Board/Minutes/2024-06

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Date and time: Thursday 27 June, 13:30 UTC
Minutes approved by the board on 2024-07-25.

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.

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

Acronyms

Participants

  • Arnalie Vicario
  • Craig Allan
  • Guillaume Rischard
  • Roland Olbricht (joined 7' after start)
  • Sarah Hoffmann

Officers and board
Biographies
Minutes by Dorothea Kazazi.

Absent

  • Daniela Waltersdorfer
  • Mateusz Konieczny

Guests

  • 14 guests, including Hopeful Bafamodei (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.

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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)

Craig Allan

Draft about role of the main and second managers

Related to action item: [Public #127] Write something on the role of the main and second managers, the documentation, to be reviewed by a director of the HR company, and share it with the board

It is our custom to have a first manager and a second manager for our employees or staff or contractors. So we have two people responding to each and the roles have not really been clearly defined.

On boarding new board members

Related to action items:

We will define a list of documents that new board members will go through (e.g. communication guidelines).

Find a solution on late time of board meetings and chats

Related to action item: [Public #119] Find a solution on late time of board meetings and chats

As a global organisation, someone will inevitably have meetings at inconvenient times, so we need to find a schedule that works for everyone.

Executive director - Establish what we'd want an executive director to do/not do

Related to action item: [Public #9] Executive director - Establish what we'd want an executive director to do/not do

  • We are considering hiring someone for a management role and defining the responsibilities of that position.
  • I have compiled a lot of paperwork that we reviewed; however, due to distractions and perhaps a lesser need, we have not moved forward with it.

Guillaume Rischard

Minimum board communication guidelines for meetings, chats and other channels

Related to action item: [Public #123] Figure out the minimum board communication guidelines for meetings, chats and other channels

  • We already have guidelines we use for our mailing lists and community.osm.org, which could be also transferred to the board, including principles like assuming good faith.
  • We previously applied Robert’s Rules of Order more strictly under Allan Mustard, and those could also be included.
  • It is unclear if this should be a single-person process; if other board members have ideas, they could be incorporated.

Fastly

Guillaume had a meeting with Hannah, from Fastly.

  • We now have a new zero-dollar contract with Fastly, who are supporting us with tile delivery. This contract includes a five-year commitment and a notice period of 60 or 70 days if they wish to terminate the agreement.
  • They want us to use their services, to say that they power OpenStreeMap.

OSMF move to the EU

  • LWG had a meeting with Lawdit (UK law firm) and Lawdit confirmed that we can have a double registration, as suggested by the Luxembourg lawyer. So, there would be no need to transfer assets because they will stay at the same company

Sarah Hoffmann

OSMF move to the EU

Related to action item: [Public #7] EU registration - Create a list of formal actions to do for the move .

  • We have finally received a long list of requirements that we must complete and submit for the due diligence of the asset transfer.
  • This process will take some time, as it requires paperwork from the past 15 years.
  • Any assistance is more than welcome.

Sovereign Tech Fund

  • We are discussing with them how we can proceed to reach the final stage.

Roland Olbricht

There will be a future action item from the TISA conference.

Secretary's report

As usual the Secretary’s report is drawn from the GitLab issues and email correspondence of the Board. Not everything is here, but I think these topics are the most interesting

Mid-month meeting 13 June 2024

The team went through the draft tasks from the Face to Face meeting for each person to see what should be published as member tasks. We discussed staff management roles and responsibilities and delegated Craig and Roland to share the discussion with Guillaume - who was not able to attend this meeting. We reviewed the move to the EU and supported moving forward on it as an urgent matter. We noted that Paul Norman has posted about progress on vector tiles to the community General Talk.

#640 Distributed Denial of Service Attack

On 13 June we had another big Denial of Service attack on our servers which lasted a few hours. We did not seem to receive a ransom note this time. Our systems team deployed their defensive tools which greatly limited the impact of the attack. In the medium term we may need to review and improve our defenses.

#643 Vandalism

Our headline event of this month has to be the massive data vandalism attacks that we suffered. It seems that one individual was vandalising the map, but on a huge scale. The account was blocked and recovery operations began. It soon became clear that the recovery is more difficult if volunteer mappers assist by layering new corrective editing on top of the vandalism. Ideally the vandalism should be notified to OPS and all vandal edits should be rolled back in one operation. We published a blog post in praise of the Data Working Group for dealing with the problem.

#641 Vandalism Follow up

We were able to track down the vandal and our team phoned him at home, in his home language, to ask him to stop messing with the map.

#633 Big Blue Button

These Board meetings use the free and open-source video conferencing software Big Blue Button. Local Chapters and Working Groups also use on the system. We hit a problem with exceeding the storage limits of the account. It turned out that someone was giving private tuition with the system and was recording all the sessions. If you use Big Blue Button for OSM purposes, please remember to download your recordings.

#637 Template Letter for new Corporate Donors

A new corporate donor just wrote to us and asked to join. We really appreciate that they did that and we decided to write and thank them on behalf of the whole Board. The same would apply to all new corporate donors so we spent a bit of time putting together a nice template for a thank you letter which we will use in future.

