Board/Minutes/2022-01

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Date and time: Thursday, 27 January 2022, 13:00 UTC - Countdown

The topics of the agenda get locked one week before the meeting.

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

Acronyms

Participants

Board members

  • Amanda McCann (Chairing this meeting)
  • Eugene Alvin Villar
  • Mikel Maron
  • Roland Olbricht
  • Tobias Knerr

Officers and board
Biographies

Minutes by Dorothea Kazazi.

Not Present

  • Guillaume Rischard
  • Jean-Marc Liotier

Guests

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.

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Administrative

Previous minutes

Circular Resolutions

2022/Res01 Approve active contributor membership application 2021121410000054

The Board currently decides on active contributor membership applications based on non-mapping contributions on a case-by-case basis.

Accepted on 2022-01-13 with
3 votes in favour: Mikel Maron, Tobias Knerr, Eugene Alvin Villar (When I checked the applicant's HDYC profile, they have already met the minimum 42 days of mapping thanks to a sprint of mapping in [month], so I see no reason to reject this application as it stands.)
2 abstained: Amanda McCann, Roland Olbricht (Is regularly active, and pattern does not look like only paid mapping. On the other hand has mapped mostly buildings for quite some time, apparently never a relation: looks rather like a beginner. Given that we want more participation from Africa and that the 15 GBP are expensive there, it make sense to let [them] join. Disclaimer: I'm still calibrating my standards, I have not seen that much applications so far.)
2 not voted: Guillaume Rischard, Jean-Marc Liotier

Application initially processed by the Membership Working Group.

2022/Res02 Update Board Rules of Order to mention NextCloud polls for circular resolutions

To change §7.3 of the Board Rules of Order from:

> Any board member has the right to request a circular resolution at any time, by the means which electronic circulars are implemented (currently Loomio) together with a reasoning to the board mailing list. The reasoning should describe why the proposed resolution is in the best interests of OSMF.

to:

> Any board member has the right to request a circular resolution at any time, by the means which electronic circulars are implemented (currently OSMF's NextCloud Polls, or if needed Loomio) together with a reasoning to the board mailing list. The reasoning should describe why the proposed resolution is in the best interests of OSMF.

This allows the use of NextCloud Polls on files.osmfoundation.org for circular resolutions, and makes clear they count from now on. Added text is in bold, but is not included in Board Rules of Order.

Accepted on 2022-01-20 with
4 votes in favour: Amanda McCann, Roland Olbricht, Tobias Knerr, Guillaume Rischard (Mikel said: "Someone else vote yes and we can stop wasting each other's time")
1 against: Mikel Maron (Let's make the Board Rules or Order generic to any technology. My preference is to simply strike "(currently Loomio)" from the text.)
2 not voted: Jean-Marc Liotier, Eugene Alvin Villar

Circular by Amanda McCann.

2022/Res03 Approve active contributor membership application 2022011110000195

The Board currently decides on active contributor membership applications based on non-mapping contributions on a case-by-case basis.

Accepted on 2022-01-21 with
3 votes in favour:
- Mikel Maron
- Roland Olbricht (The provided information is too incomplete for me, because I have no idea what "Global Projects Manager" actually means. Other than that, [they are] capable of mapping after having a look at the three most recent changesets (added a street and a POI with useful tags, gave an unnamed river a name). Thus benefit of the doubt.)
- Eugene Alvin Villar (This is a membership renewal, and while they haven't mapped much this past year, they have created, managed, and helped validate several HOT tasking manager projects.)
2 abstained:
- Tobias Knerr
- Amanda McCann (Unsure. I find the combination of their job description & level of mapping strange. I defer to other board members.)
2 not voted: Guillaume Rischard, Jean-Marc Liotier.

Application initially processed by the Membership Working Group.

Action item updates

See Board/Action_Items.

Reportage

  • Eugene offered to take-up some action items during Mikel's leave.
  • Mikel will work on a write-up on things that could be taken over by other board members while he's on leave.

Treasurer's report

Roland Olbricht has an appointment with Guillaume Rischard about the Treasurer's handover.

