OSMF updates/2018-10
Annual General Meeting
The 12th Annual General Meeting of the OpenStreetMap Foundation will be held online in the IRC chat room #osmf-gm on the IRC network irc.oftc.net, at 16:00 UTC on Saturday, 15 December 2018.
Members who want to vote in the elections for the OpenStreetMap Foundation board and whose membership will expire at any time before December 16th, are asked to renew it now.
OSMF updates - October 2018
- Content: Highlighting updates related to the Foundation - mostly news from the volunteer Working Groups, the Board of Directors, the Local Chapters, the Advisory Board members and some project news.
- Details: For more details you are invited to read the minutes or reports of the Board and the Working Groups (links on each section).
- Accuracy: These reports do not go through a formal acceptance process, like the Board minutes are. This might change. Reports are made known to the Working Groups first, before being sent to the membership.
- Previous reports: here.
Groups: Comm | Data | Eng | Legal | Memb | Ops | SotM | Chapters | AB | Board || Project
Communication Working Group
| General info | Communication Working Group, Join as a volunteer |
| Meetings | |
|---|---|
| Regularity | Monthly, on the 2nd Thursday of the month at 19:00 London Time |
| Next meeting | November 8th, 19:00 London Time, on Mumble |
| Previous minutes | Oct, Sep, Aug, Jul, list. |
Blogposts about:
- Belgium Local Chapter
- Play a role in shaping OpenStreetMap
- Mastodon instance for OpenStreetMap
- New tile render server in the USA
- Vandalism incident
- OSM birthday
- Winners of the 3rd OSM awards
- State of the Map 2018 in Milan
- Server moves
Groups: Comm | Data | Eng | Legal | Memb | Ops | SotM | Chapters | AB | Board || Project
Data Working Group
| General info | Data Working Group, Join as a volunteer |
| Meetings | |
|---|---|
| Regularity | Bimonthly |
| Next meeting | |
| Previous minutes | May, Mar, list. |
DWG activity: In the second quarter of 2018, the Data Working Group (DWG) handled 194 cases (activity report).
Ongoing - Resolving issues in copyright violation, disputes, vandalism and detecting and stopping vandalism and imports that do not comply with guidelines.
| Ongoing - Organised editing guidelines (former directed editing policy) |
|---|
| Organised mapping efforts are an integral part of today's OSM contribution landscape and, when done well, help make OSM better and more widely known. In order to maintain good communications between, and a level playing field for, individual community members and organised editing groups, the board had asked the Data Working Group (DWG) to work on a directed editing policy, in a manner that it has sufficient community input, and before anything is decided to come back to the board. The DWG has developed a set of organised editing guidelines, after integrating a lot of feedback from the advisory board members, the humanitarian mapping initiatives and the mapping community. The proposed guidelines replace the former draft directed editing policy. Read Guillaume's report and the recent Q&A session. Timeline:
|
WG volunteers: We thank Deanna Earley, who has left the DWG, for all her work and we welcome Tom Pfeifer, who has joined.
Groups: Comm | Data | Eng | Legal | Memb | Ops | SotM | Chapters | AB | Board || ProjectEngineering Working Group
| General info | Engineering Working Group, Join as a volunteer |
| Meetings | |
|---|---|
| Regularity | |
| Next meeting | |
| Previous minutes | Apr, list. |
Google Summer of Code 2018 has ended. See the projects.
Licensing Working Group
| General info | Licensing Working Group, Join as a volunteer |
| Meetings | |
|---|---|
| Regularity | Monthly on the 2nd Thursday of the month, at 20:00 UTC, on Mumble, unless rescheduled. |
| Next meeting | November 8th, 2018 at 20:00 UTC on Mumble |
| Previous minutes | Oct, Sep, Aug, Jul, list. |
| GDPR preparation |
|---|
| The General Data Protection Regulation came into effect May 25, 2018. The Licensing Working Group (LWG) published a document with a set of recommendations. Additionally:
Privacy policy: The OpenStreetMap privacy policy for services formally operated and provided by the OpenStreetMap Foundation has been published and is being updated.
GDPR-related LWG minutes: 2018 Sep, Jul, Jun, May, Apr, Mar, Feb, 2017 Nov, Sep, Jul |
Non-disclosure Agreement: The LWG-proposed NDA has been accepted by the board as the recommended NDA to use in all aspects in the OSMF, if an NDA has to be used.
