Board/Minutes/2024-08

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Date and time: Thursday 29 August 2024, 13:30 UTC
Minutes approved during the 2024-09-26 board meeting.

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

["talk" time*] Name

  • [12'] Arnalie Vicario
  • [18'] Craig Allan (chairing this meeting)
  • [05'] Mateusz Konieczny
  • [04'] Roland Olbricht
  • [01'] Sarah Hoffmann

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

Absent

  • Daniela Waltersdorfer
  • Guillaume Rischard

Officers and board
Biographies
Minutes by Dorothea Kazazi.

Guests

  • 8 guests, including Andrés Gómez Casanova (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.

Administrative

Approval of previous minutes

Circular Resolutions

2024/Res32 Approve active contributor membership application #2024070810000365

The Board currently decides on active contributor membership applications based on non-mapping contributions on a case-by-case basis.

Approved on 2024-08-09 with 6 votes in favour: Roland Olbricht, Sarah Hoffmann, Guillaume Rischard, Craig Allan ([name] has been of great assistance to the Foundation in [activity 1] and [activity 2] work. I support [their] membership.), Mateusz Konieczny (Thanks for your very significant activity within last year! This definitely qualifies for active contributor membership.), Arnalie Vicario ([name] is an [activity 1] and [activity 2] rockstar for OSMF! Thank you for all you support!)
1 did not vote: Daniela Waltersdorfer.

Application initially processed by the Membership Working Group.

2024/Res33 Update of contract for iD maintenance

The board approves the updated contract for Martin Raifer1 for his work as a iD maintainer. It furthermore confirms that Mikel Maron is the designated contract manager for this contract.'

Approved on 16 August 2024 (had been extended by one week), with 5 votes in favour:
- Roland Olbricht
- Sarah Hoffmann
- Arnalie Vicario
- Daniela Waltersdorfer (read through the GitLab discussion. Took me a bit to get caught up-- my apologies.)
- Craig Allan (The contract is two pages long and covers all likely scenarios. I am happy to vote for its acceptance. Noting: It is somewhat open ended in that the contract manager can freely extend the days worked. The contractor does not have this discretion to extend. I would like us to cap the finances and ask the contract manager to come back to the Board to apply for further funds if the annual time worked needs to exceed 12 x 11.5 = 138 days. The financial cap is therefore EUR <redacted> x 138 = EUR <redacted>)
1 abstained:
- Guillaume Rischard (Requesting extension by a week - the budgetary implications are unclear. See gitlab and Craig's last comment there for details.).
1 did not vote:
- Mateusz Konieczny.

Circular by Sarah Hoffmann.

1 Note by Dorothea: See Long-term contractors.

2024/Res34 Grant Slater's Salary Raise 2024-2025

The board approves to give a merit-based raise on the salary for our Senior Site Reliability Engineer Grant Slater [2] as agreed on during the annual review. This is to account for the raising cost of living.

Approved on 2024-08-21 with 6 votes in favour: Daniela Waltersdorfer, Roland Olbricht, Sarah Hoffmann, Craig Allan, Mateusz Konieczny, Arnalie Vicario.
1 abstained: Guillaume Rischard (Abstaining for now. Requesting more information: 1) Cost of living increase in the UK in the last 12 months, 2) Impact on the whole budget).

Circular by Dani Waltersdorfer.

2 Note by Dorothea: See Employees.

2024/Res35 Approve active contributor membership application #2024081610000099

The Board currently decides on active contributor membership applications based on non-mapping contributions on a case-by-case basis.

Approved on 2024-08-24 with 5 votes in favour: Roland Olbricht, Sarah Hoffmann, Mateusz Konieczny, Arnalie Vicario, Craig Allan (Yes. Weekly OSM is a great resource for OSM users and in my opinion all the people who make it happen are making an enormous non-mapping contributions to the OSM project.).
2 did not vote: Guillaume Rischard, Daniela Waltersdorfer.

Application initially processed by the Membership Working Group.

2024/Res36 Approve active contributor membership application #2024052410000043

The Board currently decides on active contributor membership applications based on non-mapping contributions on a case-by-case basis.