  • Roland needs access to some accounts.
  • Microsoft (Corporate Member)
    • Donation of USD 10,000 to be made.
    • Unknown status of the creation of an OSMF account on Microsoft's Supplier portal.
  • Paypal
    • Some invoices paid automatically from the Paypal account.
    • Multiple emails received by Treasurer from Paypal for every payment of membership fees.
  • Xero (online accounting/book-keeping platform): Roland to be on-boarded.

Software dispute resolution panel for iD

  • No public announcements from the Software dispute resolution panel about any case of dispute.
  • There was some contact of board members with members of the panel last year, but nothing recently.

Do we want to change anything now or let the panel go on for another year?

Suggestions

  • Ask the panel for a report and recommendations on what to do next.
  • Have the topic on the agenda of the next board meeting.

Action item: Tobias to ask the Software dispute resolution panel to provide a report for their work during the previous year or to have a discussion with the board.

Membership prerequisites and April General Meeting preparations

The board needs to write the text regarding membership prerequisites, which will be proposed to the OSMF membership for voting during the April General Meeting.

On mapping contributions

  • We already have criteria for mapping contributions. If you apply to be an OSMF member via the active contributor membership program and you have 42 mapping days during the past year, you are automatically granted an associate OSMF membership.
  • 42 was a median value selected by the Membership Working Group, so if we use that value as a threshold for granting OSMF memberships in general, we will exclude a lot of people.
    • We want members of the OSMF to have a stake in OSM, not just be members because they paid.

On non-mapping contributions

  • Many activities can be considered as non-mapping contributions to the OSM project - it will be difficult to enumerate them.
  • We need to have a fallback to a board decision for cases that cannot be quantified.

Suggestions on criteria for granting OSMF memberships

  • Ask the community for criteria.
    • Concern: People with extreme ideas will dominate the discussion or we might not get any suggestions.
  • Draft specific criteria and get feedback from the community.

Other suggestions

  • Have three groups: People who pay, people who get free membership through contributions, and people who can't get a membership because their mapping days are too few.
    • Comment that the contribution criteria will also be applicable to the members who pay.
  • Lower the number of mapping days from 42 to become members.
  • Set a minimum duration of account registration on www.openstreetmap.org before the application for OSMF membership.

Other points mentioned during discussion

  • Take into account any timing constraints by Companies Act for announcements and members' voting eligibility (Dorothea has added the deadlines on the board Gitlab ticket).

Action item: Tobias to create a draft document with suggested text to be discussed by the board. After that the text will be circulated to the community for feedback.

Fundraising committee meetings

  • Mikel had discussions with some interested people.
  • Committee needs to think about budgetary needs - the Treasurer will be involved.

Aims

  • To diversify funds.
  • To get multi-year commitment from main Corporate Members and companies that have provided big donations so far, to have a stable stream of funds.
    • We should have a high level plan for financial needs of next years, even by extrapolating the current needs (hardware, personnel, Working Groups, any ideas mentioned at the board screen-to-screen meeting) - Answer in response to question by Roland Olbricht.
  • In second/third quarter of 2022: Have pitch for 2023 funding.

Other points mentioned

  • Reached stability for OSMF's financial needs for personnel and hardware needs.

Next steps

  • Mikel to convene a meeting with interested people next week, to put together a proposed charter and course of action for the rest of year.
  • Talk with those who have been the main funders so far, either as corporate members or donors. Provide them with previews.

Should we target individual donors except corporate ones? (Question by Eugene Alvin Villar)

> Yes.
> Important part of diversification and providing opportunity of participation for all parts of the community.

On HOT trademark grant agreement

Comment by Amanda that it has been suggested to have a licence fee for granting use of the OSM marks to HOT (Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team - separate organisation from the OSM Foundation - Background on the discussions between OSMF and HOT here).

> Mikel's idea has been partnering with HOT for fundraising. Relationships and connections they have in sources of funding would be more valuable.

