Working Group Minutes/EWG 2024-07-05

From OpenStreetMap Foundation

Formal proceedings

Attendees:

  • Andrew Hain
  • Tobias Knerr
  • Robert Koeze
  • Roland Olbricht
  • Emerson Rocha

Apologies:

  • Salim Baidoun
  • Adam Hoyle
  • Mikel Maron

Minutes of previous meeting

Roland will sort out the minutes of meetings since late May, with a priority on publishing the outcome of the circular resolution.

Circular resolution: Budget-neutral scope extension of the Vector Tiles project

The Engineering Working Group now confirms a decision de facto already made by mail and chat conversation, as agreed on during the last meeting.

Proposal: Extend the scope of the Vector Tiles project to include "Infrastructure setup and optimization" and "Full-scale Shortbread implementation and launch" (or as much work towards those work packages as the budget allows).

Part of the decision is explicitly to enhance the scope of the project but not enhance the compensation ceiling. Paul shall stop at the end of the agreed-on time limit, regardless if work is completed.

This has been proposed by Adam on 2024-06-27, today absent. It has been accepted on 2024-06-30 by mail. The attendees of this meeting confirm this decision.

See further preparations in the next topic.

Actual business

Vector Tiles

A rough spontaneous estimate tells that Paul will reach the budget ceiling in early September. It is understood that soliciting the community at the end of the contract volume will interrupt Paul's work for two weeks.

It is understood that no matter what next it shall get agreement from both Adam and Paul. In general, serious under-communication has happened within the Foundation, and apparently at least the members of the personnell committee, the board, Paul, and the Engineering Working Group are all working on different numbers and rules. To unravel this:

Paul's contract as of now reads: "Time spent is not to exceed 297.5 hours without written permission from the Company’s designated representative on the Company’s Engineering Working Group."

Corresponding to this, Roland would like the board to declare Adam as the authorized representative. According to documents presented to the board yesterday, there is a line item in the Foundation's 2024 budget for Paul substantially above that limit. Based on this, Adam is entitled to extend the contract to up to at least 68 days in line with the Foundation's 2024 budget.

Extra information: the board has decided on 2024-02-29 to commit 120 092 GBP in total for personnell to the Engineering Working Group, covering other work in addition to Paul. The breakdown is neither public nor has it been announced to the Engineering Working Group.

There is different understanding of who is authorized to move around money by which process. The Spending Policy basically says that any raise in expense beyond 2000 EUR must be backed by a board decision, hence Adam's authorization shall be backed by the board.

It is expected that Adam will take the decision in accordance with the Engineering Working Group. Resorting to informal decision making within this bracket shall help to limit the interruption in Paul's schedule by making decisions faster.

Adam shall take the decision in accordance with EWG, details to sort out and subject to discuss internally the exact steps forward.

Emerson pointed out that there has already been community feedback centering around tile sizes. There should be a second round of community feedback once Shortbread is a selectable layer on osm.org.

Phase 1 has been extended through the circular resolution, see above.

After bringing initial results live, EWG would like:

  • to have a discussion around it
  • revised version of the initial proposal just covering the 2nd half, including costs
  • more details on how Street Spirit would be maintained once funding was complete

GDPR

No news this time. Postpone.

Refactoring of OpenStreetMap website notes

Emerson would like to point out that time taken by the maintainers "this round is almost 6 months", and that this is a lot slower than for the mute users work. Other than that, postpone.

The EWG decides: Roland is to invite Gregory to the next EWG meeting to present the result with the aim of declaring it finished as far as possible and get him paid.

Microgrants

Relevant links:

Salim and Mikel have drafted operating rules for the scoring committee. No discussion takes place due to time constraints.

Guillaume has suggested considering past performance when evaluating applicants.

Any other business

Next meeting

The next meeting time on 2024-07-19 is upheld despite SotM-EU because there is overlap for only one attendant. The meeting schedule shall be kept for the sake of simplicity.

Next meeting is 2024-07-19, 13:00 UTC

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