Working Group Minutes/EWG 2026-04-17

These minutes are a draft.

Formal proceedings

Attendees:

Andrew Hain
Jake Low
Tobias Knerr
Minh Nguyễn
Héctor Ochoa Ortiz
Roland Olbricht
Emerson Rocha (at 14h55 UTC)

Guests:

Mateusz Konieczny

Apologies:

Adam Hoyle

Actual business

ID tagging schema project initiative

The contract between Mateusz and the OpenStreetMap Foundation (OSMF) has been signed and is listed on the OSMF wiki.

Mateusz is completing the work. He will send next week the repo and publish it on community.osm.org. Mateusz is interested in continuing: the next proposal will carry a higher price per hour to more accurately cover costs. As the existing proposal had to be adjusted to at least meet minimum wage this is not expected to be a risk. Roland states the perception that the budget is a moving target, hence a clear-cut ask to the board is highly likely to pass.

For involving the community: Too many threads, people were upset on this. Mateusz will figure out how to involve community in a more meaningful way. A potential future approach is: diary entry + publish on OSM Weekly.

A major progress observation is that the issues in iD issue tracker got below 1000 for the first time in a long time. The iD schema builder is moving forward, for the first time in a while.

Mateusz has not sent an invoice yet, as no hours have been completed yet. Roland volunteers to start a mail thread on the EWG list about budget for continuing the work. Mateusz pledges to send the new proposal.

Microgrants

The timeline by Adam.

Difficulty completing the table:

UseOSM (€0 after last milestone)
Field-verified OSM data (no numbers, confusion between USD and EUR)
Map Review Team (optional milestones, filled in as if completed, GBP)

Roland is still waiting for response from OSMSG.

Roland will start paying the completed milestones of all projects.

Budget

The budget has been talked about already in the iD topic.

Vector tiles

Minh checking in with Paul. Paul is doing Shortbread work, working on operations side.

Future plans: getting it to the point that we can work on style work. Nice to have: More documentation on Shortbread.

The EWG discusses what is keeping people away from developing styles: the Schema may be inmature yet.

Roland complains that it is not clear what Paul is working on, we know little details. We can invite him to present at EWG (time may be an issue). The Foundation needs to renew the contract as the old one has expired. Raise with Personnel Committee.

Minh volunteers to align with Adam to ask Paul to communicate more.

STF Projects

Rubén is working on GPX traces. He is splitting it off into a different database. Privacy levels for traces are a topic. So is the question how to do migration. Further to do items: improve pagination, add filtering, and restructure how traces are processed.

For the future it is intended: Discussion with LWG, how to act when user wants deletion/redaction.

Pablo has been working on getting PostGIS used in production. One purpose for this is to designate block areas (so notes cannot be created in that region). Next week should have visible progress on notifications.

Talkes with OWG and the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) have happened:

Bot scraping attacks also happening to them
Wikimedia Enterprise, could they provide OSM services to their clients? Early discussions w/ board & OWG
Provide distribution in formats useful for LLMs

The OpenStreetMap Wiki relies on Wiki Commons, but WMF is blocking queries from the OpenStreetMap Wiki. Grant and Minh are in contact with WMF on how to solve it. The WMF wants to help out, because the organisations are aligned.

Any other business

Meeting minutes

Proposal by Roland: Ask for help from the administrative assistant (Dorothea) for minutes taking to ensure complete and timely meeting notes

Invite her and see how it works out.