Working Group Minutes/EWG 2023-02-21

Formal proceedings

Attendees

• Ramya Ragupathy
• Tobias Knerr
• Andrew Hain
• Roland Olbricht
• Robert Koeze
• 1 Guest

Actual business

Process improvements

Possibility of delegating spec work

It's tough to find people to write specs, requires knowledge of codebase, Rails, etc.

It's not clear that this is something that can be meaningfully delegated but it's clear that this is a problem.

There is a more general problem here that we have problems finding Rails developers.

We don't yet have a pool of people looking out for these projects.

Lotsa of reasons that the spec took long last time. Getting feedback from community, schedules of EWG members, etc.

We still don't know if the current maintainers wouldn't even accept the PR for the mute users bid.

Interesting in engineering work doesn't necessarily map on to what we're doing now as the EWG.

There are things we've discussed previously like giving money to maintainers that might not put the same administrative burden on the EWG.

Harry Wood's interest in doing work was handled by the board, because it needed to be done within days.

Another round of microgrants might be a way to disperse money.

Could we open things up more broadly? Allow people to apply to do things and then give them money?

There is some debate about whether or not there would be interest.

We could put up a list of ideas as part of our open call. This would not require so much work to be done in terms of writing specifications.

We might sketch out some ideas for how this open call might work. This could be discussed the next time around.

Robert will throw some ideas into a pad and share with everyone via @engineering.

Mute user bid

We are currently waiting for bids. Do we need to ask for more?

Blog post has been published. Hopefully people will read that.

Data model

In order to figure out our next steps we want to talk to Jochen about this.

Roland and Tobias will reach out to Jochen.

Roland will be presenting at a FOSGISS meeting in Germany about the discrepancy between ways that are uploaded and how they appear.

It makes sense to wait to see the outcome of the conversation with Jochen and then decide on a strategy going forward.

GDPR follow up

Robert still needs to reach out to Andy about this topic.

Any other business

SOTM US

Do we want to do anything EWG related at SOTM US?

It makes sense to invite people to participate in the EWG.

Might make sense to book a room for anyone interested in joining the EWG.

Reaching out to inactive members

Reached out to everyone. Heard back from 2 people.

It's not clear if people have an issue with the time. So maybe it's not something we need to pursue now.

Next meeting

Next meeting is 2023-03-07, 16:30 UTC: https://osmcal.org/event/1920/