the french OSM community. A lot of very involved OSMFR members were very vocal about the need for compliance to attribution and there was demand for action.

Points mentioned during discussion

  • Surprised by the results of the 2021 January community survey, as attribution does not seem to be a high priority of the community.

Are you able to divulge if there is going to be a change to Mapbox's policy for attribution? (Question by Amanda to Mikel)

> It's a topic for discussion.

Action item: Mikel to set-up a meeting of Allan with Mapbox, either online or in person.

On communications with organisations and transparency

Raised by OSM France (OSMFR) (Local Chapter) as relayed by Jean-Marc: When to switch the communication with a company from private to public? Should there be a policy?

  • Sometimes it's more productive to do things discreetly as it might make the participant to talk more openly and less defensively.
  • There are also expectations of transparency.

Points mentioned by board members

  • There are a lot of issues the board has added to its agenda and a lot of them are paused as board members do not have the necessary time.
  • No will to draft a policy with explicit criteria. Preference to spend time on the strategic plan (strategic plan outline here)
  • Full transparency brings paralysis. We owe the community a great deal of transparency but not 100% if it leads to paralysis and inability to get anything done.
  • OSMF is an extra-ordinarily transparent organisation.
  • Some things have to be done behind closed-doors.

Suggestion
Give to OSMFR a broad outline of our strategy: the first step is to sit with companies and get them on-board in a collegial manner. There could be an escalation of the issue, if they fail to comply with the attribution guidelines.

Note: There was also a brief mention of a topic that was previously requested to not be minuted.

State of the Map safety policy wording

Mikel had to disconnect 62' after start.

Next steps

  • October board meeting: If the board is fine with the draft, it will be put for community consultation.
  • The duration of community consultation will be at least for 1 month (suggestion by Geochicas and OSM-UK).
  • November board meeting: Depending on the community consultation, the board might vote on the draft.

Hiring update

Guillaume with Martin Raifer (iD developer) are working on a draft announcement, that will be shared with the CWG.

Action item (was Guillaume's): Mikel to set-up a meeting of Senior Site Reliability Engineer with TimelessTime, that Guillaume can join.

Suggestion: Regular community consultations with iD developer.

Discourse rollout

Github ticket: Merge forums, help.osm.org, mailing lists to Discourse?

  • The Operations Working Group (OWG) has set-up an instance of Discourse, which will likely replace help.osm.org and perhaps some or all of the other forums and mailing lists eventually.
  • Technical work mostly done. Login with OSM account working.
  • Mailing list mode will not be available at the start - plan to add it.

On migration

  • Will take some months/a year till most communities have a chance to migrate.

Open questions

  • Supporting languages other than English. Work by HOT community strategist.

Questions related to Operations Working Group 2022 plan

Need to chat with Guillaume as we didn't have an explicit budget for 2 years.

Any other business

Analysis of options for OSMF relocation

Jean-Marc to handle analysis for OSMF relocation.

Action item: Jean-Marc to provide during the October board meeting a list of countries that have responded to us with information which is worth examining, our realistic options and to start looking at whether the new board will want to move in 2022 out of the UK.

Any restrictions for minors becoming OSMF members?

Eugene was invited by YouthMappers network to give a talk at some YouthMappers organisations, inviting them to become members of the OSM Foundation. Many of them would fulfil the criteria for active contributor membership.

Companies act: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2006/46/contents

Action item: Amanda to ask our pro-bono lawyer.

Acronyms

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