Did not pass on 2024-08-25 with:
3 votes in favour: Roland Olbricht, Arnalie Vicario, Craig Allan (I value the contribution the applicant has made in bringing people to the OSM project through leadership at YouthMappers and HOT. Also 33/42 mapping days counts in his favour.)
1 against: Sarah Hoffmann (The described contributions seem to describe the responsibilities that come with the paid positions of the applicant. But I may have misunderstood. In that case, I encourage you to reapply and clarify.)
3 did not vote: Mateusz Konieczny, Guillaume Rischard, Daniela Waltersdorfer.

Application initially processed by the Membership Working Group.

2024/Res37 Approve active contributor membership application #2024072110000116

The Board currently decides on active contributor membership applications based on non-mapping contributions on a case-by-case basis.

Approved on 2024-08-25 with 5 votes in favour: Mateusz Konieczny, Roland Olbricht, Sarah Hoffmann, Arnalie Vicario, Craig Allan (Some note some mapping activity and some community organising activity. I support the application. ).
2 did not vote: Guillaume Rischard, Daniela Waltersdorfer.

Application initially processed by the Membership Working Group.

2024/Res38 Approve active contributor membership application #2024072110000018

The Board currently decides on active contributor membership applications based on non-mapping contributions on a case-by-case basis.

Did not pass on 2024-08-25 with
3 votes against:
- Roland Olbricht
- Sarah Hoffmann (Using OSM data or software is unfortunately not sufficient to count as community contribution.)
- Mateusz Konieczny (I found no research at the link contributing to OpenStreetMap (please mention relevant titles on applying). Mentioned activities seems to be about using OpenStreetMap data without info how it contributes back to OpenStreetMap project. If there are contributions to OpenStreetMap project please reapply and clearly mention them.)
1 abstained:
- Arnalie Vicario (Latest publication is in 2023/4 https://scholar.google.ca/<link>. Would appreciate more evidence on contribution for the past 365days. OSM Diary, OSM Wiki or any documentation will help. Encourage to re-apply again and provide these documentation to support application.).
3 did not vote:
- Craig Allan
- Guillaume Rischard
- Daniela Waltersdorfer.

Application initially processed by the Membership Working Group.

2024/Res39 Approve active contributor membership application #2024052610000192

The Board currently decides on active contributor membership applications based on non-mapping contributions on a case-by-case basis.

Did not pass on 2024-08-25 with
4 votes against:
- Roland Olbricht
- Sarah Hoffmann (Please be more verbose in describing your non-mapping contributions.)
- Arnalie Vicario (Need more evidence on teaching/training beginner mappers in the community. OSM Diary, OSM Wiki or any documentation will help. Encourage to re-apply again and provide these documentation to support application ).
- Mateusz Konieczny (Note that https://tasks.hotosm.org/contributions seems to work for currently logged in user, and does not allow us to look at your info. I also looked at OSM user page that does not mention any activities, and it does not mention any OEG ( https://osmfoundation.org/wiki/Organised_Editing_Guidelines ). Sadly I am unable to check any of these contributions.)
1 abstained:
- Craig Allan (For membership as a non-mapping contributor we need some proof of the contribution. The HOT contributions link unfortunately doesn't work for me. I encourage the applicant to either push forward from the current 31 mapping days to reach 42 days or alternatively to give clear documented evidence of helping to build the community or some part of the OSM project.)
2 did not vote:
- Guillaume Rischard
- Daniela Waltersdorfer.

Application initially processed by the Membership Working Group.

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)

Arnalie Vicario

#53 Disseminate information on how to join Working Groups + clear onboarding - and how participation works like

Related to action item: To disseminate information on how to join Working Groups (WGs) + clear onboarding - and how participation works like

Arnalie had prioritised the membership campaign instead, and probably can't complete this action item by the end of her board term in October.

Craig Allan

#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

Related to action item: Write something on the role of the main and second managers, the documentation, to be reviewed by a director of the Human Resources company, and share it with the board

Done. It's on a collaborative document and Craig has asked the board to review it.