Ongoing - DMCA and general takedown procedure: The LWG has drafted a document, which proposes changes to the DMCA procedure and is under discussion. Currently, moderation requests come to the DWG only, with requests via the DMCA form (which is linked from the "Takedown procedure" page on the OSM website) going to both the DWG and the LWG. The majority of "DMCA requests" that we receive aren't for the USA where the DMCA applies (actually, the vast majority of mails which that address receives are spam).
Trademark issues: Open-street, OpenStreetCab, YouMap, New ™ registration attempt in France.
Other topics: Export problems of OSM data in South Korea, Facebook attribution issue, Austrian contributor, Licences' discussion (Open Data Licence - India (GODL) and Community Data Licence Agreement (Linux Foundation)).
WG volunteers: We thank Paul Norman, who has left the LWG, for his help all this time.
| The LWG is looking for volunteers |
|---|
| Preferably community members or lawyers interested in OSM and EU laws. Interested or having questions? Contact the LWG. |
Membership Working Group
| General info | Membership Working Group, Join as a volunteer |
| Meetings | |
|---|---|
| Regularity | As the needs arises |
| Next meeting | |
| Previous minutes | Sep, list. |
CiviCRM mail problem resolved: CiviCRM is an open source, internationalised suite of computer software which we use to manage our membership database, send emails to our members, as well as to manage registration to the State of the Map conference. Some renewal mailings were not reaching members. This has been resolved with the help of Jon Goldberg.
OSMF membership badge on openstreetmap.org: The idea is that people can voluntarily show that they are an OSMF member on their member page on openstreetmap.org. A pull request has been prepared.
Ongoing - Membership Fee Waiver Program: The MWG is working on the implementation of a membership fee waiver program. It is based on the board resolution from Oct. 14th 2014 and the subsequent vote at the 2014 Annual General Meeting. People will be able to apply through the fee waiver program for an associate membership, if paying the fee would constitute an unreasonable burden to the member because of lack of a suitable money transfer facility. The MWG is working on finalising and publishing the procedure. The program has already been accepted by the Board, provided that the text modifications are minor.
Operations Working Group
| General info | Operations Working Group, Join as a volunteer |
| Meetings | |
|---|---|
| Regularity | Occasional |
| Next meeting | |
| Previous minutes | Dec 2017, list. |
New data center arrangements: The servers from the Imperial College have been moved to Equinix Amsterdam, as IC wanted to reclaim the space for offices. Thank you to the volunteers from the OWG/OSMF for making the move and to University College London and Bytemark, who are still generously providing hosting for some other key servers. Blogpost.
Deleted users: We now publish a daily export of deleted OSM user IDs (mostly spammers).
Ongoing: Ensuring the operation and smooth running of the XML editing API and data distribution services.
| The OWG is looking for volunteers |
|---|
The OWG are also seeking someone to help in Amsterdam who can visit the Equinix data centre if we need. To quote the OWG, this volunteer would “need to be trusted, competent and did I say trusted”. You can get in touch with the whole team at: operations@osmfoundation.org. |
State of the Map Organising Committee
| General info | State of the Map Working Group Join as a volunteer |
| Meetings | |
|---|---|
| Regularity | Every one or two weeks |
| Next meeting | November 8th |
| Previous minutes | Oct 11, Aug 13, Jul 23, Jul 16, Jul 2, list. |
State of the Map 2018: Took place on the 28-30 of July 2018 in Milan, Italy, and 420 people attended the conference (public list of 408 attendees). See the program, watch the recorded talks and read some of the blog write-ups.
State of the Map 2019:
- Page on the OSM wiki.
- It will take place on the 21st to 23rd of September, 2019, at Heidelberg University in Heidelberg, Germany.
- The SotM organising committee has welcomed the new members from Heidelberg at their first, joint, online meeting.
- The conference logo is being finalised. Stay tuned!
- The steps till the end of the year were defined.
- Some members of the organising committee had an in-person meeting during the October Hackweekend in Karlsruhe.
WG volunteers: Christine Karch is now the chairperson of the SotM Organising Committee. We thank Rob Nickerson for chairing the group in the previous years.
Groups: Comm | Data | Eng | Legal | Memb | Ops | SotM | Chapters | AB | Board || ProjectLocal Chapters
| General info | Local Chapters |
| Mailing list | Register (open to official Local Chapters and to people or organisations interested into establishing one) |
- There was a Local Chapter meeting at SotM 2018 in Milan (summary by Raphael Das Gupta). Local Chapters and organisations interested in becoming a LC, are invited to join the Local Chapters mailing list to coordinate and help each other.
- Read the blogpost introducing OpenStreetMap Belgium, our new Local Chapter!
