Working Group Minutes/EWG 2025-10-31

From OpenStreetMap Foundation

These minutes are not yet approved.

Formal proceedings

Attendees:

  • Salim Baidoun (after approve Microgrants)
  • Andrew Hain
  • Adam Hoyle
  • Tobias Knerr
  • Pablo Brasero Moreno
  • Minh Nguyen
  • Hector Ochoa Ortiz
  • Roland Olbricht

Guests:

  • Nelson Mwowa
  • Martin Raifer
  • Ilya Zverev

Apologies:

  • Mikel Maron
  • Emerson Rocha

Minutes of previous meetings

The minutes of 19 Sep, 03 Oct, and 17 Oct have been approved.

Membership application

Roland volunteers to process the current membership application in his role as secretary.

Actual business

Microgrants

The jury members Ilya, Martin, and Nelson present the results of the jury selection process. The jury has observed that the winners are technology oriented, and the Engineering Working Group confirms this as intended. There might have been a twin program to offer Microgrants for community projects, but that would have been the task of the LCCWG that decided to not run that program. There is no reason to unlaterally decide to alter the EWG Microgrants here.

Motion: the Engineering working Group approves the suggested list of projects (TODO add link) by the Microgrants jury (8 projects). The motion carries unanimously.

Some observations result into suggestions for a potential next round:

  • Give a guideline on the length of the proposals. This year's proposals had a large variance in length.
  • The jury intends to write down a blueprint for future jury processes to reduce overhead for the setup.

The general sentiment for the jury is that it would be good to perform Microgrants every year such that it is predictable and reliable.

The Engineering Working Group thanks the jurors for their work.

To sort out payment and project supervision there shall be a meeting with the winning projects. It is considered a good idea to give projects room to voluntarily present the project and results in future meetings of the Engineering Working Group.

Vector Tiles

Adam is looking at the documentation for the public to engage with Vector tiles. The project needs documention to ensure that it gets adoption and ultimately many styles.

Roadmap

Minh has kept the roadmap public but not publicized to allow the EWG to comment.

The roadmap will help to give feedback to paid and unpaid developers: it serves as an early feedback whether a certain project is perceived as solving an actual problem related to the core of OpenStreetMap or not. This is in particular important as the website has a very broad scope. The points with question marks are in particular intended to start conversations.

The next step is to get into a public conversation. The EWG agrees to first nudge stakeholders to get actually valueable thoughts into the discussion. This has priority over timelineness.

Various Topics

Skipped due to time

Any other business

The next meeting coincides with the SotM-EU conference. The EWG will determine async whether we can have an online or offline format or something else.

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