#120 Improve the new board members' on-boarding script

Related to action item: Improve the new board members' on-boarding script

Reworked the full onboarding page on the board wiki, 80% complete. Will finish the final portion with Dorothea.

#119 Find a solution on late time of board meetings and chats

Related to action item: Find a solution on late time of board meetings and chats

  • We don't have a different time that will work. Craig (currently in California) had to get up at six in the morning to come to this meeting and Arnalie (currently in Philippine) is staying up late at night to come to the meeting.
  • We will see how the new board will work.

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

Related to action item: Executive director - Establish what we'd want an executive director to do/not do

Work done, funding needed to proceed.

Mateusz Konieczny

SotM 2024 preparations

Preparations for travel to the State of the Map (SotM) 2024 conference took a lot of time.

Recruiting people to join Working Groups

Writing to some Working Groups with suggested text that they can post about recruiting people to join. Received a reply by one of the Working Groups which might proceed with posting the message on the community forum. Will continue with two more Working Groups.

Fundraising

Doing some fundraising research.

Board

Daily board work, including email processing and assessing circulars.

Roland Olbricht

All recent board work was related to the Treasurer's role. The SotM 2024 conference preparation took too much time.

Sarah Hoffmann

#7 OSMF registration in the EU

Related to action item: EU registration - Create a list of formal actions to do for the move

  • Asked for the invoice.
  • Hopes that another board member will pick the issue up.

Sovereign Tech fund

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.

I didn’t present this report last month so this one is based on two months. Things have been quiet over the Northern summer breaks, so there are fewer items than usual.

SotM 2024

In the mid-month informal meeting on Thursday 4 July 2024 we talked about the State of the Map 2024 which is an ongoing big topic.

Sovereign Tech Fund

Also we discussed the German Sovereign Tech Fund – they offer a lot of money for open source initiatives. But, it turns out that have shifted their focus to funding open source development tools and aren’t interested in user facing applications, so we will probably not qualify for any of their funding.

July board meeting

The Board Meeting on 25 July 2024 again had State of the Map 2024 on the agenda. The most interesting topic on the agenda was a presentation by the OSM Kenya group.

August mid-month chat

At the most recent Mid Month Meeting on Thursday 15 August we talked about State of the Map 2024 yet again.

OSMF move to the EU

We also got notice that our lawyers have now prepared a draft set of Articles of Association for our planned move to the EU. We’re reviewing those now.

Support to local State of the Map conferences

We also discussed supporting local State of the Map conferences. Although we don’t have the funds to do it, many local State of the Map conferences do ask us for financial support. We’re looking at this problem and seeing what we can do for them.

At this point I normally run through a few of the Board GitLab Issues. These are some mes interesting but also many mes they are just routine admin work. Being on the Board is a privilege, but some mes you just have to do the paperwork.

Here are some issues we’ve been dealing with:

#671 Budget funding format

Issue 671 was about the Budget funding format. We’re just starting the 2025 budget process and we already have a query about the format to submit requests. It is great that people are on top of it and we were caught unprepared. We are putting a process to gather budget information together this week.

#670 Companies House annual statement

Issue 670 is just paperwork. We have to file a report to the Companies House about in the UK to confirm that our company is still operating and hasn’t changed any details. It's just lots of form filling and no visible benefit to the organisation.

#661 SotM 2024 - demonstrations in Nairobi

Issue 661 was about whether we should worry about news from Kenya that students and other people were demonstrating in the streets. The State of the Map organisers are not worried about it. They advise us to keep calm and carry on.

#659 Legal notice on the osm.org About page

There is more paperwork in Issue 659. We were informed about a legal notice on the About page on our website. While we are not hosted in the EU that legal notice is fine, but when we move to the EU we must duplicate it on the osm.org web page. We run a global organisation and there are hundreds of these types of rules to remember and implement.

OpenFreeMap enquiry

We had an enquiry from OpenFreeMap, which runs a vector tile delivery service using vector tiles derived from OpenStreetMap data. As part of researching the enquiry I had a look at OpenFreeMap and I find the vector-tile implementation really interesting. We’ll get there ourselves in the next few months.