Groups: Comm | Data | Eng | Legal | Memb | Ops | SotM | Chapters | AB | Board || Project
Advisory Board members
| General info | Advisory Board |
| Members | Current members and their affiliations |
| Communications | Overview of communications |
- Some AB members had a meeting during State of the Map 2018, and spoke briefly about their own activities and the Welcome Mat project.
- The public SotM 2018 online registration list was sent to the AB members.
- OSM UK informed the AB members that they will respond to the UK Geospatial Commission's call for evidence, which "encourage(s) responses from the geospatial industry and beyond to help set the UK's future geospatial vision". The call for evidence closed on 24 October.
- Rob Nickerson shared some updates from the OSM UK community about their Annual General Meeting in Manchester, which was combined with a mapping party. This was a joint event with Open Data Manchester (an ODI Node).
- The AB members and the membership [have been asked for input on the design of the new Microgrants program.
- Joost Schouppe has joined the AB as the representative of OpenStreetMap Belgium, our new Local Chapter.
Groups: Comm | Data | Eng | Legal | Memb | Ops | SotM | Chapters | AB | Board || Project
Board of Directors
| General info | Officers and Board, Biographies, Rules of Order |
| Meetings | |
|---|---|
| Regularity | Monthly on the 3rd Thursday of the month, at 21:00 London time, unless rescheduled |
| Next meeting | 15th of November, at 21:00 London time on Mumble |
| Previous minutes | Sep, Aug, Jul, list. |
Non-disclosure Agreement: The board has accepted the LWG-proposed NDA, as the recommended NDA to use in all aspects in the OSMF, if an NDA has to be used.
Risk response plan: Discussion about developing a toolkit/plan to help the working groups and the board to handle situations where things could go wrong (vandalism/technical/financial/other).
Start developing guidance for our involvement in politics/activism: We have already taken a stand regarding the EU's proposed revision of its copyright directive, by signing as the OSMF the https://savecodeshare.eu petition. The board also had a more general discussion about our involvement in politics/activism.
Board members' reimbursement rules: Section 8 of the Board Rules of Order is related to gifts and reimbursements. Reimbursements received by OSMF board members must be reported unless: they are wholly unrelated to OSMF business or they are below £50 or they come from business relations already declared in the biographies. The board will continue the discussion about whether the current rules are sufficient or if we need to change them.
Extended OSMF membership: Currently, physical persons that sign up for a Normal or Associate membership, have to renew it every year. The board intends to explore the possibility of an extended membership (membership renewal for X years).
OSMF's next treasurer: If you see yourself as the OSMF's next treasurer, please read the email of our current treasurer, Frederik Ramm, and stand for election!
Ongoing - GDPR preparation update: The board has accepted the LWG-proposed OSMF services terms of use.
Ongoing - Welcome Mat: The board has asked for input on the Welcome Mat, a communications project to help organisations to familiarize themselves with OSM, the project, the community and especially to learn about our expectations and their responsibilities.
Ongoing - Microgrants: A consultation document was shared with the membership and the Advisory Board members, which contains an outline and top questions. There were also two microgrant-related sessions at the State of the Map 2018 conference (read some discussion points and questions).
General news
14th OSM birthday celebrations
We are 14! This year the project birthday was celebrated on Sunday, 12th August 2018 in cities all around the world!
Servers
First map tile caching server in Africa
We now have our first map tile cache server in Africa, thanks to INX-ZA!
New tile rendering server in the USA
Thank you to OpenStreetMap US, Ian Dees and Oregon State University Open Source Lab for our first map rendering server outside Europe!
New tile caching server in Chile
Altavoz provided a caching server in Chile, making tile.openstreetmap.org faster for mappers in South America. Thank you!
- See where the current cache locations are. Maybe you are interested in hosting a cache server?
OSMF registered address
We have a new address: OpenStreetMap Foundation, St John’s Innovation Centre, Cowley Road, Cambridge, CB4 0WS, United Kingdom.
Official social media account on Mastodon
We now have an official account on a Mastodon server focused on all things OSM (in English - there is also fr.osm.social for francophone OSMers). Read the blogpost and follow us!
New Supporter Corporate Member
Passenger is our new Supporter Corporate Member.
12th Annual General Meeting
The 12th Annual General Meeting of the OpenStreetMap Foundation will be held online in the IRC chat room #osmf-gm on the IRC network irc.oftc.net, at 16:00 UTC on Saturday, 15 December 2018. Members who want to vote in the elections for the OpenStreetMap Foundation board and whose membership will expire at any time before December 16th, are asked to renew it now.