Board/Minutes/2025-05-15
Board chat - not open to observers.
Preliminary agenda and page for draft minutes.
Thursday 12 May 2025 at 13:30 UTC.
Video room at https://osmvideo.cloud68.co
using BigBlueButton.
Participants
Not Present
Officers and board historic
Biographies historic
Guests
Meeting not open to observers.
2025 Board face-to-face meeting logistics
Topic proposed by Dorothea and approved by Craig.
Setting the 2025 Annual General Meeting date
Topic proposed by Dorothea and approved by Craig.
Related to circular 2025/11.
Complaint about inappropriate language by Working Group member
Topic proposed by Dorothea and approved by Craig.
Corporate Membership - LINE Yahoo Corporation (Japan)
Topic proposed by Dorothea and approved by Craig.
OSUOSL financial support
| Background provided by Grant Slater (SSRE) |
|---|
| Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSUOSL) has just put out a plea for financial support: https://osuosl.org/blog/osl-future/
OSUOSL has kindly hosted OpenStreetMap (and OSM US) servers for us for 10+ years. The tile server we have there provides tiles for most of the Americas and parts of South East Asia / Oceania. Ian Dees (cc'ed) kindly linked us up with them many years ago. OSMF owns the physical server hardware hosted by them, formerly the hardware was loaned to us by OSM US. OSUOSL additionally provides us with remote-hands support to keep things running. https://hardware.openstreetmap.org/#osuosl |
| Topic proposed by Roland. |
Potential funding source - FLOSS/fund by Zerodha
| Background |
|---|
| Mateusz Konieczny (former board member) notified the board about the FLOSS fund.
Selected sections from the https://floss.fund/ website.
FLOSS/fund is dedicated to supporting critical, impactful, and valuable Free/Libre and Open Source projects globally. We give up to $1 million per year to support developers and communities that create and maintain projects, big and small.
A project can apply for funding of up to $100,000 in one year. To keep the logistics and operational overhead of the fund reasonable, we accept requests in denominations of a minimum of $10,000 and multiples of $25,000 thereafter.
Individuals, projects, groups, communities, or organisations can apply. The application can be for a specific project or an entity representing many projects or FOSS efforts. The applicant or the legal entity must have a bank account and the necessary tax documents (which vary between jurisdictions) to receive funds. Currently, our focus is on supporting existing, widely used, and impactful projects to specifically contribute to their sustainability. Very new projects or projects with minimal usage are not considered for the time being.
It is difficult to define and quantify parameters such as value and impact across projects. For instance, Python, cURL, Krita, and Log4J are all highly valuable and impactful projects in their respective areas, with varying degrees of technical sophistication, effort, and value in their respective areas. Currently, our focus is on supporting existing, widely used, and impactful projects to specifically contribute to their sustainability. Very new projects or projects with minimal usage are not considered for the time being. Our internal investment committee evaluates projects based on broad criteria such as value, impact, criticality, and innovation. Once we have a reasonable grasp of the process end-to-end, from evaluation to disbursement of funds, we plan to set up a community voting system and an external investment committee from the FOSS world to help us evaluate and select recipients.
Only a public acknowledgement with a link to this website for others to discover the fund.
To initiate and give this experiment a serious shot, FLOSS/fund will accept funding requests from projects through a publicly accessible funding.json file hosted on their respositories or websites. This file is not meant to convey everything there is to know—an impossible task—but to solicit interest and communicate enough to ensure discoverability which would not be possible otherwise. Visit fundingjson.org to know more. Applications that come through to the FLOSS/fund will be indexed and published on the dir.floss.fund directory / portal, making them publicly discoverable by anyone interested in supporting projects.
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| Topic proposed by Dorothea and approved by Craig. |
Personnel Committee's suggestion in aligning the timing of contracts to the fiscal years
Topic proposed by Héctor.
Status of the payments to the services due this month
Topic proposed by Héctor.