#656 CiviCRM bugs

Issue 656 is about our membership so ware, CiviCRM.

CiviCRM has had some problems. The Membership Working Group has engaged a contractor and the Board has set aside several thousand Euros for the work. The CiviCRM database holds our membership information and it very important for the work of the Foundation. We are also looking at migrating our Corporate member database to CiviCRM so it is important to have it running well.

#654 Removing non-OSM accounts from BigBlueButton OSMF instance

Issue 654 is about cleaning banned accounts off our video conferencing software. I mentioned a few months back that freeloaders were using our video conferencing system. Dorothea has started a process of identifying and removing accounts on our BBB instance. 24 have been removed so far and three more pending.

#648 Providing online Safety- Related Traffic Information (SRTI)

Issue 648 is about providing online Safety- Related Traffic Information

During a European Traveller Information Services Association meeting that board member Roland attended, the Dutch body for road maintenance has brought forward the idea to involve OpenStreetMap in the implementation of the Safety-Related Traffic Information (SRTI) & Real-Time Traffic Information (RTTI) law of the European Union.

In a nutshell they want to involve OpenStreetMap as platform for user curated geodata about road conditions rather than develop something parallel by themselves. Its an interesting project and we are looking into it. Issue 662 brings us back to CiviCRM. Due to a bug CiviCRM allowed people with less than the required 42 days mapping to be associate members. This becomes an issue at election me as membership conveys the right to vote and to stand as a candidate. The error has been fixed and we are in the process of contacting the affected people.

Prepared by Craig Allan.
Sections and links added by Dorothea.

Treasurer's report

2025 budget

We are looking forward to having a budget complete before the end of the year.

Thanks to Craig for preparing a budget process and to the board for contributions.

On income

  • We've started to track how the income from Corporate Donors develops to see early when there's a shortfall.
  • We don't yet have useful tools because the dates of Corporate Membership renewals are unevenly distributed.

Thanks to Sarah and Dorothea for work on tracking the income from Corporate Members.

On spending

  • We have a couple of routine contractors. The process for getting the money out for the invoices is now up and working. Most invoices have been put in time, were correct and were paid in time.
  • Spending is lower than expected - this is not necessarily a problem, as the contractors we work with are cautious in how they bill their invoices. This issue will get attention later, as currently we're focusing on the income side and the budget planning.

On next Treasurer report

No clear report expected in next month, due to SotM 2024 and the 2024 OSMF board election. Hope we'll have a useful tool to check the income side.

Membership Working Group and CiviCRM

Two issues:

  • Active Contributor Membership applications affected by the CiviCRM bugs.
  • Paypal issue.

Active Contributor Membership applications affected by CiviCRM bug

  • We are in touch with people whose active contributor membership sign-ups were affected by the CiviCRM plugin issue.
  • There are regular updates about the issue on community.osm.org.
  • By the end of the week we'll contact people with active contributor membership sign-ups who did not provide their OSM usernames.

Stats: 30% of membership sign ups from December 2023 to mid-July 2024 were affected.

Thanks to the Membership Working Group (MWG), the Licensing Working Group (LWG), the board, and Dorothea for helping out.

Paypal issue

  • Contractor working on it.
  • MWG has access to payment info and is helping out.

Membership campaign

The campaign to get new OSMF members mainly run from March to May 2024.

  • 20 volunteers from around the globe worked on this campaign.
  • 390 new OSMF member sign-ups: most joined via the active contributor fee-waiving program, some of these memberships were affected by the CiviCRM bug.
  • 4 countries (including Colombia) recruited 15+ new OSMF members, and one volunteer from the campaign team joined the Membership Working Group.
  • 16 countries now have OSMF members.

After the campaign ended, a webinar was conducted in English and French and the campaign organising team talked about issues and how the communities perceived it. The team might run a campaign early every year and a lot of the team members expressed interest to help again.

