Board/Minutes/2022-12
First meeting of the new board after the 16th Annual General Meeting
Date and time: Tuesday, 20 December 2022, at 13:30 UTC
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New video room https://osmvideo.cloud68.co/user/dor-2cd-qah-rim
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Participants
Board members
- Arnalie Vicario
- Craig Allan
- Guillaume Rischard
- Mateusz Konieczny
- Mikel Maron
- Sarah Hoffmann
Board Member Bios
Minutes by Dorothea Kazazi.
Not Present
- Roland Olbricht
Guests
- 21 guests, including 3 past board members
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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Selection of officers
Detailed votes to be added together with the draft minutes.
Selection of Secretary
| Nominee for Secretary: Mikel Maron |
|
Mikel Maron was elected as the Secretary with 5 votes in favour: Craig Allan, Guillaume Rischard, Mateusz Konieczny, Mikel Maron, Sarah Hoffmann. |
Mikel mentioned that:
- He has a good idea of how the Secretary can work.
- Important role cause it is the main way the board communicates with the outside world and a lot of administrative tasks.
- Reluctant due to time commitments but will self-nominate, given that no-one else seems eager to do it.
- Appreciates help from other board members and Dorothea.
Craig mentioned that:
- Happy that an existing board member is prepared to accept the role.
- Is happy to help with administrative tasks that do not require representing the Foundation from the first day.
Selection of Treasurer
| Nominee for Treasurer: Roland Olbricht (via past mention on the board chat) |
|
Roland Olbricht was elected as the Treasurer with 5 votes in favour: Craig Allan, Guillaume Rischard, Mateusz Konieczny, Mikel Maron, Sarah Hoffmann. |
Selection of Chairperson
| Nominee for Chairperson: Guillaume Rischard |
|
Guillaume Rischard was elected as the Chairperson with 6 votes in favour: Arnalie Vicario, Craig Allan, Guillaume Rischard, Mateusz Konieczny, Mikel Maron, Sarah Hoffmann. |
Selection of non-officer roles
Selection of Personnel Committee chair
| Nominee for Personnel Committee chair: Sarah Hoffmann (Craig Allan mentioned that he could also help but withdrew his nomination during the discussion, as he can help with other things) |
|
Sarah Hoffmann was elected as the Personnel Committee chair with 6 votes in favour: Arnalie Vicario, Craig Allan, Guillaume Rischard, Mateusz Konieczny, Mikel Maron, Sarah Hoffmann. |
Selection of Finance Committee chair
| Nominee for Finance Committee chair: Mikel Maron |
|
Mikel Maron was elected as the Finance Committee chair with 6 votes in favour: Arnalie Vicario, Craig Allan, Guillaume Rischard, Mateusz Konieczny, Mikel Maron, Sarah Hoffmann. |
Selection of Trademark licensing subcommittee representative
| Nominee for Trademark licensing subcommittee chair: Mateusz Konieczny (Guillaume and Craig offered to do it, if no-one was interested) |
|
Mateusz Konieczny was elected as the Trademark licensing subcommittee representative with 5 votes in favour: Arnalie Vicario, Craig Allan, Guillaume Rischard, Mateusz Konieczny, Sarah Hoffmann. |
Selection of Open Source Initiative delegate
| Nominee for Open Source Initiative delegate: Sarah Hoffmann |
|
Sarah Hoffmann was elected as the Open Source Initiative delegate with 6 votes in favour: Arnalie Vicario, Craig Allan, Guillaume Rischard, Mateusz Konieczny, Mikel Maron, Sarah Hoffmann.<b 1 did not vote: Roland Olbricht (absent). |
Background
Offered by Tobias Knerr (previous Open Source Initiative delegate)
- Open Source Initiative (OSI) is an organisation which stewards what open source exactly means and which licences are compatible with the open-source definition.
- Involves:
- the opportunity to participate in meetings with other members of OSI, which one could use to exchange ideas. Example of discussion: how training data for artificial intelligence could be handled under open-source licensing terms.
- participating in the elections of the OSI board.
- Depending how much one wants to get involved it will be a lot or low volume of work.
Points mentioned during discussion
- The OSI delegate doesn't have to be a board member.
- Better to appoint someone rather than have the seat vacant.
On board members in Working Groups
Points mentioned during discussion
Related link: Board rules of order section "Working Groups, Committees, and Special Committees".
- There are some board members in Working Groups (WGs) as a point of contact, but there is no need to have a board vote for that. Guillaume is the point of contact for Data Working Group (DWG), Licensing Working Group (LWG), Membership Working Group (MWG) and Operations Working Group (OWG).
- All board members are welcome to join meetings of Working Groups.
- Board members cannot be chairpersons on Working Groups.
