Working Group Minutes/EWG 2025-07-25

These minutes are a draft.

Formal proceedings

Attendees:

• Tobias Knerr
• Roland Olbricht
• Adam Hoyle
• Andrew Hain
• Héctor Ortiz Ochoa
• Minh Nguyen
• Emerson Rocha

Guests (until 45 min into the meeting):

• Sean Mann - RP1
• Dean Abramson - RP1

Minutes of previous meetings

The minutes of the previous meeting have been approved.

Some minutes of meetings before this meeting and when Roland has been absent are currently missing.

Actual business

Presentation by Metaversal Corporation / RP1

Two representatives of the company RP1 present how they are currently building a browser for an interoperable "Metaverse" (similar to the earlier hyped Second Life), addressing the concern of platform lock in. The idea is that coordinates on the Earth's surface in the virtual world are assigned to the actual operators of the plots on the ground, and coordinates elsewhere can be marketed independently.

Some questions regarding import of OSM-external data to OSM have been resolved to that rather a conflation on a copy is intended.

Vector Tiles

There has been a lot of public discussion and feedback following the public announcements:

• https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2025/07/22/vector-tiles-are-deployed-on-openstreetmap-org/
• https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/vector-tiles-are-deployed-on-openstreetmap-org/133008
• https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/neue-vektorgrafik-ebenen-auf-osm-org/133007

Paul's report

The release has been a success both technically and within the community.

A number of minor website integration issues came up in openstreetmap-website. Attribution controls, oddities at extreme zooms, etc. Some slipped through both OMT and shortbread PR testing, some only showed up in production.

The main questions on the community forum, slack, etc have been:

• Confusion over which component is what. With the OpenMapTile pull request landing at the same time there's more than eight repos involved, some shared between both styles.
• Questions about using the style json on vector.openstreetmap.org and relative paths
• Questions over where to file issues
• Questions about the future

The comment I gave that explains stuff was this:

• For the "Shortbread" style on the main page there's a few places to file issues
• Issues that are present on openstreetmap.org but not on https://vector.openstreetmap.org/demo/shortbread/ (e.g. the very high zoom issues): https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website
• Style issues (colors, symbology, fonts, etc): Versatiles Styles
• Changes to what is supposed to be in the tiles: shortbread
• Cases where what is in the tiles differs from what should be in the tiles: https://github.com/pnorman/spirit
• How the tiles are served: https://github.com/pnorman/tilekiln

Microgrants

The blog post is now live. The deadline extension to next week (2025-07-31) has been announced by Salim.

Some non-engineering proposals have been made. Could better communication prevent that? The role of endorsements remains an open question.

GDPR

Ability to accept ToU is live, but was launched with some bugs.

Floss Fund

Hector has volunteered to move this forward. Some internal discussion on chat.

The board has no objections, we could apply.

Next Projects to Commission / Projects Pipeline

Minh is close to sharing the roadmap that is being worked on. It is shared with the EWG for now, will be shared more publicly via Communications Working Group in a couple weeks in conjunction with the job posting. STF-funded engineer job posting underway. It is best to pause this discussion until that's available.