On getting regular meetings of the committee started

  • Mikel to convene an initial meeting with interested people he has already contacted.
  • After getting the ok from the board on the proposed charter of the fundraising committee, will get regular schedule of meetings and open the meetings up for participation.

Next OSMF Board screen-to-screen meeting (2022Q1)

  • Allen Gunn (Gunner - proposed facilitator) has limited availability.
  • Mikel is going to be on leave for some time.
  • The meeting will take place on two consecutive days.

Suggestions

  • Try the screen-to-screen meeting without facilitation by Allen Gunn.
  • Have facilitation one day and not the other.

Do we know other potential facilitators? Question by Tobias Knerr.

  • Amanda volunteered to look into other potential facilitators.
  • Recommendation by Mikel to have Allen Gunn on the first day and building of the agenda, as he has been valuable before.

Voting on the days of the screen-to-screen meeting

OpenStreetMap Austria Local Chapter Application

The OSM Austria articles of association look fine according to the Secretary.

On FOSSGIS and the application

  • FOSSGIS is the Local Chapter (LC) for Germany.
  • FOSSGIS is also the OSGEO local chapter for the German-speaking area, which includes Austria.

Do OSMers in Austria feel more at home in FOSSGIS or OSM-Austria? (Question by Amanda McCann)

Tobias and Roland: Self-declared Conflict of Interest (CoI) on any vote, as they are active in FOSSGIS. (Board conflict of interest policy).

Feedback from Roland

  • Austrians mainly gather around OSM-Austria. There is an annual conference loosely related with OSM in Salzburg, where OSM Austria is active and FOSSGIS isn't.
  • FOSSGIS will probably not have any objection to the application.
  • In Switzerland (where FOSSGIS is also the OSGEO local chapter) we already have OSM Switzerland as the OSM local chapter.

Next steps, to be done in parallel

  • Secretary to contact FOSSGIS.
  • Extended community consultation phase (more than the usual two weeks).

OSMF account for Communication Working Group's promotional material programme and direct charging

Vote

Suggestion
Periodic reports on the promotional material programme (amount expended, number of stickers sent).
- Amanda has created a wiki page and intends to send monthly reports to the Communication Working Group (CWG).

Monthly presentation - Operation Fistula

Operation Fistula presenters: Seth Cochran and Dolly Andriatsiferana.
Project's OSM wiki page

  • Operation Fistula is a charity focused on the condition obstetric fistula, which is a childbirth injury that happens to women who need a Caesarean section but don't get a quality one in time.
  • Devastating condition but highly treatable with cheap surgery.
  • The organisation is based in Madagascar.

Mission: Find the women who have this condition and get them treated.

Operation Fistula and mapping on OSM

  • The organisation got into mapping as the mission was expanded to find every patient in an area. Seth Cochran met Mikel Maron (OSMF board, HOT) 3 years ago and OSM was a natural choice of a tool.
  • Operation Fistula hired Dolly Andriatsiferana (member of the Madagascar OSM community) to build a team and accelerate mapping in the target regions.
  • Use of Facebook telemetry data and OSM data.
  • Growth of mapped area in OSM: from area covering 10% of Madagascar's population (around 3 years ago) to 20% in the last year, due to Dolly and his team.

State of OSM in Madagascar 3 years ago

  • Mapped area covering 10% of Madagascar's population.
  • In some regions, OSM was unusable - one of the barriers preventing organisations and public stakeholders from incorporating OSM.

On quality of mapping the road network

  • The Madagascar community uses the Highway Tag Africa guidelines for mapping the road network.
  • Organised editing by organisations that do not follow these guidelines produces problematic results, with "floating (unconnected) islands" of the road network. ([tasks.hotosm.org/projects/ HOT tasking manager project 117117 by the United Nations] was provided as an example)

Documented guidelines

  • Operation Fistula created a document with guidelines on how to map every feature, for training the mappers.
  • The document is now used by other companies in Madagascar to train their mappers.

Quality assurance
There is also quality assurance for the work of the mapping team, e.g.

