Operations/Minutes/2026-02-05

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

Paul Norman (OWG volunteer, OSMF contractor)

Minutes by Dorothea Kazazi, including some notes from Grant.

New action items from this meeting

2026 OWG Budget: OWG to work out what is needed in 2026, and see if budget adjustments are required. Will come back to the board. [Topic: 2026 OWG Budget]
Grant to test some mediawiki settings to improve size selection. [Topic: WikiCommons image resize]
OPS to go through Paul Norman's comments related to the OSM.org Postgres database update and consultancy. [Reportage: Credativ consultancy on OSM.org Postgres database update]
Minh to relay some of Paul's points to the Credativ consultants. [Reportage: Credativ consultancy on OSM.org Postgres database update]

Reportage

Communications with journalists on the issue with scrappers

The Operations team made a public call to tech journalists, as OSM is hammered by scrapers hiding behind residential proxy/embedded-SDK networks. Several journalists have contacted the team.

Guardian: Meeting with the OPS team to be scheduled.
The Register: is interested in publishing an article.

OSMF response: The OSMF Communication Working Group was very active in publishing about the issue.

Wikipedia: Wikipedia people are happy to be involved in conversations with journalists, through their own communications team. They published a post last year, which created a lot of press. Grant has been encouraging them to publish another article.

Fastly: Fastly reached out to us when they saw the scrapper post. We mentioned that we may switch osm.org to them, and they were happy about that.

It is mportant to emphasize that projects like OpenStreetMap are fighting these anonymous scrapers, which impacts the OWG's time and resources.

Credativ - database consultant

Related to action item 2026-01-22 OPS to work on follow-up questions for the database consultant and then respond when ready. [Topic: Credativ consultancy on OSM.org Postgres database update]

Paul sent some follow-ups.

Action items

OPS to go through Paul Norman's comments related to the OSM.org Postgres database update and consultancy.
Minh to relay some of Paul's points to the Credativ consultants.

On Outlook.com rate limiting the osm.org mail server

Related to action item 2026-01-22 Grant to create a ticket about Outlook.com rate limiting the osm.org mail server. [Topic: Outlook.com rate limiting osm.org mail server]

Resolved.

There were a lot of suspicious OSM accounts creations. A bad actor seemed to be trying to flood people's mailboxes, by signing them to OSM and other services, probably while hacking their bank account. The aim was to create noise in the persons' mailboxes, so they don't see their bank emailing them that their bank accounts had been hacked.

Cloudflare reCaptcha PR

Tom rebased the PR #4314 (still marked as "draft") for Cloudflare's reCaptcha and tested it using a key on his personal account. Andy had proposed some tests two years ago.

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

Related to action item 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)]

Issue: OPS need to get clarity on the server's payment.

The payment should be done within a few days after we receive the quote, otherwise the price might change. We have received two quotes from the supplier so far, as we had been unable to pay in time. The price of the new quote is unknown.

Feedback from Hector: The agenda of the February closed board chat includes looking at the OSMF financials.

Suggestion: Roland Olbricht (Treasurer) could raise the purchase request with the supplier. However, OPS may not purchase the server, if the new price is too expensive.

Other points mentioned during discussion:

The server is within the OWG's budget.
Sarah Hoffmann (Lonvia, volunteer maintainer) is frustrated with Nominatim's heavy abuse.

Switching www.osm.org to Fastly frontend

Related to action item 2025-07-24 Grant to set-up a test for OWG's review [Topic: Switching www.osm.org to Fastly frontend]

osm.org is now properly set up with Fastly.
Grant to provide some IPs, so that we can do host hack testing, and if we're happy we will switch to Fastly.

Email providers used by spammers

Related to action item 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 now disposable email providers. 2025-09-18 parked

IP address block list update: Grant removed any hosting provider used by VPN providers. Spammers will be targeted with a later update. The goal is to reduce the number of incidental people who are blocked, and thus the OWG's administrative burden for support.

Tarpitting non-osm tile traffic

Topic added by Paul. Postponed until Paul is available.

GPS trace modernisation project

Topic added by Minh.

