Operations/Minutes/2024-05-02
OpenStreetMap Foundation, Operations Meeting - Draft minutes
These minutes do not go through a formal acceptance process.
This is not strictly an Operations Working Group (OWG) meeting.
Thursday 2 May, 19:00 London time
Location: Video room at https://osmvideo.cloud68.co
Participants
- Tom Hughes (OWG)
- Paul Norman (OWG)
- Grant Slater (OWG)
Absent
- Guillaume Rischard (OSMF board)
New action items from this meeting
- Paul to draft a policy regarding deploying new WordPress sites. [Topic: 20th birthday WordPress site] Ticket created
- Grant to open a ticket about the PR to turn off DNSSEC. [Topic: PR to turn off DNSSEC]
- OPS to revisit the OpenMapTiles application.
Reportage
Equinix
Grant asked publicly if anyone works for the Equinix Foundation can suggest OSMF as an organisation that can be sponsored by the Foundation. We have been asked to formally submit an application.
We still need to accept their offer about the increased power rates.
Discussion on not forwarding incoming spammy tickets
Related to action item: 2024-03-07 Grant to open tickets about not forwarding incoming spammy tickets to other email servers, where they get bounced. [Topic: email notifications getting marked as spam]
privacy@osmfoundation.org forwards spam messages to OTRS. Grant has maximised the spam controls.
- A ticket is open.
- The LWG needs to manage the spam queue and check for false positives and negatives.
OPS to review the issue of spam reports to ISPs in 6 months (May 2024)
Related to action item: 2023-11-30 OPS to review the issue of spam reports to ISPs in 6 months (May 2024)
- Grant submitted the initial application, which requires approval from HE.net for the "Verify" service.
- During a Karlsruhe hack weekend, Tom added the list-unsubscribe header to comply with the new Gmail guidelines.
On messages reported by people as "spam"
- People are reporting the OSM sign-up email as spam, possibly due to friends signing them up. Alternatively, it could be people with mainly non-EN languages who are not understanding the email. The message is sent in the user's language, that they signing up in. Grant replied to 1-2, and one responded that it was his mistake and that he should have unsubscribed.
- People subscribe to the community.osm.org digests and then report them as spam.
- The same issue occurs with the mailing lists.
Other points mentioned
- Email providers likely base spam reports solely on messages manually flagged by users.
- Currently, there is no way to unsubscribe from notes, as recipients are determined by previous comments. Unsubscribing is only possible for changesets and diary entries.
Suggestion: Encourage Microsoft to work on maintaining separate subscriptions for notes, as there was some work already done by them on refactoring the way notes are presented and they are interested in improving the notes.
Discussion on spam reports via ISP
The list-unsubscribe header has been implemented for the past few weeks where available.
Notes currently lack an unsubscribe function, so there is no list-unsubscribe option. However, this may be added in the future. Microsoft has suggested additional development work on notes subscriptions and may undertake this work.
- Grant submitted the initial application but it needs some approval from HE.net.
- "Verify" service.
- Tom during one of the Karlruhe hack-weekends worked and added the list-unsubscribe header, as it's part of the new Gmail guidelines.
On messages reported by people as "spam"
- People are rejecting the OSM sign-up email. Might be from people who get signed-up by their friends or people with mainly non-EN languages who are not understanding the email. The message is sent in the user's language, that they signing up in. Grant replied to 1-2, and one responded that it was his mistakes and that he should have unsubscribed.
- People subscribe to the community.osm.org digests and then report them as spam.
- Similar with the mailing lists.
Other points mentioned
- Email providers are basing the spam reports probably only on messages manually flagged by people.
- There is no way to unsubscribe from notes at the moment, as we infer who to send the comments to based on who has previously commented. It is only possible to unsubscribe from changesets and diary entries.
Suggestion: Encourage Microsoft to work on maintaining separate subscriptions for notes, as there was some work already done by them on refactoring the way notes are presented and they are interested in improving the notes.
AWS credit renewal
- Grant submitted it. 12% higher than last year, solely for the tile-rendering server.
