Board/Minutes/2025-01
Draft minutes to be added.
Date and time: Thursday 30 January 2025 at 13:30 UTC.
Time in your time-zone - Countdown.
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.
Participants
["talk" time*] Director's name
- [09'] Craig Allan (Chairing)
- [27'] Dani Waltersdorfer
- [00'] Guillaume Rischard (joined 30' after start)
- [01'] Héctor Ochoa Ortiz
- [01'] Maurizio Napolitano
- [00'] Laura Mugeha
- [05'] Roland Olbricht
*Includes time when the microphone was activated due to noise.
Officers and Board Historic
Board member biographies Historic
Absent
Guests
- 8 guests
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
- 2024-12-19 Approved
Circular Resolutions
2024/Res49 Accept 2025 OSMF budget as attached
| The board accept the budget as attached as the budget for 2025. It is understood that the budget has to be adjusted by later board votes during 2025 when Working Groups ask for support or substantial new information comes in. In particular, not all working groups have submitted a budget request yet.
The board has during the public December meeting of today decided to defer the decision to this circular to have something in written form. |
|
Unanimously approved on 2024-12-26 with 7 votes in favour: Roland Olbricht, Craig Allan, Héctor Ochoa Ortiz, Maurizio Napolitano, Laura Mugeha, Daniela Waltersdorfer, Guillaume Rischard. |
| Circular created by Roland Olbricht. |
2025/Res01 Approve active contributor membership application #2025010310000071
| The Board currently decides on active contributor membership applications based on non-mapping contributions on a case-by-case basis. |
|
Approved on 2025-01-13 with 5 votes in favour: Roland Olbricht, Héctor Ochoa Ortiz, Maurizio Napolitano, Laura Mugeha, Daniela Waltersdorfer. |
| Application initially processed by the Membership Working Group. |
2025/Res02 Approve active contributor membership application #2024121010000154
| The Board currently decides on active contributor membership applications based on non-mapping contributions on a case-by-case basis. |
|
Approved on 2025-01-19 with 4 votes in favour: Roland Olbricht, Craig Allan, Daniela Waltersdorfer, Laura Mugeha (I cross-checked the [organisation's] website and can see [the applicant] is one of the founding members and leads the community: [website of organisation]. They double as an OSGEO and OSM community and became an official local chapter in [Year]. Upvoting based on community(leadership) contribution - still wasn't obvious on the response but checked online.). |
| Application initially processed by the Membership Working Group. |
2025/Res03 Approve active contributor membership application #2025011210000115
| The Board currently decides on active contributor membership applications based on non-mapping contributions on a case-by-case basis. |
|
Approved on 2025-01-19 with 5 votes in favour: Roland Olbricht, Daniela Waltersdorfer, Héctor Ochoa Ortiz, Laura Mugeha, Craig Allan (Supported - Thanks to [applicant] for [their] work organising [team]). |
| Application initially processed by the Membership Working Group. |
2025/Res04 Reimburse travel expenses to Karlsruhe Hackweekend February 2025
| The board approves that the Foundation reimburses usual travel expenses for member of the Operations Working Group and of the maintainers of openstreetmap-website to the Karlsruhe Hackweekend in February 2025[1].
The rationale is that after the outage in December 2024 a couple of member of Operations Working Group and openstreetmap-website have expresses intent to meet in person there to sort out a strategy to make openstreetmap.org resilient against this current effective Single Point Of Failure. |
|
Unanimously approved on 2025-01-23 with 7 votes in favour: Roland Olbricht, Héctor Ochoa Ortiz, Laura Mugeha, Guillaume Rischard, Maurizio Napolitano, Daniela Waltersdorfer, Craig Allan (This event is a key conference for engaging with people who work on OSM software - those that already do develop for OSM and very importantly, the future developers we are trying to attract to OSM.). |
| Circular by Roland Olbricht. |
[1] Event page on the OSM wiki.
2025/Res05 Distribution of Meta Sponsorship to regional SotM (SotM Japan), via OSMF
| Here is another circular to support the distribution of Meta Sponsorship to regional SotMs. Details about the event we are voting on are explained below.