The topic was briefly discussed by Tom and Grant yesterday.

Minh proposed OSMF to contract someone to work on GPS trace modernisation with money through the Sovereign Tech Alliance. This project is fairly isolated, easy to define and someone could work on it soon - in contrast with work on failover/resiliency.

The project could include work on:

GPS tiles
thumbnails for traces
handling deletions
move of the GPS trace table out of the main database
tile rendering pipeline
GPS planet dumps

Minh shared his notes with the OPS team.

Minh has a back-end engineer in mind, who could tackle most of the issues above and who had volunteered to help with the OSMF Spyglass service. He works on tile rendering for OpenHistoricalMap.

Comments during discussion

Tom and Andy would like to have the detailed proposal.
The contract work must be completed before the end of 2026, because we have a certain number of hours that we can bill the Sovereign Tech Agency in 2026. If we don't, we will lose the money.

Other potential projects

moving away from animated GIF files to animated SVGs. This requires a modern version of Chrome or Firefox.
GPX tile site
solving the data removal issue

Next step

Minh will share his proposal with the board soon.

Credativ consultancy on OSM.org Postgres database update

Topic added by Minh.

Suggestion: Send to Credativ some discussion points from Paul's email.

Other points:

support for pgbackrest
enabling data checksums on all the tables in parallel or sequentially
- might not be possible on a per-table basis, as it's working at the page level in the database
downtime duration. Can't be done per table basis.

OSM.org sign-up captcha

PR 4314 for "captcha" is open, stops scripted sign-ups. Scripted abusive sign-ups are a problem, used by non-OSM entity to flood people's email with noise.

Tests are still required.

MediaWiki/Wikibase breakage

https://github.com/openstreetmap/operations/issues/1327 has some issues that need to resolved.

On broken special page: This has been addressed, but the fix seems to have caused some regressions.

Action item: OPS to nudge Yuri https://github.com/nyurik to see if he has more time to fix the additional issues.

Other points mentioned during discussion

Considering moving the Wikibase dump to planet.osm

2026 OWG Budget

Topic added by Héctor (board).

This is the budget, approved by the board on 2026-01.

2025	2026	Working Group	Description	Method
1,619.00	1,619.00	OWG	Computer sundries and peripherals	Overrun of estimate, Scale by 365/365
0.00	50,000.00	OWG	To be discussed
696.00	696.00	OWG	Computers Hosting Services	Overrun of estimate, Scale by 365/129
15,158.00	15,158.00	OWG	Internet Charges
1,468.00	5,000.00	OWG	Travelling	Use budget
0.00	15,000.00	OWG	Hardware, Upgrades (additional depreciation)

About the line "50,000":

This amount was added as there were several ideas in Paul Norman's email to the board.
The amount of 50,000 has been approved, and if the OWG needs more, they can discuss this with the board.

The OWG traditionally works out which servers we need to buy the next year. Last year, the OWG was very lean, squeezed their resources and did not buy anything. The OWG hasn't looked at purchases for 2026, as the board did not answer the OWG's budget and growth related questions before the end of 2025.

Board member's input

Feedback by Héctor, present at the meeting.

The board wanted to discuss the OWG questions in November, but the OSMF banking issues had priority.

Suggestion: The board to communicate to the OWG any constraints.

In 2024, the OSMF lost money.
In 2025, the board thought that it would have a big deficit, but ended with a surplus, as the Working Groups had spent less than expected.

Action item

OWG to work out what is needed in 2026, and see if any budget adjustments are required. Will come back to the board.

Other points mentioned during discussion

Most items in the approved OWG budget look reasonable.

WikiCommons image resize

Wikimedia has requested we use standard resized image sizes for thumbnails pulled from WikiCommons to improve caching their end. The Map features page on the OSM wiki was causing extreme load on them, as the requested image sizes were not-standard.

Minh fixed the OSM wiki template used by the Map features page.

Since then, some people have reported:

seeing html broken images. Purging seems to fix that.
redlinks. Purging sometimes fixes that.

Action item

Grant to test some MediaWiki settings to improve size selection.

Action items

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