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Operations/Minutes/2026-01-22

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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 22 January 2026, 19:00 London time
Location: Video room at https://osmvideo.cloud68.co

Participants

Absent

Minutes by Dorothea Kazazi, including some notes from Grant.

New action items from this meeting

  • Grant to get AWS S3 bucket credentials for the dev server. [Topic: Credativ consultancy on OSM.org Postgres database update]
  • Tom to draft follow up question on pgbackrest local backup required or can /JUST/ S3 be used. [Topic: Credativ consultancy on OSM.org Postgres database update]
  • OPS to work on follow-up questions for the database consultantant then respond when ready. [Topic: Credativ consultancy on OSM.org Postgres database update]
  • OPS to review again at next OWG call. [Topic: Credativ consultancy on OSM.org Postgres database update]
  • Grant to create a ticket about Outlook.com rate limiting the osm.org mail server. [Topic: Outlook.com rate limiting osm.org mail server]

Reportage

On looking for sysadmin help with new OSM Spyglass service

Related to action item: 2025-11-27 Grant to get back to all of the persons interested to help with new OSM Spyglass service by next Wednesday. [Topic: SotM Europe 2025 follow up - Looking for sysadmin help with new OSM Spyglass service]

Grant emailed all of the 14 people who volunteered to help with the new OSM Spyglass service.

Rub21 is super-eager and Grant will create an account for him on the dev server. Rub21 wants to have a go at doing minutely diffs there. He seems to understand how osmdbt works and has his own osmdbt fork. He is an [osm:OpenHistoricalMap|OpenHistoricalMap]] sysadmin [and is on the OSM US Slack channel.

Suggestion: Help Rub21 and get him on IRC.

Purchase of Gen10 (second-hand) server for Nominatim in USA

Related to action item: 2025-10-02 Grant to go ahead with the purchase of the Gen10 (second-hand) server for Nominatim in USA. [Topic: Gen10 Nominatim purchase (USA)].

The OSMF had banking issues and was unable to make the payment.

On banking issues

  • The banking issues got resolved and some payments have been made. Minh got a payment on Monday and Grant's 3 months worth of expenses were recently paid.
  • It is unclear whether Michelle Heydon (OSMF bookkeeper) has bank access yet. The payments were probably made by Roland Olbricht (Treasurer).

On server quote
The server's price has gone- up. The shop asked us to notify them once the banking issues got resolved and they will send us a new quote.

Grant to follow up with the Treasurer for the new quote.

Credativ consultancy on OSM.org Postgres database update

Got a response to our questions from Credativ (the database consultants).

On potential multiple days of downtime
A lot of the answers amount to that we can't do this without multiple days of downtime. We haven't intentionally done extended downtime for 10-15 years. Having multiple days of downtime might be worthwhile to, for example:enable features like the checksuming in Postgres.

Suggestions

  • Format the document.
  • Change how the WAL logs are archived.
  • Test tun: Make some changes in the dev server first.
  • Ask the consultancy regarding using AWS S3 bucket.

Other points mentioned during discussion

  • Paul has follow-up questions for OPS.

Action items

  • Grant to get AWS S3 bucket credentials for the dev server.
  • Tom to draft follow up question on pgbackrest local backup required or can /JUST/ S3 be used.
  • OPS to work on follow-up questions and then respond when ready.
  • OPS to review again at next OWG call.

Marketing for Business. OSM profiles. What is our policy.

Do we permit businesses promoting their company by creating an OSM profile with links and marketing message and that do not edit the map?

Issue: More than 100 OSM accounts per day created purely for promotion. Of which, around 30 OSM accounts per day are marketing online Vietnamese casinos. 99% seem to care only about the marketing and the backlinks.

We would also like to prevent SEO companies from editing OSM, as they do not care about data quality and the correct location of the businesses.

The majority of the accounts are created by:

  • SEO online marketing companies, based in Asian countries with low wages, such as Pakistan.
  • people from Fiverr.

On current practices and spam identification

  • We have traditionally removed OSM profiles with marketing content.
  • Grant now has a tool that helps him identify and suspend the accounts faster.
  • Frederik Ramm (DWG volunteer) has a tool which scrapes OSM notes, looks for spammy OSM profiles and deletes them.

Héctor Ochoa Ortiz (Board) joined 16 minutes after start.

Other points mentioned during discussion

  • Creating an OSM account with just the business name and then adding their location seems reasonable.
  • Grant provided to Tom some additional IP addresses of SEO companies. Blocking them resulted in a small drop in spam. Some have moved to other IP addresses.

Adding instructions to the form for editing the OSM profile probably won’t head off SEO spammers. We don’t really want to send them to OSM notes either – community actively deletes spammy-sounding notes linked to spammy-sounding accounts. Could implement an “improve this map” flow that goes to /dev/null if it sounds like a spammer, like what Andy implemented.

Outlook.com rate limiting osm.org mail server

Related to 2026-01-22 community.osm.org post by dieterdreist (Martin Koppenhöfer) Max 100 emails a day?.

Issue
Outlook.com started to rate limit our email server and was soft-rejecting the majority of emails we were sending. That has an impact to various people, including those creating OSM accounts, who wouldn't get the email for confirmation for several hours.

Discourse sends a huge number of emails.

A person signed up to community.osm.org 6 months ago and widely enabled mailing list mode. There were a lot of emails in the queue for him, and the retries to outlook.com were every 20' (each message is considered independent).

