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Working Group Minutes/EWG 2026-07-24

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Formal proceedings

Attendees:

Apologies:

  • Adam Hoyle

EWG membersHistoric

Minutes by Dorothea Kazazi.

Minutes of previous meeting

2026-07-10

New action items from this meeting

  • Contact popular apps like OsmAnd, which upload traces manually and still offer deprecated settings. [Topic: STF - GPS visibility settings update]
  • Inform the Data Working Group that users may not receive DWG messages sent via email, if they have turned the email notifications off. [Topic: STF - A new notifications page is now available to logged-in osm.org users]
  • Jake to raise the topic of contractor payments in Element, to ensure Roland Olbricht (Board) and Héctor Ochoa Ortiz (Board) are aware. [Topic: Contractor payments]
  • Add contractor payments to the next EWG meeting agenda, where board members are likely to be present. [Topic: Contractor payments]
  • Add the StreetComplete lump sum payment topic to the next EWG meeting agenda. [Topic: Microgrants]

Actual business

Sovereign Tech Fund Projects

GPS visibility settings update

Topic raised by Minh.

Visibility settings of GPS traces uploaded to osm.org will be changed. The apps/services which use the deprecated GPS visibility settings needs to remove these options soon.

Minh posted an announcement. This is work by Rubén López Mendoza, funded by the Sovereign Tech Association. The decision to deploy has already been made.

Issue: There are various apps/services that bulk upload GPS traces to OSM and we can't contact all of them.

Deployment: Deployment will happen once enough developers are aware of the changes.

Other points mentioned during discussion

  • Error messages in some clients are unhelpful
  • JOSM and some other apps recover gracefully - i.e. the users do not lose their traces, they just have to try to upload with a different setting.
Action item

Contact popular apps like OsmAnd, which upload traces manually and still offer deprecated settings.

See also: 2026-07-23 Operations minutes.

A new notifications page is now available to logged-in osm.org users

Topic raised by Minh.

Issue: Many OSM users do not read their emails, which include notifications about OSM changeset comments, Data Working Group (DWG) messages, and event invitations.

New feature: A new notifications page (https://www.openstreetmap.org/notifications) will help logged-in osm.org users find their notifications. A count of notifications will get added to the badge of unread messages on osm.org. The design is intended to be rudimentary and the layout be improved by people who are more familiar with front-end development.

Pablo Brasero Moreno, who is not a front-end developer, has been working on the new feature for a few months.

Expectations: The new feature,

  • will help people become aware of comments on their changesets
  • reduce DWG workload
  • help people organising events, and
  • alert people who have requested changeset reviews, that someone has reviewed them.
  • Some users might turn off some email notifications, in order to avoid duplication.

Other points mentioned during discussion

  • A common beginner question is "How do I make sure I haven't missed any comments that people left me on my change sets? I wanna know I'm doing this right."
  • Design bikeshedding has previously stalled this effort for years and there was effort to avoid it this time.
  • There's a lot more to do.
Action item

Inform the Data Working Group that users may not receive DWG messages sent via email, if they have turned the email notifications off.

Contractor payments

Topic raised by Jake.

Issues:

  • Paul Norman's (work on Vector Tiles) June invoice and the previous month's invoice are due for payment. This has happened in the past and Paul had requested a better process to avoid chasing the EWG for late payments.
  • Mateusz Konieczny's (work on iD triaging and improving the iD tagging schema) invoice is also due.
  • Dorothea's note: Unless something has changed, the Bank of Ireland requires payments to be scheduled at least 4 working days in advance and there is a maximum amount of outgoing money per day.

Roland (Treasurer) is aware and has scheduled some payments: https://osmfoundation.org/wiki/Working_Group_Minutes/EWG_2026-07-10#OSMF_payments

Suggestion: Establish a payment process that does not depend on individual follow-ups.

Other points mentioned during discussion

  • Being able to pay people on time is important.
  • Most of the contractors have set terms.
  • Risk of contractors charging late fees.

Action items

  • Jake to raise the topic in Element, to ensure Roland and Hector are aware.
  • Add contractor payments to the next EWG meeting agenda, where board members are likely to be present.

UN open source week

Topic raised by Minh.

Minh attended the UN open source week. He will provide an update at the next meeting, when more people are present.

Microgrants

Andrew forwarded responses by microgrant recipients OSM NG, StreetComplete to mailing list. Tom Hukins withdrew his project.

StreetComplete: Tobias received a lump sum and is uncertain whether he will spend it or refund it. If Tobias will proceed, a reestimation would be needed, though this is problematic at this stage in the process.

Action item

Add the StreetComplete lump sum payment topic to the next EWG meeting agenda.

Any other business

On quorum

The EWG does not seem to have a rule about quorum for meetings.

Agenda: STF and GDPR section merge

Minh merged the GDPR and STF recurring sections of the agenda.

Meeting adjourned 24 minutes after start.

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