Two Conferences

Board member Sarah recently joined the 3rd annual UNMaps conference in Valencia, Spain to present about the OpenStreetMap project and participate in a panel discussion about crowd -sourced geodata. Sarah notes in her blog post that OpenStreetMap is well known and is used on a daily basis within the UN. ​ Our Treasurer, Roland, attended a conference of the Traveller Information Services Association. They are focused on providing traffic and traveller information services in the EU. They are under some pressure to produce a European system and were very interested in layering their information onto OSM road and rail networks.

#634 South Australia Director of Land and Built Environment

We were offered a lot of governmental spatial data in South Australia, by the director of the department that created much of it. These gifts are complex because we can’t just add in new data to the map without resolving all the conflicts with the existing data. I haven’t heard yet how it is going, but he may be disappointed by our lack of enthusiasm and the complicated process.

SotM EU

We’re preparing our table and presentations for Sotm EU. The board will be represented by board member Mateusz, who lives in Poland, and our administrator Dorothea.

SotM 2024 Nairobi

The organisation of the conference is proceeding well. I hope we will get a lot of people there, especially people from Africa who we haven’t seen before. We’ve just learned that the Board will not be getting free tickets for the conference. We’re going to have to pay! Another proof that OSM Working Groups are assertively independent.

2024 Elections

I want to remind everyone that the Board elections are coming up in October. We’re starting the work already, setting up the Wiki and organising communications material.

Treasurer's report

  • Gratitude was expressed to Harrison Devine for preparing the report.
  • It looks like we are spending much lessand receiving much less income than expected at this point in the year.
    • This is due to various reasons, such as spending being dependent on our contractors sending bills.
    • What is important is whether the work has been completed and if they are satisfied with doing the work, rather than the exact date they send their invoice.
  • Reduced inncome: difficulties with the procurement systems of some organisations.
  • Nothing particularly alarming.

Membership campaign update

Update: put on-hold after request by Arnalie.

2024 Annual General Meeting and election to board

Skipped, as Mateusz was not present.

Next step for OSMF regarding vandalism

Skipped, as Mateusz was not present.

Presentation: Delighted Women Development Initiative by Hopeful Bafamodei

10 minute presentation by Hopeful Bafamodei on the "Delighted Women Development Initiative" and the OSM community in Nigeria. 5 minutes questions and comments.

Comment by Craig Allan (board)

It's just wonderful to hear these stories of how people are organizing around OSM to reach people who are in a very difficult situation. I'm looking at young girls in Nigeria can be very oppressed and using this as a tool to organise them, to get a community going, to empower them and to make things better, especially campaigns against FGM, which is a very special thing.

Any other business

Request by MWG for budget

  • Request from MWG to get budget for contracting someone to work on CiviCRM issues. The approved budget did not include any amount for MWG.
  • Arnalie emailed Michael Spreng (MWG) and asked for an estimate on the consulting cost and timeline.
Motion to add 3 budget lines: EUR 100 each for DWG and MWG volunteer engagement; 4000 for personnel for MWG (CiviCRM consulting).
Motion by Guillaume Rischard, seconded by Arnalie Vicario and Craig Allan.
  • Urgency: We need to fix CiviCRM as the board elections are approaching, and we require the software to determine voter eligibility.
  • Suggestion: Decide via a circular. The board has a good history of getting the circulars voted within 24 hours, it's really urgent.
  • Procedurally, these items should be presented a week in advance of a board meeting, to give board members a chance to review them.

Decision: Guillaume to create the circular.

Act as a platform to process temporary road closures, see issue 648

The European Union has introduced legislation that may provide an opportunity for OSM to increase its visibility and be more involved in providing feedback. There are both advantages and disadvantages to this.

Suggestion: Discuss this within the board.

Reply to the DWG

  • Gratitude expressed to the DWG.
  • Many ideas to improve the situation with vandalism. Need to discuss with DWG whether they make sense, and then contact the EWG and OWG.
  • Discussion is also happenning with Tom Hughes and the DWG on what the DWG would like changed.

TISA meeting

  • The organisation has been the steward of the TMC standard (not the data) for real-time traffic information. It consists of road maintenance authorities and data providers, but not car manufacturers.
  • OSMF had been invited to present at their meeting.
  • Our main contact there had been TomTom.

European Union related

  • The European Union has enacted a law requiring road authorities in the EU and the UK to provide roadwork announcements in a machine-readable format by the end of the year. So, there would be a database where you could download information on when, at what time, and for how long roads will be blocked.
  • There is an additional requirement that the individual drivers must be able to give feedback on missing roadwork information or on whether announced roadwork does not actually occur. Collecting and processing this user feedback is a complex task.

Suggestions

  • Take the discussion to community.osm.org, as there are several levels of possible actions.
    • Need to define the actionable steps first.

Other points mentioned during discussion

  • We will focus on reaching out to road maintenance authorities in the hope of supporting them with the implementation of real-time traffic information.
  • We need to decide whether this presents a valuable opportunity or not. It could be a missed chance. On the other hand, so far, we have very clearly declared that we don't feel it is our competence to collect information on temporary road closures.
  • It could be a secondary database and there are a couple of other interesting use cases for such a database. We still would get in touch with these users that are willing to give feedback on geospatial information.

Guest comments or questions

None.

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: 25 July 2024

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

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/.

Next public meeting: 25 July 2024 at 13:30 UTC.

Mid-month board chat

Next mid-month board chat: 4 July at 13:30 UTC.

Mid-month board chats are informal and are not open to observers.

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

Closed session: Personnel management

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