- Our bills have decreased due to Grant's billing optimisation efforts.
- Maximum billing was in January but has significantly dropped since then.
Editor Policy Document
The draft editor policy was written by Martijn van Exel and is in a Google doc.
Tom and Grant discussed the editor policy during a past meeting, and some changes were suggested:
- drop reference the desktop editors because they already handled by the remote editor protocol policies about web based editors.
- clarify that we are happy to add a generic mobile editor entry.
Other points mentioned
- Meta have asked Mikel Maron about how the editor policy is going and they seem eager to have Rapid added to the osm.org editor menu.
- We would have to get the ok from LWG.
- There's probably a difference between an embedded editor that is offered by us, versus a third party editor, in terms of the demonstrated usage.
Any other business
Znuny
- Working with Znuny has various difficulties.
- Tom offered to help.
20th birthday WordPress site
Mikel Maron asked OPS to create a WordPress site for OSM's 20th birthday.
Suggestions
- Ask requesters why a static site would not work.
- The policy should be not to launch new WordPress sites for tasks that static sites can handle.
Other points mentioned
- OPS had suggested designing the site with Jekyll or Hugo, but were told that there is not enough time.
- The likely designer for the project appears to be familiar with WordPress.
- Grant is creating a WordPress site and will explore the possibility of exporting it to a static site.
- WordPress sites, such as the old SotM websites, prove to be administrative headaches that last for years.
Action item: Paul to draft a policy regarding deploying new WordPress sites.
PR to turn off DNSSEC
It seems that the root cause was not resolved.
Lately Ironbelly was reporting a lot of issues contacting AWS DNS servers, as Tom had to block that IPv6 route. The block was removed and named restarted by Tom and Grant changed the logging. The free spikes all stopped experiencing the error when Tom restarted named on Ironbelly.
Suggestion: try flushing the resolved cache.
Other points mentioned
- It is not clear if named is having a DNSSEC issue.
- Resolved is quite verbose and it had been suggested to turn it off when one faces problems with DNSSEC.
- Spike8 was using Ironbelly as its primary DNS server.
Action item: Grant to open a ticket.
Internal DNS
Internal DNS seems broken. The original design was that the machines in data centers would use the gateway machine for DNS, which is problematic.
OpenMapTiles
They came back to us: They fixed the issue with the languages but the rest of the issues seem unresolved.
Suggestion: wait to see their 1 weekly update cycle of new schema.
Decision: To be revisited.
Action items reviewed at the beginning of the meeting
2024-04-18 Grant to post the maintenance outage notice. [Topic: Upcoming Equinix Amsterdam Power Maintenance / HE.net Maintenance]- 2024-04-18 Grant to reply to Equinix, restating the issue in a brief form to them. [Topic: Equinix]
2024-04-18 Grant to reply to Equinix, to accept their offer. [Topic: Equinix]2024-03-21 Grant to reply to Equinix, restating the issue in a brief form to them. [Topic: Equinix]2024-03-07 Grant to open tickets about not forwarding incoming spammy tickets to other email servers, where they get bounced [Topic: email notifications getting marked as spam]2024-03-07 Grant and Guillaume to open a GitHub issue about the redundancy of gateway / IPv6 "private subnet". Benefit / "Cost" [Topic: Redundancy of Gateway / IPv6 "private subnet"]- 2024-02-08 OWG to review the Editor policy during one of the next calls and possibly vote on it. [Editor Policy adding to OpenStreetMap.org]
- 2023-11-30 Grant to revisit the "policy for purchasing" document, which currently is focused on specs, and add information such as the process for obtaining approval for purchases. [Reportage] Added info: Who Approves / Steps etc -> Grant to create GitHub ticket
- 2023-11-30 OPS to review the issue of spam reports to ISPs in 6 months (May 2024) -> Grant to create GitHub ticket
- 2023-05-18 Paul to start an open document listing goals for longer-term planning. [Topic: Longer-term planning]
Action items that have been stricken-through are either completed, or have been moved to GitHub tickets.