State of the Map Japan 2024 - 15 Jan 2025 More details about the application are included in its GitLab issue. Please read the issue and its attached documents carefully before voting. |
|
Approved on 2025-01-23 with 6 votes in favour: Guillaume Rischard, Héctor Ochoa Ortiz, Daniela Waltersdorfer, Laura Mugeha, Craig Allan, Roland Olbricht. |
| Circular by Héctor Ochoa Ortiz. |
[2] Accessible to board members.
Action item updates
| Public board action items - About | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Filter by assignee | Craig | Dani | Guillaume | Héctor | Laura | Maurizio | Roland | Not assigned |
| Filter by label | Example: any label # labels here (non-clickable) | |||||||
Secretary's report
| Background |
|---|
| Topic presented by Dani Waltersdorfer. |
By Dani Waltersdorfer.
2025 Face-to-face board meeting
We're busy planning the Board Face to Face meeting. These Board face to face meeting are important for building relationships between Board members who are located across the globe, and to work closely on prioritizing goals and actions for this year. It looks like it will be held in Italy this year, maybe in April or May.
2025 Annual General Meeting
We're also looking at the timing of the Annual General Meeting (AGM). Traditionally it was held late in the year, but for several very good reasons it has been moved to the beginning of the 4th quarter. This year we are looking at the impact of having it before the SotM 2025 in Manila, maybe after the SotM or perhaps holding the AGM at the SotM Meeting. The date we choose will set the time for completing the complex train of events that lead to the election and the AGM.
Sovereign Tech Fund and Software Development Facilitator
An exciting development is that following a successful funding application to the Sovereign Tech Fund Agency, an organization funded by the German government, we are now hiring an OSM Core Software Development Facilitator for a period of roughly two years. Wahoo! It is notable that we did this by a public advertisement to try to get the best possible developers and the response has been great. Sadly we can only appoint one person. The successful candidate will help to coordinate the growing team of developers of the OpenStreetMap core software to coordinate and organize their work. The work is mainly centered around the OpenStreetMap-website project. The Facilitator will organize communication with the OSM community to ensure visibility on the development work and to establish a space for the community to contribute productively.
January Advisory Board meeting and Microsoft presentation
On that same topic, the Advisory Board meeting was held on Monday (January 27th) this week and Microsoft staffer Aleksandar Matejevic presented on the team that they have deployed to work on the OSM project. There are five people involved, of which three are dedicated to making upgrades to the core software particularly to improve the user experience. This is a big contribution to OSM. The Development Facilitator will be working closely with them.
The Advisory Board is a meeting of representatives of our Local Chapters and representatives of our biggest sponsors, where we engage with them and they with us. The meetings are chaired by Mikel Maron (Advisory Board coordinator). This time we had five Board members sitting in on the meeting, specifically for the meeting to meet our three new Board members, Laura Mugehahistoric, Maurizio Napolitanohistoric, and Héctor Ochoa Ortizhistoric.
Meeting with the Overture Maps Foundation
Another interesting meeting we had recently was with the Overture Maps Foundation. You will remember that the Overture Maps Foundation was created by AWS, Meta, Microsoft and Tom-tom to try to build a common geo-data resource that is more suited to their commercial needs than OpenStreetMap. However, their map draws heavily on OSM data and they understand that they depend on OSM data for the success of their project. Two Board members, Craig and Dani met with Executive Director Marc Prioleau and Technical Director Amy Rose. The meeting was designed to build a relationship between the two organisations and it was successful in doing that. Overture is very well resourced with engineering staff and it is clear that if we would like to draw on those resources for any technical development work then Overture would be open to assisting us.
Participation in the February 2025 Karlsruhe Hackweekend
We are sending a team of our Operations resources to the HackWeekend to be held at the GeoFabrik offices in Karlsruhe in February. The weekend is a gathering of twenty European and British OSM related developers who work on our internal systems and on private systems that interface with OSM. Our operations team representatives will be Grant Slater, Tom Hughes and Andy Allan. The primary purpose of us sending them is to build strong relationships with the developer community.