Thanks were expressed to Arnalie and the volunteers, as well as to the Licensing Working Group and the Membership Working Group for the work on the CiviCRM issue.

LCCWG update: Local Chapters applications updates

LCCWG update: Communities tool (formerly microcosms)

There was an update by Brian de Rocher (LCCWG member).

LCCWG update: 31 Day OSM Challenge for October

Topic suggested by Arnalie Vicario.

Włodzimierz Bartczak (OSM Poland) suggested a 31 day OSM mapping challenge for October. He has reached out to other Local Chapters via the Advisory Board, to spread the word.

LCCWG update: local SotM support discussions

There are several discussions about supporting regional SotM conferences, organised by local communities. While OSMF does not have the funds to support these conferences, it can support them by bringing them in touch with potential sponsors and being an intermediary for the distribution of sponsorships, especially to organising teams of local SotMs that do not have a registered organisation. Currently working on clarifying the benefits of acquiring a SotM quick licence.

Take action against data consumers persistently plagiarising OSM data and not using OSMF tile servers

Deferred, as Mateusz did not have time to post before the meeting.

GDPR updates

There were comments on community.osm.org about how to handle GDPR issues and related progress. Sarah plans to ask Grant Slater (Senior Site Reliability Engineer) if the suggested changes are easy to implement.

Presentation - OSM Colombia

Presentation 2024-08 OSM Colombia by Andres Gomez Casanova.pdf

10 minute presentation by Andrés Gómez Casanova (@AngocA). 5 minutes questions and comments.

Question about negative responses to the messages sent to active mappers in Colombia

Question by Sarah Hoffmann (board) on any negative responses to the messages Andrés sent to top active mappers in Colombia, asking them to consider becoming OSMF members as they would quailify for an active contributor memership.

> Didn't get any negative response, just did not receive a response from some people.
> Sometimes people that have been mapping for a long time they do not know about the OSMF or the benefits of becoming members, such as voting for the board.

Thanks to Andrés for his personal engagement in the OSMF membership drive

Arnalie Vicario (board) thanked Andrés for his personal enaggement in the OSMF membership drive and mentioned that Colombia was one of the four countries that acquired the most OSMF new members (29+) during the recent membership drive, even without having any campaign materials in Spanish.

> Next time Andrés would like to follow the same approach which he employed for the membership campaign, to the whole Latam.

Comment about location of mappers on OSM tools

Comment by Craig Allan (board) that the tools by Pascal Neis do not show the country that people are living in, which is necessary for analyses like the one Andes did, which focused on the people who do local mapping. Having a mapper's location is important for community outreach, otherwise you have to figure out the home location of mappers one-by-one, which is tricky in cases of people who have mapped in every single country around the world, like Craig has.

Question about mappers not logging into the OSM website

Question by Enock (guest), on the text chat: Could it be that some of these mappers don't log into OSM website or something. Since I have contacted mappers in OSM messages and Changeset discussions but never get responses but these users continue to actively contribute. May be they are using an editor that doesn't even prompt them of OSM messages, etc. In relation to ignored messages.

> Have faced the issue. It seems that the mappers don't see the messages from the OSMF system, which is very sad because they are very active and while they are making mistakes, they don't see the messages about the corrections.
> Would be a good opportunity for the OSMF to email them directly.

Comment by Enock that some mappers might have signed up with a social login.

Comments by board members that,

  • While the OSMF has the email addresses of many mappers, we probably can't use them in such cases.
  • Mappers can enable email notifications, to receive copies of osm.org messages.
  • In cases of mapping mistakes, people can contact the Data Working Group (DWG) to put a zero-hour block to users who don't respond to changeset comments (the zero-hour block is essentially displaying a message that the users have to read and acknowledge when they login, before proceeding to map).

Any other business

None mentioned.

Guest comments or questions

None mentioned.

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: 26 September 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: Thursday 26 September 2024, at 13:30 UTC at https://osmvideo.cloud68.co/user/dor-2cd-qah-rim.

Mid-month board chat: 12 September 2024

Next mid-month board chat (not open to observers): 12 September at 13:30 UTC.

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

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