Working Group Minutes/EWG 2018-02-13

A meeting of the Engineering Working Group on 13th February 2018 via Mumble.

Attendees

• Peter Barth
• Tobias Knerr
• Jo (Polyglot)
• Ilya Zverev

Plus Thomas, who was a guest and a potential GSoC student.

Topics

Google Summer of Code 2018

We were accepted as a GSoC organization! Now is the time to announce this in the OSMF Blog. The tweet is already out. We definitely will promote this GSoC in regional communities, but decided to postpone regional ads by a week or two, to get more project ideas first.

Peter would like to write to the wiki about what we expect of a good project proposal. How to make it more appealing to potential mentors. For example, the numeric programming skill rankings didn't help much in the past. But the list of what students can do is useful, even without ranks. The plan is to draft this in a pad.

The GSoC website has forgotten all past mentors (since they can be different each year), so Peter will reach out to potential mentors and add them to the system.

We noticed that summer in US and Europe means winter in Latin America, South Africa and Australia. That likely affects the number of students from the southern hemisphere. Looks like an oversight on Google's side.

Project Ideas

We went to the Project Ideas page and discussed each one. Most are good; ideas by Jan (OSMBuildings) seem raw and ambiguous, need refining. There are two ideas by "Pa" who didn't leave their contact details. We decided to move these ideas to a separate page, and to ask all potential mentors to provide their e-mail, or at least an OSM profile.

Also it was suggested that maybe project ideas could have a small task for students to do before starting the work. Like reading about an API or trying to map stuff. In some cases it can be code, or setting up a complex development environment. It could help a student understand what they are getting into. Peter will mention this on the mailing list.

Top Ten Tasks

Peter asked to finalize the Top Ten Tasks draft page, which was prepared in August. Turned out, both Ilya and Tobias were working on that, one in the wiki, another in a pad. An awkward situation happened, when nobody wanted to lose the work. Finally, we decided Tobias will finish his variant, using parts of the wiki draft. To speed this up, Peter asked him to do it in a week and post the results to the group in a mail.

Stefan (User Geonik in OSM wiki) suggested we drop two of the tasks in favor of printing OSM data and improving the documentation on Overpass API. We decided that since the task were contributed by the community and publicly discussed, it's too late to change the list. Ilya to contact Stefan about that.

Next Meeting

1st of March, 20:00 UTC.