Board/Minutes/2022-04

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Date and time: Thursday 28 April 2022, 13:00 UTC - Countdown

The topics of the agenda got locked one week before the meeting, on 2022-04-21.

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

Acronyms

Participants

Board members

["talk" time*] Name (role, notes)

  • [06'] Amanda McCann
  • [15'] Guillaume Rischard (Chairing)
  • [03'] Jean-Marc Liotier
  • [02'] Mikel Maron
  • [10'] Roland Olbricht
  • [02'] Tobias Knerr

*Includes time when the microphone was activated due to noise.

Not Present

  • Eugene Alvin Villar (Apologies)

Officers and board
Biographies

Minutes by Dorothea Kazazi.

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/Res11 Cancel plans for a general meeting in April

The board has not yet agreed on the next step towards membership prerequisites and the implementation may end up using a different mechanism than a membership vote at a general meeting. Therefore, a general meeting may not be needed at all, and would in any case be premature. There are no other topics on the drafted agenda. The board therefore decides to cancel the plans for the general meeting on the 30th of April 2022.

Approved on 2022-04-01 with 5 votes in favour: Guillaume Rischard, Mikel Maron, Roland Olbricht, Tobias Knerr, Eugene Alvin Villar
1 abstained: Amanda McCann (While this isn't ideal, I don't have the time to work on fixing it myself. Hence I defer to my other board members.)
1 did not vote: Jean-Marc Liotier.

Circular by Tobias Knerr.

Related to the 2021-10 board decision to have a General Meeting on 30 April 2022 with a resolution related to membership requirements (background here).

Action item updates

See osm:Foundation/Board_action_items.

Reportage

Moderation team candidates

Related to the 2022-03-24 action item: "Amanda to contact the suggested members of the moderation team and schedule a meeting of the board with them in order to get to know them. Will also ask them to write a paragraph about themselves."

Amanda contacted the proposed members of the moderation team and the board has received some replies.

HOT draft trademark agreement

Related to the 2022-03-24 action item: "Guillaume to update the board after his meeting with Tyler Radford (Humanitarian OSM Team) on 2022-03-30."

Guillaume had a good chat with Tyler Radford (HOT) and hopes that we can move forward with new ways on the trademark agreement and in general.

Attribution guideline messaging and enforcement

Related to the 2022-02-26 and 27 action item: "Amanda to remind Advisory Board (AB) members about the Etiquette guidelines during the next Advisory Board meeting. Session: Attribution - Agree on an attribution enforcement strategy"

Amanda stated that she has a conflict of interest (Board conflict of interest). Action item owner changed to the board.

Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Related to the 2022-02-26 and 27 action item: "Guillaume to upload the contract of SSRE (senior site reliability engineer) on the board wiki and notify the board"

  • Grant Slater has been hired as the Senior Site Reliability Engineer - he has been a volunteer in the Operations Working Group (OWG) for 15 years.
  • Start date: 1st of May 2022.
  • A blog-post will be published on the 1st of May and will be mentioned in weeklyOSM.
  • The contract has been uploaded to the OSMF Nextcloud instance.

Copyright page

Related to the 2022-02-26 and 27 action item: "Guillaume to check with the Licensing Working Group (LWG) on updating the copyright page. Session: De-bottlenecking the board.

Guillaume contacted the LWG and found where the copyright page is maintained.

Local chapters and commercial activities

Related to the 2022-02-26 and 27 action item: "Jean-Marc to write up a proposal for the minimum local chapter criteria before the March 24 board meeting. Will be supported by Eugene. Session: Local Chapter minimum criteria (including formalisation/clarification on commercial activities)."

Points mentioned

  • Framework for commercial activities of local chapters needed, so that they will remain faithful to OSMF's mission.
  • The economies of local chapters vary a lot - not every local chapter can survive on donations alone.
  • No board decision on the topic yet.

Fundraising committee meeting

Related to the 2020-03 action item: "Mikel to move forward on proposal / scope out fundraising structure."

  • Scheduling a meeting in the next couple of weeks. (post-meeting addition: scheduled for 2022-05-06)
  • Focus on developing a charter for the committee, a work plan and a strategy for fundraising.
  • Participants are going to be people who expressed interest.

Mikel was thanked for his work on fundraising by Guillaume.

Treasurer's report

Action item: Roland to set up a regular meeting with Guillaume Rischard (ex-Treasurer) and Michelle Heydon (accountant).

Bank accounts' access

  • Roland: still no access. No emergency option available to Roland to send money.
  • Guillaume: has access again to the bank accounts (had lost access with his old phone) and will try with Michelle Heydon (book-keeper for OSMF and also having access to the Bank of Ireland accounts) to give access to Roland.
  • OSMF should have at least 3 persons with access to the bank accounts, in case of emergencies.

