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Board/Minutes/2024-03: Difference between revisions
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My monthly Secretaries report is a review of some of the workstreams on our
issue tracker. It doesn't cover everything but I hope to give members an idea of what
has been keeping the Board busy over the last month.
=== Funding ===
Issue 597:<br>
Our Meta funding is still under negotiation. I’ll remind you that Meta owns
Facebook and WhatsApp. Meta is one of our biggest donors; so this an important
process. At this time draft contracts are circulating but none have been finalised.
We hope to be able to make an announcement on this in the next month.
=== Planned face-to-face board meeting ===
Issue 559:<br>
We are planning the Board [[Board/Minutes/2024-04-F2F|face-to-face meeting]]. This Board will meet face to
face for the first time on the last weekend of April. We‘ll be meeting in Frankfurt,
which was chosen because it is central and minimises travel costs. We have
secured [[Contractors_and_employees#Recurring_individual_contractors|Allen Gunn]], aka ‘Gunner’ as our facilitator.
Occasional face to face meetings are very important for the Board members.
There is a lot of body language and nuance that gets lost in text chat and
endless video meetings. Personal contact between Board members will really
help to improve our working relationships.
=== OSMF move to the EU ===
Issue 271:<br>
The work continues on [[Board/Background/OSMF_relocation_or_subsidiary|moving out of the UK and into the EU]]. Sarah is
investigating the Belgium option and Guillaume has recently met with a lawyer in
Luxembourg to discuss the pro’s and con’s of establishment of OpenStreetMap in
that country. Luxembourg and Belgium remain the two strong contenders for our
new location.
=== Enquiry from Municipality of Santa Fe, Argentina about contributing street names ===
Issue 595:<br>
Some correspondence. The Municipality of Santa Fe, Argentina contacted us with
a view to contributing street names in their city to our database and using OSM
as a base map for their web site mapping. It’s great that so many government
agencies use OSM in their daily operations.
=== Member's question about December 2023 emergency board meeting and mid-month chats ===
Issue 588:<br>
You may remember that at the last Board meeting there was a [[Board/Minutes/2024-02#Question_by_imagico_(guest)_about_the_2023-12-11_emergency_board_meeting_and_'mid-month_board_chats'|two part question]] from the audience about the emergency meeting we held in December and
about mid-month chat meetings.
The first part of the question was whether the emergency meeting was
legitimate according to the Articles of Association and rules of order.
The answer is Yes. The meeting was compliant with the [[Articles_of_Association|Articles of Association]]
and was compliant with the [[Board_Rules_of_Order|Rules of Order]] except for point 6.3 which requires
the membership to be informed of a Board meeting one week in advance. That
one week notice period was waived by agreement of the majority of board
members as it was truly necessary to hold an emergency meeting without any
delay.
On the second part of the question, on whether mid-month Board chat meetings
are legitimate Board meetings.
Well, for this one, the answer is no. Mid-month Board chat meetings are informal
discussions not formal Board meetings. They fall outside the Articles of
Association and the Rules of Order. There is usually a list of things we want to
discuss but we don't follow formal procedure and no resolutions are considered
during the meetings.
=== Board's participation in Wikimedia East and Southeast Asia conference ===
Issue 563<br>
We are still working on presenting a talk at the [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ESEAP_Conference_2024 Wikimedia East and Southeast Asia conference] in May. Speakers have been finalised. This is part of a move by
the OSM Foundation to build better relationships with the Wikimedia movement.
=== 2024 membership drive ===
Issue 440<br>
There has been a recent [https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2024/03/12/call-to-action-help-us-grow-and-diversify-osmf-membership/ push] to increase the registration of new members of the
Foundation, especially from the global south, which has been seriously under-
represented in foundation membership. Arnalie Vicario has been pushing hard on
this project.
=== New budgets and procurement Policy (layered spending) ===
Issue 570<br>
On finance, we have created and put in place a new [[Budgets_and_Procurement_Policy|policy for buying goods and services]] which has a number of internal controls that were previously missing.
This is now being supplemented with a much more explicit policy (or guidance
document) on hiring contractors. Our contractors are typically software
developers. These policies are part of our push to make the foundation more
professional and more efficient, and in the process we are mitigating reputational
and financial risks.
=== SotM Europe 2024 branding and upcoming regional SotMs ===
Issue 560<br>
We had correspondence with the organisers of the [https://stateofthemap.eu/ State of the Map Europe] about
their branding, and I mention it here because this will apply to all regional State
of the Map conferences.
State of the Map conferences must use the local area name, in this case EU, in the
name of their conference, so that it is clear that they are a regional conference, not
the global State of the Map conference.
Staying on that, I have just signed approvals for the use of OSM branding at five
upcoming State of the Map conferences. Madagascar in April, Europe will meet
in July , State of the Map Nigeria in October, State of the Map Rwanda in
November and State of the Map Latin America will meet in Brazil in December,
The [https://stateofthemap.org/ global State of the Map conference] will be in September, in Nairobi.
=== 2024 board election ===
And lastly, Issue 589:<br>
We are planning for the [[Annual_General_Meetings|annual general meeting]] of the Foundation to be held in
October this year, to separate the important budget development and approval
process from the disruptions we always have around the elections. This means
that the elections process will begin a few months earlier this year.
That report doesn’t cover everything that has been happening, but I hope it
gives an idea.
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