Board/Minutes/2025-03

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Draft minutes.

Date and time: Thursday 27 March 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.

Acronyms

Participants

["talk" time*] Director's name

  • [22'] Craig Allan
  • [02'] Dani Waltersdorfer (disconnected ~29' after start)
  • [12'] Guillaume Rischard
  • [07'] Héctor Ochoa Ortiz
  • [01'] Maurizio Napolitano
  • [02'] Laura Mugeha

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

Apologies

  • Roland Olbricht

Officers and Board Historic
Board member biographies Historic
Minutes by Dorothea Kazazi.

Guests

  • 3 guests

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

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Administrative

Approval of previous minutes

  • 2025-02-27 While the minutes were proposed for approval, discussion ensued about the circulars on that page, and the minutes were not formally approved during the March meeting.

On 2025/Res06 "Resolution to prioritise Brussels, Belgium in the move of OSMF to the European Union""

Comment that the resolution 2025/Res06 "Resolution to prioritise Brussels, Belgium in the move of OSMF to the European Union" is moot because it was discussed during the February board meeting.

Current board rules of order:
7.5.1 The proposed resolution concludes under either of these conditions

  • Passes as soon as an absolute majority of board members approve.
  • Cancelled without decision when the topic is voted on at a board meeting.
  • Fails in all other cases.

7.5.2 Any circular not passing may be raised as an agenda item at a board meeting for discussion and vote.

On 2025/Res08 "Resolution in support of core infrastructure investment project coordinator"

Comment that resolution 2025/Res08 was also discussed during the February meeting.

Circular Resolutions

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

The Secretary apologised for not having an official report prepared, as she is recovering from a mild head concussion. She also mentioned that most of the topics the board is focusing on this month are included in the agenda.

Board 2025 face-to-face meeting

Venue: Thanks to Maurizio, we have a venue which will not charge us.

Hotel:

  • Dani and Héctor arranged a hotel close to the meeting venue.
  • Roland will pay with OSMF's bank card.
  • The finalisation of the accommodation is important for Craig and Laura, as it will be mentioned in their letters of invitation for their Visa applications.

Treasurer's report

The Treasurer was absent, as he was giving a talk at FOSSGIS 2025, and sent his apologies.

  • Craig forwarded to Roland a spreadsheet with the January and February expenditures, based on the Xero bookkeeping accounts. The spradsheet includes the budget and Roland hasn't seen it or approved it yet. The plan is to present it to the members at the next board meeting.
  • Nothing in the board's finance folder of shared documents since June 2024.

Heatmap of OSM mapping contributions on user profiles and GDPR

Issues

  • Potential GDPR non-compliance: The heatmap of OSM mapping contributions, currently visible on www.osm.org user profiles, may not comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This issue was mentioned by community members.
  • Using service without accepting OSM terms of service: Some OSM accounts created before the introduction of the OSM terms of service, can login to www.osm.org without accepting the terms of service. This issue was raised by Simon Poole (former OSMF and LWG Chairperson).

Current status

On heatmap of OSM mapping contributions

  • The information used for the heatmap is already provided by the OSM user history and is not new personal information.
    • Aggregated information can be used to track patterns of map editing and that can be an issue.

Suggestions

  • The board to create a subgroup to consult the Licensing Working Group (LWG) and Simon Poole, and to propose a solution before the next board meeting. Ask whether we need to allow people to enable/disable this feature, in order to be compliant with GDPR.
    • Héctor and Craig will be in the group. Dani offered to join.
  • The board to look at the issue of people with old accounts, created before the introduction of the OSM terms of service, who can log-in to www.osm.org without accepting the terms of service.
  • The board to consult the community about the GDPR compliance of the rest of the features planned to be implemented on www.osm.org.

Decision

  • A board subgroup, with Héctor as lead, Craig and Dani, to ask the LWG for feedback. The email draft will be put on a collaborative document, so that all board members can contribute.

See also the comments by Simon Poole (former OSMF and LWG Chairperson) further below.

Any other business

On process

Board members were asked if they wanted to remove the topic of "United Kingdom Online Safety Act" from the agenda, as it was added to the agenda after the seven days cut-off (#6.3 Board rules of service historic). The decision was to keep this topic - as well as the rest, most of which were also added after the cut-off - and discuss it during the "any other business" section. If decisions are to be made, to make them as circulars.

United Kingdom Online Safety Act

Craig has prepared a first draft of OSMF's self risk-assessment for the Online Services Act. The act requires websites to protect UK users from violence, terrorism, and other harmful content. Ofcom's guidelines include checking for 43 different risks. We don't need to provide the self risk-assessment to Ofcom, until requested to do so, and we can amend it.

Other points mentioned during discussion

  • Craig has provided the self-assessment to the LWG for feedback.
  • We have done a lot more than we did for the GDPR.
  • While the act seems to target the big 40, it does not have any exclusions for smaller websites.
  • The act was vague.
  • Preparing the document was a lot of work.

Plan

  • Craig to publish the self-assessment on the OSMF website.
  • Ask the moderation team to regularly post notices, providing a channel for complaints, on community chats.

