Board/Minutes/2024-03

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< Board‎ | Minutes

Date and time: Thursday 28 March, 13:30 UTC.
Minutes approved by the board on 2024-05-30.

Please note that the individual points mentioned below usually reflect the opinion of one or more board members and not necessarily of the whole board. Official board decisions are taken during the meetings or by voting using circulars, and votes are listed in the minutes.

Location: Video room https://osmvideo.cloud68.co/user/dor-2cd-qah-rim
using BigBlueButton.

Acronyms

Participants

["talk" time*] Name

  • [14'] Arnalie Vicario
  • [10'] Craig Allan
  • [00'] Dani Waltersdorfer (messages via text)
  • [07'] Guillaume Rischard (Chairing)
  • [02'] Mateusz Konieczny
  • [03'] Roland Olbricht
  • [04'] Sarah Hoffmann

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

Officers and board
Biographies
Minutes by Dorothea Kazazi.

Guests

  • 12 guests, including Letwin Pondo (Presenter)

Open to all OSM Foundation members. (Become a member of the Foundation, even for free if you are an active OSM contributor)

You are welcome to ask questions or to comment (via voice or on the chat) at the end of the meeting.

  • Please mute your microphone when you join, and to preserve bandwidth, refrain from turning on your webcam.
  • If you are in a low-bandwidth environment, you may benefit from using BigBlueButton's low-bandwidth settings. To assess them, click on the 3 dots on the top right of the black video-window.

Preliminaries

  • Welcome by Chair
  • Determination of quorum
    • Members present: 7
    • Members absent: 0
  • Apologies:

Administrative

Approval of previous minutes

Circular Resolutions

Action item updates

Public board action items - About
Filter by assignee Arnalie Craig Dani Guillaume Mateusz Roland Sarah Not assigned
Filter by label Example: any label # labels here (non-clickable)

See agenda topics for some of the updates.

Mateusz Konieczny

The following updated were provided during the "any other business" section.

Secretary's report

My monthly Secretaries report is a review of some of the workstreams on our issue tracker. It doesn't cover everything but I hope to give members an idea of what has been keeping the Board busy over the last month.

Funding

Issue 597:
Our Meta funding is still under negotiation. I’ll remind you that Meta owns Facebook and WhatsApp. Meta is one of our biggest donors; so this an important process. At this time draft contracts are circulating but none have been finalised. We hope to be able to make an announcement on this in the next month.

Planned face-to-face board meeting

Issue 559:
We are planning the Board face-to-face meeting. This Board will meet face to face for the first time on the last weekend of April. We‘ll be meeting in Frankfurt, which was chosen because it is central and minimises travel costs. We have secured Allen Gunn, aka ‘Gunner’ as our facilitator.

Occasional face to face meetings are very important for the Board members. There is a lot of body language and nuance that gets lost in text chat and endless video meetings. Personal contact between Board members will really help to improve our working relationships.

OSMF move to the EU

Issue 271:
The work continues on moving out of the UK and into the EU. Sarah is investigating the Belgium option and Guillaume has recently met with a lawyer in Luxembourg to discuss the pro’s and con’s of establishment of OpenStreetMap in that country. Luxembourg and Belgium remain the two strong contenders for our new location.

Enquiry from Municipality of Santa Fe, Argentina about contributing street names

Issue 595:
Some correspondence. The Municipality of Santa Fe, Argentina contacted us with a view to contributing street names in their city to our database and using OSM as a base map for their web site mapping. It’s great that so many government agencies use OSM in their daily operations.

Member's question about December 2023 emergency board meeting and mid-month chats

Issue 588:
You may remember that at the last Board meeting there was a two part question from the audience about the emergency meeting we held in December and about mid-month chat meetings.

The first part of the question was whether the emergency meeting was legitimate according to the Articles of Association and rules of order.

The answer is Yes. The meeting was compliant with the Articles of Association and was compliant with the Rules of Order except for point 6.3 which requires the membership to be informed of a Board meeting one week in advance. That one week notice period was waived by agreement of the majority of board members as it was truly necessary to hold an emergency meeting without any delay.

On the second part of the question, on whether mid-month Board chat meetings are legitimate Board meetings.

Well, for this one, the answer is no. Mid-month Board chat meetings are informal discussions not formal Board meetings. They fall outside the Articles of Association and the Rules of Order. There is usually a list of things we want to discuss but we don't follow formal procedure and no resolutions are considered during the meetings.

Board's participation in Wikimedia East and Southeast Asia conference

Issue 563
We are still working on presenting a talk at the Wikimedia East and Southeast Asia conference in May. Speakers have been finalised. This is part of a move by the OSM Foundation to build better relationships with the Wikimedia movement.

2024 membership drive

Issue 440
There has been a recent push to increase the registration of new members of the Foundation, especially from the global south, which has been seriously under- represented in foundation membership. Arnalie Vicario has been pushing hard on this project.

New budgets and procurement Policy (layered spending)

Issue 570
On finance, we have created and put in place a new policy for buying goods and services which has a number of internal controls that were previously missing.

