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Working Group Minutes/EWG 2026-06-26

From OpenStreetMap Foundation

Formal proceedings

Attendees:

  • Adam Hoyle
  • Andrew Hain
  • Emerson Rocha
  • Jake Low
  • Héctor Ochoa Ortiz (also on the OSMF Board)

Apologies:

EWG membersHistoric

Minutes by Dorothea Kazazi.

Actual business

iD tagging schema project initiative

New contract

The board approved Mateusz' new contract. Board approval was necessary, as the contract exceeded the EUR 10,000 threshold, specified by the OSMF procurement policy. The contract is priced per hour, with a maximum number of hours until its end (31 December 2026).

Mateusz' new contract has been signed, and Mateusz has started working again.

Héctor is named as the primary contact for contract management - they don't have recurring meetings.

Suggestions

  • Have occasional personal check-ins with Mateusz.
  • Invite Mateusz to attend EWG meetings approximately every two months, to provide updates.
    • Consider doing the same with other EWG contractors as well, such as Paul Norman (Vector Tiles), as direct contact with the EWG is preferable to just one person talking to the contractors.

Other points mentioned during discussion

  • Mateusz has been occasionally joining EWG meetings.
  • The Personnel Committee which meets infrequently, held a brief meeting to discuss how best to collaborate with persons who work more full-time and are somewhat outside of the EWG.

Action items

Microgrants

Andrew had reached out to grant recipients a few weeks before this meeting. No updates since.

Map Review Team microgrant - request for withdrawal

Tom Hukins on the 23rd asked for cancellation of his "Map Review Team" microgrant (Proposal, Contract), as his circumstances have changed. Salim has responded, encouraging him to participate in a future round.

Suggestions

  • Keep the Microgrants timeline updated.
  • Ask grant recipients to provide updates every two to three months.

Action item

Andrew to update the Microgrant timeline to reflect current project statuses and include the withdrawal.

Adam offered to help, if Andrew had any issues with editing Markdown.

Budget

Decision: To be removed from the recurring topics.

Vector tiles

Adam is typically meeting with Paul Norman every two weeks. During last week's meeting, Adam discussed with Paul about having a better style for Shortbread.

Paul is working on:

1.
Adding Andy Townsend's Vector Tiles style (SVWD03) to osm.org and replacing VersaTiles colorful. The style has UK colors and might not be ideal for an international audience. PR approved. This is intended to be a short-term solution.

2.

  • 2.1 Porting CartoDB Voyager from the CartoDB template build system to Glug - a style language by Richard Fairhurst, who originally worked on Potlatch.
  • 2.2 Changing from CartoDB's tiles to Shortbread.

On porting Carto DB Voyager

  • Estimate of work: 6 weeks for initial version.
  • Suggestion to get feedback from Stamen, EWG and the board. Then get feedback from the community.

Other points mentioned during discussion

Action item

Adam to check with Paul if OSMF needs to add attribution for any of the changes above.

FLOSS Fund

All the paperwork is now ok. Payment expected soon.

Héctor asked the FLOSS Fund about their views regarding banking data in OSMF's funding.json. No reply yet.

Sovereign Tech Fund Projects

Skipped.

GDPR

Skipped.

iD Development

Skipped.

Imagery

Skipped.

Any other business

Kathy Snider's enquiry about ways to help as a volunteer

Action item: Jake to reply.

OSM US projects' updates

Jake was asked if he could occasionally provide updates on OSM US projects, as he is involved in many of them, and it might improve their visibility. Additionally, having updates as part of these minutes, would result in less fragmentation in finding out what is going on.

The 2026 SotM US conference took place recently. and Jake gave updates on the following work.

MapRoulette

New frontend version soon. Now in beta: https://beta.maproulette.org

Vector Tiles

OSM US have their own Vector Tiles that serve OpenMapTiles, used by some community projects which OSM US supports. New features, including:

  • an RSS feed with info on tile publication.
  • new JSON metadata with info on the Planet file that the tiles were generated from.

Countermeasures for AI scrapers

AI scrapers have been attempting to download large volumes of data from OSM US servers, including every snapshot that has ever been uploaded to [osm:Field_Papers|Field Papers]], or every project in the tasking manager instance.

Most services have been moved behind CloudFlare, which provides a configurable set of rules for bouncing traffic at the edge before it actually reaches the origin server. More work needs to be done.

Suggestion

  • Jake to contact Grant Slater (Senior Site Reliability Engineer, OWG), who has done similar work for OSMF with Fastly. regarding countermeasures for AI scraper. Jake has met him in the past, but doesn't have regular communications with him.

Other points mentioned during discussion

  • OSMF has moved from Cloudflare to Fastly.

SotM 2026 EWG presence

Brief discussion about attending the State of the Map 2026 conference, in France. The possibility of holding an informal in-person EWG meeting was mentioned.

Plan to attend:

  • Andrew
  • Héctor
  • Jake

Adam can't join.

Meeting minutes

The EWG has been using for the agenda a Chaospad - which can be updated live - and minute taking was crowdsourced in the past.

The participants were fine with Dorothea taking notes locally and uploading the created minutes to the OSMF website.

Meeting adjourned 35' after start.

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