- It is acceptable for board members to join meetings of Working Groups and lurk until they find one that they like.
- Most Working Groups have non-disclosure agreements that need to be signed to join, but it is a formality which can be sorted.
Discussion about a Screen-to-Screen board meeting in 2023
| Background |
|---|
| Discussion about a potential board "screen-to-screen" meeting in 2023. These are board meetings taking place once or twice per year on two consecutive days (usually during a weekend), for ~7 hours each including breaks. The meetings are not open to observers so far and some have been facilitated. Until May 2019 such meetings were in person and were called "face-to-face" board meetings. |
Points mentioned during discussion
- Weekend meetings to plan strategy for OSMF.
- Screen-to-screen board meetings are an issue with board members that are in very different timezones.
Board members' usual scheduling
Guillaume and Mikel are in the US.
- Arnalie is usually in Colorado, during the US summer for 3-4 months. Once in the US, she cannot go to another country due to her Visa.
- Craig is usually in the US during northern spring.
Options mentioned
- Screen-to-Screen board meeting early in the year.
- Screen-to-Screen board meeting middle of the year, when Arnalie is in Colorado.
- Face-to-face board meeting.
Suggestions
- Facilitated meeting with Allen Gunn of Aspiration Tech (provides discounted price) - scheduling depends on him too.
- A four hour meeting, independent of the screen-to-screen/face-to-face meeting or facilitation, to bring all new members on the same page.
On timing
- A screen-to-screen board meeting doesn't have to be early in the year.
- The earlier the meeting, the better.
- In June: lower benefit of the meeting.
- In summer: past board usually did not have much energy.
- Sometimes getting a Visa is tricky.
- Most board members should have a US Visa.
Vote
Motion:
|
|
Motion passed with 6 votes in favour: Arnalie Vicario, Craig Allan, Guillaume Rischard, Mateusz Konieczny, Mikel Maron, Sarah Hoffmann. |
Suggestion
- Leave the decision on the location of the face-to-face meeting for the future, as some board members might not get a Visa or the logistics might not work out.
Other points mentioned during discussion
- OSMF will cover the cost of the travel.
- If North America does not work for most of the board members, the plans will be changed to have the meeting elsewhere.
Next step
- Mikel will follow-up for scheduling and will ask Dorothea to help.
Holiday circular blackout
| Background |
|---|
| The OSMF board in the past years decided to impose a blackout period on voting on circular resolutions during the Christmas/New Year holidays.
Circulars usually follow a board discussion by mail (except the circulars on active contributor membership applications for other contributions), and are basically a show of hands. The minimum duration of voting is seven days. Board members who might be away during the holidays will not have the chance to ask others to give an issue another thought before voting on circulars, or provide their point of view during the internal discussion. Therefore, it has been suggested to have a black-out period for non-urgent circulars during the holidays. Previous discussions and blackout periods
|
Vote
| Amended motion to have a holiday blackout on circulars from 23 December 2022 to 3 January 2023. (initial motion was to January 8) |
|
Motion passed with 6 votes in favour: Arnalie Vicario, Craig Allan, Guillaume Rischard, Mateusz Konieczny, Mikel Maron, Sarah Hoffmann. |
Tradition in the past few years to have no circulars during the holidays, except for urgent business.
Points mentioned during discussion
- Mikel and Mateusz will be back by the 3rd of January.
- It is a quiet period.
Any other business
Overture Maps Foundation
- The announcement, which was vague, surprised most of the mapping world.
- There was no consulting of the OpenStreetMap Foundation before the announcement.
Points relayed by board members from informal conversations with some people involved with Overture
Some board members had conversations with people involved with Overture.
- There were still a lot of questions, even after the conversations.
- Sensed a willingness to engage with questions.
[Overture]
- Not trying to fork or reproduce data that is created in OSM.
- Bring into a public forum the processing pipelines these companies already have for consuming OSM data. Bring it together with other data sources and align with data model that's their production map environment.
- The individuals saw value in OSM, both in the community and what is produced and they don't see what they're doing as competitive.
- Sense that the drafting of the announcement was happening very quickly with a small group, so the omission of including the OpenStreetMap Foundation might not have been intentional.
Questions
- How is OpenStreetMap talked about
- What is the goal
- Influence or consulting of the OpenStreetMap Foundation
- What does it mean for data flowing back to OSM
- Tooling which might be useful for OSM
- What does it mean for OSM as a distribution point
- Financial aspect: A lot of resources go to Overture. What does it mean for OSM and OpenStreetMap Foundation.
- Claim that they are not changing what they're doing in OSM.
- Do we engage
On financial aspect: Some of the companies are big supporters of the OpenStreetMap Foundation.