This is now being supplemented with a much more explicit policy (or guidance document) on hiring contractors. Our contractors are typically software developers. These policies are part of our push to make the foundation more professional and more efficient, and in the process we are mitigating reputational and financial risks.

SotM Europe 2024 branding and upcoming regional SotMs

Issue 560
We had correspondence with the organisers of the State of the Map Europe about their branding, and I mention it here because this will apply to all regional State of the Map conferences.

State of the Map conferences must use the local area name, in this case EU, in the name of their conference, so that it is clear that they are a regional conference, not the global State of the Map conference.

Staying on that, I have just signed approvals for the use of OSM branding at five upcoming State of the Map conferences. Madagascar in April, Europe will meet in July , State of the Map Nigeria in October, State of the Map Rwanda in November and State of the Map Latin America will meet in Brazil in December, The global State of the Map conference will be in September, in Nairobi.

2024 board election

And lastly, Issue 589:
We are planning for the annual general meeting of the Foundation to be held in October this year, to separate the important budget development and approval ​ process from the disruptions we always have around the elections. This means that the elections process will begin a few months earlier this year.

That report doesn’t cover everything that has been happening, but I hope it gives an idea.

Comments

Comment by Guillaume (board) that he finds these reports very useful.

Comment by imagico (guest) on the chat regarding the item "Member's question about December 2023 emergency board meeting and mid-month chats" that "For context: Historically for non-public board meetings or non-public parts of meetings a reason why it is not public had been provided to the members. Originally decisions made in the 2023-12-11 meeting had been published but have been depublished in the meantime. It is unclear to the members if the decisions have been retracted or if they just are meant to be removed from the public record but remain in force". Guillaume replied that "what's published now is meant to be the public record".

Treasurer's report

Improving financial reports

  • The board wants to make the finances transparent for donors and community members.
  • Thanks were expressed to Harrison Devine, who is working towards monthly, automatically-generated financial OSMF reports.
  • The current financial reports are ~ 9 pages, which must be condensed, and they also show a couple of thousands GBP as bank charges, while in fact they are currency revaluations.
  • The board plans to check with the Advisory Board if the automatic reports are useful to them.

January and February numbers

  • January and February numbers and spending are as expected.

Meta funding

There's a SotM sponsoring contract with Meta, which includes clauses that have to be discussed by the board such as:

  • OSMF should not to give alcohol to anybody below 21 at the SotM conference.
  • Meta wants to know three days in advance what we will use their logo for. So, it seems they need to be informed about the SotM front page, where you find the logo, and if we plan to print anything with their logo.
  • Another clause is about insurances.

Roland does not expect the above to be obstacles in processing the SotM 2024 Meta sponsorship.

OSMF's move to the EU

Belgium

There was a misunderstanding about the charity issue. Sarah had a call with Kathleen Lu (LWG's chairperson) and the LWG is mainly concerned that the Belgian firm has more expertise on the charity aspects, rather than the company aspects, and that this could lead to delays. The concerns were relayed to the Belgian lawyers, but we have not received a response yet.

Luxembourg

As mentioned during the action item updates.

Guillaume had a meeting with the Luxembourg lawyer, Tom Hummel (LWG) and Roland Olbricht (Treasurer). The lawyer asked the right questions and Guillaume sent him details to get an offer. The Luxembourg firm seems to have expertise in intellectual property transfer.

Local Chapters and Communities congress

The 2024 Local Chapters and Communities congress was a virtual event, where leaders and members of various OSM communities gathered together to share stories, activities (mapathons, regional SotMs), aspirations and learn from each other. It took place on 2nd March 2024 (open data day).

  • 50 community members participated.
  • Board: Dani, Craig, Arnalie were present.

Discussion points

  • OSMF affiliation model.
  • Redesign the LCCWG page.
  • Fundraising and chapter sustainability.

Next steps

  • LCCWG will share the recording and slide presentations.
  • LCCWG will publish a post with highlights.

OSMF membership campaign

The OSMF membership campaign started on March 12 with the aim to diversify the OSMF membership. The volunteer team has members from all over the world, including Africa, Asia, South America, and the preparations lasted 1-2 months. The campaign was advertised in various OSM channels and will run until May, when it will be assessed whether it needs to be extended. Some volunteers from OSM communities in Africa have stated the numbers of new OSMF members from their communities that they are aiming at.

Statistics from the Membership Working Group (MWG), received on 21 March

  • Pre-launch: Mar 5-11, 7 new OSMF members (1 paying)
  • After launch: Mar 12-18, 85 new OSMF members (9 paying)

Other points mentioned

  • There will be a webinar.
  • One volunteer from the campaign will apply to become an MWG member.
  • The MWG seems to need more volunteers.

Wikimedia East and Southeast Asia and the Pacific (ESEAP) conference and travel

OSMF will have a presentation about the iD editor at the Wikipedia and Southern East Asia and Pacific conference, which will be held in Malaysia in May. Supaplex and Eugene will be helping. Arnalie will send a travel application to the board.