  • at level of changeset with JOSM validator
  • at project level
  • harmonisation of data with help of GPS tracks and geotagged photos
  • use of Osmose
  • database requests to find unusual attribute values
  • spatial analysis to find "floating islands" in the road network

Next steps and final thoughts

  • Operation Fistula is working on automating and scaling the quality assurance process across organisations - will start mapping in Senegal with a larger NGO.
  • For any organisation that does community-based work, within 5-10 years it is an absolute given that you will have to have a quality map to meet the needs of distributed populations.
  • Operation Fistula is a major advocate for OSM and improving the quality of the data.

Comment by Imagico (guest) that the "Consignes de cartographie OpenStreetMap" could be of value translated to other languages

Contributions without individual OSM accounts

External tools like Wheelmap and the recently introduced Microsoft MapBuilder allow their users to submit changes to the OSM data via a single account, instead of having one account per individual contributor.

The Data Working Group (DWG), after request by the board, sent a well thought-out list of requirements for contributions to OSM via external services - such as the Microsoft MapBuilder - for the contributor to be a meaningful part of the community. E.g.

  • Ability to be contacted through means that OSM offers, e.g. messages on changesets created by the individual.
  • Being aware of contributing to OSM.
  • Consenting to our licence terms.
  • Being able to be moderated/blocked - vandalism shouldn't be able to slip under the radar through a common account.
  • Being able to delete all contributions by a particular user.

How would a scalable solution look from an OSM point of view? Would have to be usable also by smaller organisations than Microsoft. Question posed during Advisory Board meeting.

On Microsoft's recently introduced the Microsoft MapBuilder

Mapbuilder, recently presented during an Advirory Board meeting and currently available to limited Microsoft accounts, allows contributionsto OSM without individual OSM accounts.

  • Simplified experience.
  • Associating changesets to the particular Microsoft user that created them - this is only visible to Microsoft.
  • There is quality control and ability to communicate through the systems of Microsoft.

Considerations on the general topic

  • Operational/technical requirements for acceptable use of www.osm.org
  • Legal requirements - at what point do the contributors agree to the OSM contributor terms of service? Is it sufficient only for the unified account to have agreed?

Suggestions

  • Restrict the content that is mapped, as done via the Wheelmap app (by Roland)
  • Should have at least one automatically-created account per user, so that it can be blocked by moderators and in cases of vandalism, as the DWG recommended. (by Tobias)
  • Having the possibility to upgrade the automatically created individual accounts, to one fully owned by the user - if technically possible. (by Tobias)
  • Reach out to working groups, Microsoft, other Advisory Board members and add it to the next Advisory Board meeting.
  • Regarding Microsoft
    • The topic of blocks should be raised. (by Mikel)
    • Compiling discussion points and feedback and provide them to Microsoft directly. (by Mikel)

Concerns

  • Competition for members - if people start to substantially contribute, we should expect them to contribute via www.osm.org.
  • Having many users under a single account and owning the entire workflow.
  • Does lowering the barrier for first contributions outweigh the risk of people settling into an external process and never contributing via the OSM infrastructure?

Decision

Next steps and action items to be decided during the mid-month meeting.

Moderation team suggestion from LCCWG

Suggestions

Points mentioned during discussion

  • It might not be legal to publicly disclose the information asked by the board about the proposed persons for the moderation team.
    • Suggestion: As a compromise, the answers could be disclosed to the board members who were also members of the subcommittee when it started (Amanda McCann and Tobias Knerr).
  • It's up to the moderation subcommittee if they will answer.

Vote

Action item: Amanda to email the LCCWG moderation subcommittee.

Advisory Board - monthly update

No update.

Any other business

No other business.

Guest comments or questions

No comments or questions.

Next meeting

  • 2022-02-10 at 13:00 UTC: Mid-month board chat (not open to observers)
  • 2022-02-24 at 13:00 UTC: Board meeting (open to observers)

Open board meetings take place online once a month. The recurring day and time for board meetings and mid-month board chats has not been set yet.

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

Dorothea's contract renewal

Meeting adjourned 2 hours and 30 minutes after start.

Acronyms

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