OSM is a recipient of the 2024 Proton fundraising
A surprise email arrived from the Proton, the privacy on the Internet organization. They hold an annual fundraising event and the part of the event is used to funds are distributed to a small number of deserving organizations. OpenStreetMap was selected because we are very respectful of user privacy. As we explained to them on a call, we can't give stats on our user characteristics because we don't collect any user data other than an email. We don't know how much will be allocated to us yet, but we expect that it will be at least many tens of thousands of Euros. If you participated in announcing this on your social media accounts, could we kindly ask you to please share with us? Thank you!
Donation of 1 Bitcoin
Staying on privacy, we have received a donation of one bitcoin. It was as completely anonymous as only bitcoin can be. Someone out there likes us and sent us funds which we have converted to almost 80 thousand Euros-- wahoo!. Our policy on Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, and other electronic money is to convert it to conventional funds as soon as possible.
Niantic is a new Corporate Member and sponsor of the 2025 State of the Map conference
On the funding note, Niantic is now a Silver Corporate Member and that they will sponsor SotM 2025. Thank you, Niantic!
Distribution of Meta sponsorships to regional SotM conferences
A less happy money story was the troubles we have had distributing external funds for a number of regional State of the Map events. We have not funded regional SotMs before and It has been difficult to deal with the banks to send all the funds internationally. We are now richer in experience and it will probably run a lot smoother next time. We send our apologies to the local chapters organising teams for the delays in the transfers funding their meetings.
DMCA renewal
A feature of these secretary reports has been to mention the administrative problems the Foundation deals with. Our latest pain point has been renewing our DMCA registration. The OSMF is registered with the US copyright office as a "designated agent" and a "service provider" so that any US copyright issues can be dealt with through the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) process. We need to renew before 31 January 2025. Getting the renewal done has been a nightmare of multiple emails between the Legal Working Group, The DMCA office, our OPS team and our Treasurer, Roland. We're still not done with it and it's due tomorrow.
Post-meeting addition of sub-section titles and links.
Draft comments to be added.
Treasurer's report
| Previous reports during monthly board meetings and general meetings |
|---|
| See the Treasurer's reports on the finances page. |
| Topic presented by Roland Olbricht. |
Draft minutes to be added.
Update from SotM Latam 2024
| Background |
|---|
| Dani Waltersdorfer participated in SotM Latam 2024 as a board member with the talk "The OpenStreetMap Foundation and its Board of Directors: What it is, What it does, What it isn't" - video here - and her presence at the Foundation's booth. |
| Suggested by Dani Waltersdorfer. |
Deferred from December 2024 board meeting.
Draft minutes to be added.
Any other business
None
Guest comments or questions
| Open to all OSM Foundation members (Become a member of the Foundation). You are welcome to ask questions or to comment (via voice or on the chat) at the end of the meeting.
|
Draft minutes to be added.
Next meetings
Open board meeting: 27 February 2025 at 13:30 UTC
2025 dates of open board meetings: on this Framagenda calendar (green dots), and below.
- 27 Feb 2025 at 13:30 UTC
- 27 Mar 2025 at 13:30 UTC
- 24 Apr 2025 at 13:30 UTC
- 29 May 2025 at 13:30 UTC
- 26 Jun 2025 at 13:30 UTC
- 31 Jul 2025 at 13:30 UTC
- 28 Aug 2025 at 13:30 UTC
- 25 Sep 2025 at 13:30 UTC
- 23 Oct 2025 at 13:30 UTC
Add future board meetings to your calendar
If you want future board meetings to be automatically added to your calendar, you can subscribe to the following iCalendar link. Instructions on how to do that depend on which calendar software/service you use. The link is provided for your convenience.
Please note that:
- It might not work when Framasoft servers experience problems.
- You might get delayed updates, depending on how often the calendar service from your side syncs/checks for updates.
- Both public and non-public meetings are added to this calendar. The later ones have a note in their description about being non-public.
Mid-month board chat: 13 February 2025 at 13:30 UTC
Not open to observers. About mid-month board chats.
Dates: See this Framagenda calendar (yellow dots), and the board meetings page.