Board liaison for working groups

The board has already discussed about who will be the liaison for each Working Group.

  • DWG: is fine with Matheusz as their board liaison. Mateusz will not join the DWG private IRC channel.
  • EWG: Roland is also the secretary of the EWG.
    • No objections from other board members.
    • Arnalie does something similar in LCCWG, and been clarifying when stating her views as an OSMF board member.
  • Craig is happy with his assignments.

Suggestions

  • Specify as a single person.
  • Arnalie offered to be the backup for the LCCWG.
  • The main liaison and the backup should not be in the same election group for continuity purposes.

Other points mentioned during discussion

  • The main liaison is the immediately responsible person.
  • Good to have a backup.

Vote to appoint board liaisons for Working Groups (Approved)

Motion to appoint the proposed board liaisons as listed.

Proposal after modification:

Working Group Board liaison Back-up
CWG Craig Allan Dani Waltersdorfer
DWG Mateusz Konieczny Sarah Hoffmann
EWG Roland Olbricht Mateusz Konieczny
LWG Guillaume Rischard Craig Allan
LCCWG Dani Waltersdorfer Arnalie Vicario
MWG Arnalie Vicario Guillaume Rischard
OWG Craig Allan Roland Olbricht
SotM-WG Sarah Hoffmann Arnalie Vicario

Approved on 2024-03-28 with 6 votes in favour: Arnalie Vicario, Craig Allan, Daniela Waltersdorfer, Mateusz Konieczny, Roland Olbricht, Sarah Hoffmann.
1 abstained: Guillaume Rischard

Proposed by: Sarah Hoffmann

Presentation: Ladies in Map, Zimbabwe, by Letwin Pondo

Presentation 2024-03 Ladies In Maps by Letwin Pondo.pdf

Presentation by Letwin Pondo about Ladies in Map, Zimbabwe.


Twitter account of Ladies in Map, Zimbabwe - link shared during the meeting.

Comment by Craig Allan

The board is doing a lot of work, sometimes causing us to lose touch with field activities and the impactful projects empowering individuals and improving their circumstances.

Question about suggestions to increase the participation of women in OSM local communities in India

Question by Ravi (guest) about suggestion to increase the participation of women in OSM local communities in India. There are many OSM communities, such as in Delhi, but there are no women there.

Suggestions by Letwin:

  • Organising activities and events catering to women's needs, or that help address things that they fear or affect them within their communities.
  • Ensure balanced gender representation in committees/panels and activities (e.g. trainings, speeches) and also have women leaders is inspiring.
  • Have initiatives that are not too formal and in a more creative environment.
  • Recognising the efforts of women already involved.

Suggestion by Arnalie:

  • Initiatives targeting young people (e.g. YouthMapper chapters). There is a YouthMapper chapter in India.

Letwin offered to have a call with Ravi if the OSM community in India required help, and provided her phone number.

Question on suggestions for changes in OSM globally that would be of specific benefit for women

Question by imagico (guest) regarding concrete suggestions for changes in OSM globally, instead of just locally, that would be of specific benefit for women.

  • There was an open mapping women awards ceremony a few hours ago - an initiative by women for women - which had large participation.
  • Suggestions are similar to the ones in local scale, including finding a cause that women would want to participate in.

Any other business

F2F meeting room arrangement

Sarah took over from Craig organising the meeting room for the face-to-face board meeting in April, as the people in the venue speak German. The meeting room is cheap (EUR 400 for 2 days, including lunch), but it is required to take the catering offered by the venue. Other meeting room offers were more expensive.

There was a quick poll about the dietary preferences of board members.

Guest comments or questions

Question regarding the legal minimum age for OSM Foundation membership

Question by imre (guest) about the legal rules regarding the minimum age for OSM Foundation membership? A.) at least 13 years old B.) at least 16 years old. Based on the OSM Terms of Service, imre assumed it is 16 and was wondering whether it is possible to deviate from this - for example, if the OSMF board individually approves? (it was added that this was just a theoretical question).

  • There are some legal minimums which are not imposed by the Foundation, which are imposed for Internet safety. The rules change from country to country. We take a general approach of saying that one should be at least 16 years old.

Next meetings

All Board meetings for 2024 have been planned. 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.

Open board meeting: 30 May 2024, at 13:30 UTC

Open board meetings take place online monthly: currently on the last Thursday of every month.

Next public meeting: On 2024-05-30 13:30 UTC at https://osmvideo.cloud68.co/user/dor-2cd-qah-rim, as the April meeting was cancelled, due to its close proximity to the face-to-face board meeting. The agenda will be here, approximately one week before the meeting.

Dates: See this Framagenda calendar (green dots), and the monthly board meetings page. The dates of public board meetings are also added to https://osmcal.org/.

Mid-month board chat

Mid-month board chats are not open to observers.

Dates: See this Framagenda calendar (yellow dots), and the monthly board meetings page.

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