OSM Core Software Development coordinator - Appointment of contractor

Topic proposed by Craig Allan

The preferred candidate, who was ready to sign the contract, declined due to personal issues. Therefore, we had to go back to the other candidates and do a second round of interviews, which is now finished. There are currently two preferred candidates. The selected person should be ready to start work next week. Given the requirement to complete a specified number of hours within 2025 and our current delay, they will need to work hard. We now have to spend €16,000 per month for the next 10 months to fulfil our commitments.

Dani disconnected 29' after start.

Moving the OSMF out of the UK and into the EU

Topic proposed by Craig Allan

Draft Belgian Articles of Association have been prepared by Belgian lawyers and been edited by board members. The board plans to also get feedback by the LWG and OSM Belgium (Local Chapter) and to post the updated version on the OSMF website for feedback by members. The aim is to have draft Belgian Articles of Association ready by the next Annual General Meeting (AGM), for vote by the membership.

The LWG briefly looked at the draft Articles of Association. Guillaume and Tom Hummel (LWG) had a meeting and looked at drafts of Articles of Association for both Belgium and Luxembourg. Guillaume has prepared something for Tom Hummel (LWG) to look up and he has to find the report.

Suggestion

  • Guillaume to send his and Tom Hummel's (LWG) feedback, to be incorporated in the draft.

Vector Tiles implementation

Topic proposed by Craig Allan

Paul Norman has been working on improvements to the speed and efficiency. Integration into the osm.org website is expected within two months.

Revisit the FPOSM trademark licence agreement

The two-year trademark agreement with the Federation of Pros of OSM from France ends in three days. The initial plan was to switch to a new type of agreement, under the OSMF affiliation scheme which is currently being developed by the Local Chapters and Communities Working Group (LCCWG).

FPOSM has grown from 9 to 20 members since the original agreement and offered to give a presentation at the next board meeting.

Suggestion

  • Extend the agreement indefinitely.
    • We need to establish a formal agreement for professional associations and non-local chapter affiliations. The two years serves as a good prompt for us to complete it.

Decisions seemed to be

  • Héctor to create a circular for extending the agreement for 2 years.
  • Invite FPOSM to give a presentation at the next board meeting.

Other point mentioned during discussion

Board's presence in Wikimania

Laura and Craig to discuss whether they want to participate in Wikimania.

Dorothea's contract

OSMF has renewed and signed the contract with Dorothea Kazazi.

Comment that the board still needs to vote on the contract renewal.

Guest comments or questions

On the heatmap of OSM mapping contributions on user profiles and GDPR

Comments on the topic by Simon Poole (guest, former OSMF and LWG Chairperson).

Main issues

  • Disconnect between OSMF's assurances and the actions of the osm.org development team, as they haven't been informed of the need to vet changes against privacy policiy and related documents from the LWG and EWG.
  • Data distribution: it could have been completed by the end of 2019. However, we are at least two years away, as there was no communication to the OWG about the need to budget and plan for this. Additionally, the migration of data to Amazon Web Services (AWS) makes the task now more complex. Even if all the necessary work is completed, there is no safeguard to prevent it from being undone the next day if someone merges a pull request which undoes all of it.
  • Tech bro exceptionalism: the thinking that "the law doesn't apply to me".

Board comments on the disconnect

  • One of the board members has been in multiple chats with Simon, Tom Hughes (OWG volunteer) and Grant Slater (Senior Site Reliability Engineer) about the issues.
  • Simon commented that - while he had pointed out when the move to AWS was made that they should take these issues into consideration - all these discussions were informal chats.

On the heatmap

Simon was asked what part of the privacy policy dos he think that the heatmap violates and how does he think we should do it well.

Suggestions

  • Short-term: Make the feature available only to logged-in contributors. It's the simplest solution, not requiring many code changes.
  • Ideally, make the feature configurable, so that people can turn it off/on.

On data processing

  • Issue: OSMF is doing additional data processing to create the heatmap, without a legal justification for that. We are adding features, arguing that it is just a bit more processing of the data.
  • Data processing needs a legitimate reason, which can be achieved with:
    • consent,
    • having a legitimate interest,
    • law.
  • OSMF's current data processing is based on thes justification of legitimate interest. This was chosen before May 2018 (when GDPR came into force) instead of basing it on consent - because consent can be withdrawn at any time, which would create havoc. It was a good solution, with minimal impact on day-to-day usage of OpenStreetMap.

OSMF has to decide whether this feature is legitimate processing of the data, as we have communicated to our users.

On GDPR

Robert Riemann (European Data Protection Supervisor) gave a talk at State of the Map 2021 and he came to the same conclusions as the LWG in 2018.

"OSM data: Privacy Risks and GDPR compliance"

Comments by board members

  • The points raised by Simon are important.
  • We would like to comply and maintain the privacy of our users, as shown with the recent funding by Proton.

Suggestion

  • The board to find the related document created by Simon while he was in the LWG and proceed from there.

Next meetings

Open board meeting: 24 April 2025 at 13:30 UTC

2025 dates of open board meetings: on this Framagenda calendar (green dots), and below.

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Mid-month board chat: 10 April 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.

Meeting adjourned 52 minutes after start.

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