10K Microsoft donation

  • Status: Microsoft started sending the money after a 3 month boarding process.
  • As OSMF is not a charity, they are sending the money via Github sponsors.
  • Amount:
    • 10,000 USD in total - will be receiving 1,000 USD each month.
    • OSMF does not pay any extra fees.

Gojek - Corporate Member to be

  • Gojek has applied to become a Corporate Member.
  • If the full corporate membership cannot be paid due to taxation from their side, the process will stop.
  • Roland is going through their on-boarding process.

EDF wants to support OSMF through Benevity

  • Benevity's process is geared towards having a charity in the UK - and OSMF is not a charity.
  • Roland contacted them but did not get a useful response.
  • The board has contacted Benevity in the past, as other companies were interested to support OSMF via Benevity, but there was no response as well.

Fundraising committee meeting

  • Roland has filled the scheduling poll for the meeting of the fundraising committee.

OSM Austria Local Chapter application

Vote

Motion to accept the OSM Austria local chapter application.

Approved on 2022-04-28 with 5 votes in favour: Amanda McCann, Guillaume Rischard, Jean-Marc Liotier, Roland Olbricht, Tobias Knerr,
2 did not vote: .Mikel Maron (away from keyboard), Eugene Alvin Villar (absent).

Motion by Tobias Knerr.

Advisory Board - monthly update

The board had an online meeting with representatives of 5 Local Chapters and 2 Gold Corporate Members on the Advisory Board. The meeting was open to observers (1 guest). Topics:

Monthly presentation: Julien Coupey, Fédération des Pros d'OSM

Julien Coupey presented the new French federation of OpenStreetMap professionals.

Related past board discussion: 2021-11 Structure recognising professionals active in OSM

On applications of new members

> How many applications of new members per year? (Question by Roland Olbricht)

  • There are 9 founding member and more people coming in meetups.
  • Geovelo is among the companies interested in joining.
  • Companies are mostly from the French OSM ecosystem - meeting in conferences.

On number of votes per company

> The association consists of companies, not individuals. Regarding the decision-making process, does each company have a single vote? (Question by Tobias Knerr)

  • One (founding or regular) member can have one vote.
  • The other types of members (e.g. supporting) are sometimes consulted but do not have voting rights.

On similar initiatives

> Are you aware of other efforts towards that end? (Question by Jean-Marc Liotier)

We are the first formalised initiative. The Belgian local chapter thought of doing something similar, but stayed as a local chapter.

On scope

> Is the scope national or the whole Francophone community? (Question by Jean-Marc Liotier)

  • The scope is national, as we are all working in France.
  • If people from other French-speaking countries want to do something similar, they don't need us to do it.
  • We also want to be inclusive, so if companies from other French-speaking countries want to join, there is no restriction.

On OSM trademark

> Are you happy with the trademark situation or is there something we could do for you? (Question by Roland Olbricht)

  • We were thinking of becoming a local chapter, to get some kind of agreement.
  • Formal agreement needed, giving us the right to use the trademark, in case someone complains that we have no right to use it.
  • Suggestion: have an OSMF process for similar situations.

Other points mentioned during discussion

  • If you use the trademark in good faith and to the benefit of OSM it is fine to use the trademark but it makes sense to have something more formal.
  • You could argue that in this case the trademark use falls under community activities.
  • OSMF had trademark agreements with some projects.

On OSMF trademark policy

  • OSMF has a pretty generous Trademark Policy, but a lot of commercial use is not included.
  • The Trademark policy does not allow events or fundraising, so it wouldn't cover everything.

Suggestion Licensing Working Group (LWG) to adapt an existing agreement for OSM professionals of France.

Any other business

No other business.

Guest comments or questions

On announcing board meetings

> Question from weeklyOSM via Pierre Béland whether the next board meetings could be announced early enough to be published in the Sunday edition of weeklyOSM.

  • The agenda of the board meetings isn't set until 7 days before the meeting.
  • The date of the board meetings is approximately the same each month and a link to the draft agenda can be supplied.

On draft HOT trademark agreement

Comment by Pierre Béland that he hopes that the Humanitarian OSM Team trademark is not to restrict other OSM humanitarian groups.

  • No, it wouldn't stop them from using the trademark. No other group has applied for trademark.

> "Could other groups use Humanitarian OpenStreetMap?

  • Yes - Guillaume wouldn't recommend they do, because they would need an agreement with the Foundation.
  • HOT has thought of renaming themselves, to avoid the mess with the Foundation.
  • There is no monopoly in the usage of the name for community activities.
  • We have coexistence agreements for the sake of clarity.

Suggestion: If you are starting something new in the OSM area, it is best to not use OSM in the name, even if you can. If you intend to use it, best to email the board (board@osmfoundation.org).

Next meetings

Open board meetings take place online once a month, usually on the 3rd or 4th Thursday of the month, at 13:00 UTC, unless rescheduled.

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.

Acronyms