On Discourse (used on community.osm.org) email limits

  • The default maximum number of emails that a Discourse user receives per day is 100.
  • Grant had previously set it to "unlimited".
  • Yesterday, Grant changed the limit back to 100 per day.
  • Today, Grant changed it to 500 per day.

Other points mentioned during discussion

  • One of the community.osm.org moderators calculated that the usual number of messages per day for the 2 main categories that people subscribe to, is 80.

Decision

We will look to set better backoff for sending emails to outlook.com (and related domains).

Action item

Grant to create a ticket about Outlook.com rate limiting the osm.org mail server.

Any other business

supporting.osm.org payment issue

Topic proposed by Héctor

Report from an OSMF Corporate Member that the payment page on supporting.osm.org does not provide the option to pay with a credit card for payments above EUR 300. Héctor has emailed the Membership Working Group (MWG) and Guillaume Rischard (former board member) replied.

Suggestions

  • Contact Michael Spreng (MWG volunteer) directly, as he understands CiviCRM.

Other points mentioned during discussion

  • We had donations over EUR 300 on supporting.osm.org, but they were via PayPal.
  • Guillaume set up the payment and was the reason we use plugins like Mollie, instead of the built-in integrations with the payment providers.

Purchase of Gen10 (second-hand) server for Nominatim in USA

Related to action item: 2025-10-02 Grant to go ahead with the purchase of the Gen10 (second-hand) server for Nominatim in USA. [Topic: Gen10 Nominatim purchase (USA)].

The new quote is going to be higher than the previous one.

On OSMF pending payments

  • The OSMF payments to Pablo Brasero Moreno, Minh Nguyễn and Grant have been made.
  • Tom and Paul are still waiting for their reimbursements/payments (Note: probably for the OWG travel grant to have an in-person OWG meeting during the SotM Europe 2025 conference).

There is a daily limit on the bank payments that OSMF can make.

2 BTC donation to OSM

Background: OSMF has received a donation of 2 BTC at the Bitcoinc address 1J3pt9koWJZTo2jarg98RL89iJqff9Kobp. The donation transaction is visible here.

Grant had converted a part of the amount before the new year and can transfer it, once the OSMF banking issues have been resolved. The rest (~ GBP 150,000) hasn't been converted yet. If Grant does the conversion through his Coinbase account, he will be heavily taxed.

Suggestions

  • Meeting of Grant with Héctor and other board members.
  • Create an OSM Coinbase account - the process is paiful, but worth it for GBP 150K.
  • Add the topic to the public board meeting.

Other points mentioned during discussion

  • Grant does not mind managing the proposed OSM Coinbase account.

Action items

  • 2025-11-27 Grant to get back to all of the persons interested to help with new OSM Spyglass service by next Wednesday. [Topic: SotM Europe 2025 follow up - Looking for sysadmin help with new OSM Spyglass service]
  • 2025-10-16 Grant and Paul to set up a meeting about AWS Identity and Access Management Roles Anywhere https://docs.aws.amazon.com/rolesanywhere/latest/userguide/introduction.html. [Topic: AWS CA cert]
  • 2025-10-16 Grant to create a PR regarding refactoring some stuff. [Topic: Reworking of Test Kitchen methods for defining which jobs run on Test Kitchen Github actions]
  • 2025-10-16 Grant to create a PR about adding logic to Chef for retrying failed initial creation of Let's Encrypt certificates [Topic: Add logic to Chef for retrying failed initial creation of Let's Encrypt certificates]
  • 2025-10-16 Paul to ping Grant on the "Repurpose or return old tile servers" ticket https://github.com/openstreetmap/operations/issues/575 [Topic: #575 rhaegal - Repurpose or return old tile servers] Done
  • 2025-10-02 Grant to discuss with Paul Norman and flesh out his suggestion and determine the practicalities (e.g. key revocation). [Topic: AWS CA cert]
  • 2025-10-02 Grant to follow up with Paul. [Topic: Serving vector tile styles]
  • 2025-10-02 Grant to go ahead with the purchase of the Gen10 (second-hand) server for Nominatim in the US. [Topic: Gen10 Nominatim purchase (USA)]
  • 2025-09-18 Paul to look at potential issues related to the collation of indexes - Debian Postgres upgrade. [Topic: OSM DB upgrade to Postgres 17]
  • 2025-07-24 Grant to set-up a test for OWG's review [Topic: Switching www.osm.org to Fastly frontend]
  • 2025-07-24 Grant to do the Mailman 2 to 3 conversion [Topic: Mailing lists] - https://github.com/openstreetmap/operations/issues/1264
  • DONE first part, see the agenda: 2025-06-12 Tom still to run OSMDBT test. OPS then to plan a maintenance window for the OSM.org postgres database update. [Topic: OSM.org postgres database]
  • 2025-05-01 Progress, we need to form academic justification and then we should get something: Grant to follow-up with Australian hosting again. [Topic: OSUOSL funding / issues]
  • 2025-05-01 Grant to see if other University offers are still available and what hardware would be required. [Topic: OSUOSL funding / issues
  • 2025-03-20 Grant to follow-up with the South African contact about the potential hardware donation from a mobile network. [Topic: New offers of Servers Australia and South Africa]
  • 2025-03-20 Grant to run an SQL query to identify more email providers used by spammers. [Topic: Spam] #2025-05-01 Grant has created a small list of disposable email providers.

Action items that have been stricken-through are completed, removed, or have been moved to GitHub tickets.

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