Board/Minutes/2023-04-13
Draft minutes.
Please note that mid-month board chats are not open to observers and that these minutes do not go through a formal approval process.
Location: Video room at https://osmvideo.cloud68.co
using BigBlueButton.
Date and time: Thursday 13 April 2023 - Countdown
Participants
Board members
- Arnalie Vicario
- Craig Allan
- Mateusz Konieczny
- Mikel Maron
- Roland Olbricht
- Sarah Hoffmann (Chairing)
Not Present
- Guillaume Rischard
Officers and board
Biographies
Minutes by Dorothea Kazazi.
Guests
Not open to observers.
Re-registration to the EU transparency register
| Related to the 2021-12-11 (Annual General Meeting) derived action item "The Board to choose a new board member with legal responsibility and in charge of EU relations for the EU transparency register.
Previous board discussion:
|
| Topic suggested by Sarah Hoffmann. |
- Lost account. Passwords we have probably don't work.
- Have to re-register from scratch.
Points mentioned during discussion
- Low maintenance and not a lot of work.
- Could be used in case of fundraising/lobbying.
Suggestion: Wait for one year for OSMF registration in the EU.
Action item
Sarah to re-register OSMF on the EU transparency register.
Status of the strategic plan
| Background |
|---|
| 2023-01 report by Sarah Hoffmann, Craig Allan and Allan Mustard, who have taken the initiative to work on the strategic plan (strategic plan outline here).
Related board discussions:
Related OSMF webpages, created by the team: |
| Topic suggested by Sarah Hoffmann. Presented by Craig Allan. |
Summary of recent strategic plan meeting
Yesterday there was a meeting of Sarah Hoffmann, Craig Allan and Allan Mustard, at Sarah's request.
- Plan will be communicated to the community.
- Break the plan in 4 clusters: community, technical, financial, institutional re-arrangement of the Foundation.
On community consultation
The group is preparing a draft letter to distribute to the community and social media.
- Once the draft is ready, it will be circulated to the board.
- Responses: should be sent to osm-talk list and community pages.
Distribution:
Sarah, Craig and Allan have created a list of interest groups, including board, Working Groups, Advisory Board, Local Chapters and a lot of informal structures working on OSM, which should all be contacted.
On timeline
- Consultation starting this Monday with the first cluster.
- Every 2 weeks, the group will start a consultation on a different cluster.
- The last session will start on 29 May and will end in the second week of June.
Suggestions:
- Raise the attention on the Advisory Board. Good signal to Corporate donors and get feedback also from Local Chapters.
- Schedule an Advisory Board meeting.
Point mentioned during discussion: Forums generate more discussion than mailing lists.
Action item
Mikel to schedule an Advisory Board meeting, probably in May. Sarah, Allan and Craig might present their work on the Strategic Plan.
Management of board passwords
Topic suggested by Sarah Hoffmann.
Fall-out of the search for the password for the Transparency register.
Suggestion: Create a password-protected file which contains non-critical and non-personal board passwords (e.g. for accounts that are used once a year or less). The master password will be known to board members and could change when the board changes.
Passwords not to be included:
- OSMF board member email accounts
- OSMF board member OSMF website accounts
Passwords that might be included:
- Board non-personal ones.
- EU transparency register.
- US administration.
Options:
- Keeping the file on the Board wiki or Nextcloud.
- Board wiki has versioning.
- Dorothea can keep the file updated.
- Online synchronisation of passwords, but is an expensive option.
Point mentioned during discussion:
- OPS use a tool which is probably not good for board members.
Action item
Dorothea to look for board accounts that might need storing credentials.
Follow-up to FPOSM and 'interest group chapters': discuss next steps
| Background |
|---|
The board received a trademark licence request by Julien Coupey for Fédération des Pros d'OSM (an organisation created by French people professionally active in OSM).
Trademark policy and FAQ. |
| Topic suggested by Sarah Hoffmann. |
There was no decision on the board member who will:
- work on the FPOSM intermediate agreement.
- work on a template agreement for interest-group chapters.
Arnalie declared a conflict of interest (board conflict of interest policy) on doing work for interest groups. There was a comment by a board member that she could start the work.
Point mentioned during discussion:
- Discussed earlier during Allan's time - affects informal groups.
- Wikipedia has local chapters, thematic groups and user groups.
- "User groups" sounds nice.
- The Local Chapter agreement can be used.
On suggested future work
- Document what is existing now and challenges of previous local chapter applications.
- Make more explicit the criteria for Local Chapter approval and acceptability guidelines.
- Where do Local Chapters differ from user groups and where are they the same.
On intermediate FPOSM agreement:
- Sarah used the existing local chapter template agreement and tried to remove the geographical mentions, but that does not work.
