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Working Group Minutes/EWG 2026-01-09

From OpenStreetMap Foundation

These minutes are a draft.

Formal proceedings

Attendees:

  • Andrew Hain
  • Adam Hoyle
  • Tobias Knerr
  • Hector Ochoa Ortiz
  • Roland Olbricht (from 16:08)
  • Emerson Rocha

Guests:

  • Mateusz Konieczny

Actual business

Microgrants

The grantees have been announced.

Adam will collect relevant dates for checking up on microgrant recipients' projects (unless Salim does). We'll track those dates publicly in a file in our GitHub repository.

So far, we haven't been able to pay the grantees because of OSMF banking issues. We should update them about the current status. The banking issue is unlikely to be resolved before January 23.

Project Initiatives

Mateusz Konieczny asks which formalities are required to request funding for website related work.

The Engineering Working Group (EWG) figures out that there is no process so far to deal with project proposals initiated outside of the Engineering Working Group. The Project Funding Framework rather deals with the situation that the EWG asks for bids on existing project proposals.

The group gives the informal advice to write down the proposal and to let it circulate amongst the EWG by mail.

Budget

Outcome of previous meeting:

  • 2026 Microgrants 30K GBP
  • iD: 68K GBP
  • Vector tile work: 73K GBP
  • Various website work: 25K GBP

The board has not yet discussed the budget; there may be progress at the mid-month board chat and the subsequent public board meeting.

Google Summer of Code

GSoC Application Period for organizations opens on January 19th.

The Google Summer of Code org admins would welcome additional members to reduce workload on the existing team. Andrew volunteers to help out (but has no prior GSoC experience). Tobias to discuss this with the other org admins.

The EWG offers to the Google Summer of Code org admins to publicly ask for volunteers on the community forum and/or other channels such as OSM US Slack.

Presentation French Cadastre

An official body of the French Administration runs an ongoing project to overhaul the Frenach cadastre and might use a lot of the OpenStreetMap software stack. They have got in touch with the OpenStreetMap Foundation.

They are interested in presenting their ideas and discussing potential for collaboration. For multiple reasons, it might be beneficial to have Minh and potentially others in that meeting. The EWG will sort out availabilities and enable a presentation in one of the next meetings.

Vector tiles

The main area of progress for the vector tiles implementation on osm.org is to improve documentation and make it easier to create own styles. That it is possible to have many styles with the same set of data has been one of the core selling points of the vector tiles.

It is considered to look into the domain specific language Glug to make building styles easier.

Floss Fund

Next steps require finance-related documents.

A related problem: funding.json needs to be modified because it is being scraped for fradulent purposes, but currently is not a good moment to do that. After sorting out banking issues: Approach them on their views regarding banking data in funding.json

Roland and Hector volunteer to keep track of the issue.

Any other business

EU

Roland reports that the board has been pointed towards a consultation of the European Union on Open Source.

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