Local Chapters and Communities Working Group/Meeting minutes/2025-06-04

Meeting started at 14:07 UTC.

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Attendance

Present

• Adam - UK
• Eugene - PH
• Geoffrey - UG
• Héctor - ES (also Board)
• Michael
• Laura - Board liaison (also KE)

Not present

• Anisa - IT (with apologies)
• Maggie - US (with apologies)

Guest

• Salim (EWG microgrants)

Administrative

• May minutes: https://hackmd.io/@lccwg/S1KLjfqC-l
  • Approved

Main agenda

Local Chapters and Communities Congress

• Blog post draft for the March congress: https://hackmd.io/rL3UBd75T9-OogHLPqxY2A
  • Need to finish by next week
• SotM 2026
  • Congress session approved: https://2026.stateofthemap.org/sessions/E7G93L/
  • Confirm with Maggie if she can lead the session with Anisa and Héctor assisting

Local Chapter applications

Colombia

• Blog post draft: https://hackmd.io/@lccwg/HygxVbJWfl
• SotM 2026 Local Chapter agreement signing ceremony still pending; we are not sure if AC3 is sending a representative
  • Confirm with AC3/Andrés
  • If AC3 cannot attend SotM, coordinate with Board on who's attending LatAm SotM
• David Rios was nominated to join the WG
  • Eugene to ask him to join the next meeting

Catalan countries

• Was not discussed during Board's May meeting; Roland has reservations about lack of consultation with Spanish community
  • This is considered an internal Board matter and the WG does not need to be involved
  • It is possible that the Board will approve in their June or July monthly meeting

Spain

• Héctor is in Spain and will go to the bank to resolve OSM Spain's bank account issues

Microgrants

• EWG did a successful technical microgrants last year
• Salim (TomTom) provided info about EWG's microgrants:
  • EWG tracked everything in GitHub using PRs and other GitHub features mainly because of technical nature of the grants
  • Jurors were selected from different backgrounds and knowledge following an open call; EWG has had to encourage people to apply
  • Sending of payments is a factor; hard to send payment to certain regions outside Europe and the OSMF Treasurer is very busy
    • Possible improvement: EWG maybe should've gotten grantees' payment details (Bank, Wise, Payoneer, etc.) ASAP to check if payments could be sent
• Outcomes:
  • EWG required project reporting and documentation from grantees
  • Financial reporting was not really needed
  • Payment was provided based on milestones
  • Timeline: https://github.com/osmfoundation/ewg_bidding/blob/main/microgrants-2025/_timeline.md
  • EWG didn't want to micromanage
• 2020 microgrants info:
  • In 2020, OSMF used the OSM Wiki for the application and public comments: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Microgrants/Microgrants_2020
• Wikimedia Italia also has microgrants: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Italia/Programmi_di_finanziamento/Microgrant
• WG to ask Salim if he's willing to join grant subcommittee

Any other business

• No other business

Next meeting

• No calendar invitation yet; should be on 2 July 2026

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Meeting ended at 15:10 UTC.