- Suggestion to ask the LWG for existing agreements or an FPOSM agreement with the conditions agreed during the March 2023 board meeting.
- There are signed agreements already on the board wiki.
Action items
- Arnalie to share with the board until the end of May the revised draft minimum criteria for being a local chapter / acceptability guidelines, before asking feedback from the community. (See Action item from 2023-03 screen-to-screen board meeting: Until end of June 2023 draft clearer minimum criteria for being a local chapter / acceptability guidelines)
- Mikel to take the GeOSM trademark agreement as a starting point and modify it with the conditions approved during the March board meeting. Will happen in around 2 weeks.
- Sarah to email FPOSM.
Second 2023 screen-to-screen board meeting
| Background |
|---|
| The board had a four hour screen-to-screen board meeting on the 4th of March 2023, facilitated by Allen Gunn (Gunner) and is planning another meeting in 2023.
Outcome of the session "Setting an agenda for 2023 and beyond" |
The meeting will be facilitated.
Action item
Mikel to contact Allen Gunn (Gunner), who has acted as a facilitator before.
Contracting for Vector tiles work
| Previous board discussion: |
| Topic suggested by Mateusz Konieczny |
Is the issue blocked or are we waiting for something?
- Guillaume is handling it.
Email request for funding / contracting
The board has received an email from an OSMer, offering services as a contractor or employee.
- Mateusz has replied (representing himself).
- We don't have the budget for this for the next 6 months.
- EWG might have interest and funds for a project, but not a huge package.
Suggestions:
- Respond that the EWG is looking at funding projects. We would like to bring on more tech roles, the first one would be to focus on the OSM website. From a board perspective we don't have funds for full-time employment due to budgetary constraints.
- Could suggest a more concrete project to the EWG.
- Ask the sender to join an EWG meeting.
Action item
Mikel to respond to the email request for funding / contracting. Roland to follow-up (as an EWG member).
Response from Microsoft regarding MapBuilder
| Background |
|---|
| The board had decided on 2023-02-23 to send a unified response to Microsoft by 2023-03-03. The response has not been sent yet (as of 2023-03-23). Additionally, the board received an email on 2023-03-23 from the Microsoft MapBuilder team with some changes they suggest.
--- The Microsoft MapBuilder was presented to the OSMF board and to Advisory Board members during November 2021: Microsoft presentation - "MapBuilder, an experiment to build the best map" during an Advisory Board meeting. Its initial implementation allowed some Microsoft users to submit changes to the OSM data via a single account, instead of having one account per individual contributor. This led to the single Map builder user OSM account getting a block by the Data Working Group (DWG) on February 2022. The Data Working Group (DWG), after a request by the board, sent a 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, including:
There has been communication between Microsoft, individual board members and the DWG, and at least two online meetings in 2022 with some members of the OSMF board: on 2022-03-03 and on 2022-06-20. The current implementation of MapBuilder does not use a single account for all of the edits submitted to OSM, but there are other concerns by the DWG, the board and some community members. The latest meeting between Microsoft, DWG and board members seems to have taken place in January 2022. Related board discussions:
Related community discussions
|
- The board had received a response from Microsoft, to which it has not replied yet.
- Microsoft would like to restart the automatic accounts.
- Some edits from MapBuilder go straight away, some through a staging area.
Brief discussion about differently licenced data.
Suggestions:
- Get from Microsoft the specific plans for single sign-on and how we can help facilitate them.
- Microsoft should start the discussion on Github https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website
- Ask Microsoft what "contribution to Microsoft" means in the context of Map builder.
Action item: Mikel to respond about single sign-on and ask for clarification about "contribution to Microsoft".
Sovereign TechFund
The German government has now officially started their FOSS support fund, with minimum funding EUR 150000.
Sarah Hoffmann has a meeting with Andy on Tuesday about the Sovereign TechFund.
- In theory, it is only for libraries.
Suggestion for application:
- Maintenance work for OSM website, modernising code, finding a permanent solution for doubling of code.
- Andy would probably do PR merging and reviewing.
- Other financing could support feature work.
Donation website
Question by Mateusz Konieczny regarding content on https://join.osmfoundation.org/donate/ - where is the text defined in the code?
Suggestion: Ask Grant Slater.
Board chat ended 56 minutes after start.
Next meeting
Public board meeting on Thursday 27 April 2023, 13:00 UTC
Open to OSMF members.
- Date and time: Thursday 27 April 2023, 13:00 UTC - Countdown
- Video-room: https://osmvideo.cloud68.co/user/dor-2cd-qah-rim
- Page for preliminary agenda and minutes. Topics will get locked one week before the meeting, on 20 April 2023.
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