Suggestions
- Publish an initial statement. A draft was started.
- Make it positive and welcoming.
- Will be an OSMF statement, as there is not a single point of view in the OSM community - and even within the board. Will later consult the community, to make sure the direction that OSMF takes is aligned with community consensus.
- Bring out the asset of our community when communicating about the topic.
- Think where we want OSM to stand and about any threats they present to us and we present to them, to help our understanding.
- Ask to be included in the Overture Steering Committee.
- Ask to be included when sending communications - e.g. send draft of press releases, to avoid language that makes members of the OSM community defensive.
- Ask to help the OSMF to address some problems where the issue is the lack of resources.
- Organise an Advisory Board (AB) meeting.
- Invite them as OSMF Corporate Members.
- Set up a meeting or invite them to give a presentation during a monthly board meeting.
- Spend more effort to make the OSM data model more usable by data consumers.
On Overture membership tiers
- They are very high, even for the Linux Foundation.
- There is a non-profit tier, which does not cost, so there might be no cost barrier for us, if we decide to get involved in a formal way.
On communication
- OSMF has a low communication profile.
- Overture have better public relations.
On engagement
- From not notifying us before the announcement it is clear that they do not want us to engage.
- Option to invite them to join the OSMF.
On licence and OpenStreetMap trademarks
- No impression from the announcements that Overture will not respect the OSM licence and trademark.
- They intend to release the non-OSM datasets under ODbL or a licence compatible to ODbL.
- Pessimism, as Meta (ex-Facebook) will likely respect the OSM licence as well as it respects it now, hiding attribution. Suing Facebook is not really easy.
On providing open data
- It is nice that big companies plan to make some substantial data open. There might be some overall benefits, besides to OSM.
- We have compatible goals making open data available to the widest number of people.
Other points mentioned during discussion
- The abbreviation of the newly created foundation is "OMF", which might be not accidental.
- The technical problem they're addressing is known for a long time and discussed. Difficult to ingest OSM data and enrich it with other data and understand the tagging scheme.
- It is an open question whether OSMF should join Overture.
Administrative
This section has been moved to the end of the meeting, so that the election of officers takes place first.
Previous minutes
- 2022-11-25 (Deferred for the January meeting)
Circular Resolutions
2022/Res33 Restrict admissible edits on election Wiki page
| To ensure a fair election, the board orders the secretary and election facilitator to remove all edits from other users from the pages for the formal candidate response, i.e. this page and all its subpages.
In future years, the official information shall be moved to the Foundation's Wiki. |
|
Rejected on 2022-11-26 with 2 votes against: Amanda McCann, Tobias Knerr (The long-term implications of a move to the foundation wiki haven't been discussed at all, and a process change for the 2023 elections is not an urgent matter that requires a circular resolution). |
| Circular by Roland Olbricht. |
Note:
- Related to the addition of a table with mapping contributions - as measured by the HDYC site - of the 2022 board candidates on the answers and questions election page of the OSM wiki by community members. Once the candidates' answers were published, the table was moved (diff change) to the OSM wiki page asking about the candidates' OSM activities. Similar tables were in the same position in the 2020 and the 2017 board elections.
Next meeting
To be scheduled by the Secretary.
Open board meetings take place online once a month. The new board will decide on the new recurring day and time of the future meetings. Board meetings are usually scheduled by the Secretary.
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.
Guest comments or questions
| Open to all OSMF members (join the OpenStreetMap Foundation). You are welcome to ask questions or to comment (via voice or on the chat) at the end of the meeting.
|
Comments on Overture
Comment by Willy Franck SOB - GeOsm
- It is clear that there is frustration, but it is just a communication problem.
- OSMF could be a partner. We need more partners on several levels. Everyone can make the choice of governance they want. But above all, OSM is a database, we just have to make sure that the license and trademark are respected. There is always more strength to do together.
Comment by ImreSamu
- that TomTom is not yet an OSMF Corporate Member (maybe We have to invite them)
- that Overture only accepts just a "Qualified Nonprofit" - is OSMF a Qualified non-profit?
Comment by Ilya Zverev
- in his shtosm post (in Russian) he has mentioned that Overture Maps pose a visibility threat to OSM.
- that OSMF haven't been notified and isn't a partner sends a weird message regarding its corporate approachability.
- that he welcomes Overture Maps, he thinks they would improve how we work with third-party sources, and make mappers' life easier. Problems lie in communication only.
- that the Governmental/Nonprofit role (in the Overture membership tiers) is for data contributors. OSMF is more than that, so we shouldn't use the standard tier. Instead we have to communicate and get a proper seat.
Post-meeting note by Dorothea: I have collected some public communications related to Overture and added them to the OSM wiki.
Meeting adjourned 72' after start.