Working Group Minutes/EWG 2025-04-04

From OpenStreetMap Foundation

These minutes are a draft.

Formal proceedings

Attendees:

  • Andrew Hain
  • Adam Hoyle
  • Tobias Knerr
  • Robert Koeze (off during iD)
  • Mikel Maron
  • Roland Olbricht
  • Héctor Ochoa Ortiz
  • Emerson Rocha (at 30 minutes, during Q&A after Microsoft presentation)

Guests (from Microsoft):

  • Kirill Fedotov
  • Aleksandar Matejevic

Apologies:

  • Salim Baidoun

Minutes of previous meetings

No minutes of 2025-03-21 have been written so far, but a saved revision exists in the ChaosPad.

Actual business

Microsoft presentation

Microsoft has followed the inivitation. Kirill Fedotov and Aleksandar Matejevic give a presentation of their effort to improve the openstreetmap-website project. This includes some of the challenges they have ran into.

People are spread over many communucation channels, opposed to discussed topics. So some of the code changes received an outcry after going live on community.osm.org, because too few people tracked the discussions on the issue tracker.

Even if there were a beta page, people would still have to look there, so there is as of now no compelling way forward to solicit feedback on code changes before going live.

The Microsoft team enjoyed the interaction with the maintainers. That there are only three of them is still a substantial bottleneck.

A project page to collect projects, and with some guidelines on them, might help to save new people a lot of time for onboarding.

Microgrants

In addition to 4 jury members approved at the previous meeting, Nelson Mwova has been approved by the Engineering Working Group through an asynchronous poll.

Salim has committed to draft a public announcement. No further discussion takes place at the meeting.

Copyright page update with CommsWG

Mikel and Adam intend to have a meetup on this.

Sovereign Tech Fund (STF)

Roland shall ask Minh to join an Engineering Working Group meeting. The Engineering Working Group might adapt its time for one meeting to account for Minh's timezone if required.

GDPR

Andrew has communicated with AntonKhorev. A current development priority is to make it possible to accept the ToU for old accounts.

Come back to it in 2 weeks.

Vector Tiles

Paul is working through bugs and issues, including lots of communications. Shortbread has only a human written specification.

iD Development

The Personnel Committee currently negociates the contract extension. It is suggested to align the contract cycle with OSMF budget. Martin asks to go from 11.5 days per month to 13 days per month. The Engineering Working Group needs to look into its budget and to shift money towards Martin for this.

Any other business

People on the Element Group

The element Group has been closed. We would like the channel to be exclusive to EWG members.