Board/Minutes/2022-06

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Date and time: Thursday 30 June 2022, 13:00 UTC - Countdown

The topics of the agenda will get locked one week before the meeting, on 2022-06-23.

Location: Video room https://osmvideo.cloud68.co/user/ror-nt7-6tu
using BigBlueButton.

Acronyms

Participants

Board members

  • Amanda McCann
  • Eugene Alvin Villar
  • Guillaume Rischard
  • Jean-Marc Liotier
  • Mikel Maron
  • Tobias Knerr

Not Present

  • Roland Olbricht (Apologies)

Officers and board
Biographies

Minutes by Dorothea Kazazi.

Guests

  • 10 guests

Open to all OSMF members.

You are welcome to ask questions or to comment (via voice or on the chat) at the end of the meeting.

  • Please mute your microphone when you join, and to preserve bandwidth, refrain from turning on your webcam.
  • If you are in a low-bandwidth environment, you may benefit from using BigBlueButton's low-bandwidth settings. To assess them, click on the 3 dots on the top right of the black video-window.

Administrative

Previous minutes

Circular Resolutions

2022/Res13 Renew BigBlueButton service from Cloud68

Our BigBlueButton server from Cloud68 is due for renewal, at €1089 per year (a Medium+ instance at €99 per month with 1 month free)

This circular resolution is to approve that renewal for the 1 May 2022 to 1 May 2023 period, and also to approve regular yearly renewals at this price (including reasonable price changes which Cloud68 may do), i.e. a circular resolution would not be needed to renew next year.

Approved on 2022-05-25 with 5 votes in favour: Amanda McCann, Eugene Alvin Villar, Mikel Maron, Roland Olbricht, Tobias Knerr
2 did not vote: Guillaume Rischard, Jean-Marc Liotier.

Circular by Amanda McCann.

2022/Res14 Authorize board members to participate in board discussion on corporate membership rates

The Board authorizes all current Board members to participate in Board discussions in 2022 on what the price of OSMF corporate membership should be, even if they normally have a Conflict of Interest in this. Voting is not included in this motion.

Approved on 2022-06-25 with 3 votes in favour: Tobias Knerr, Roland Olbricht, Jean-Marc Liotier (Corporate membership rates do not seem like a contentious issue to me, currently or potentially - nor are they an avenue of subversion.)
1 abstained: Amanda McCann (I do not know if I have a conflict of interest on this topic. I abstain.)
3 did not vote: Eugene Alvin Villar, Guillaume Rischard, Mikel Maron.

Circular by Amanda McCann.

Action item updates

See osm:Foundation/Board_action_items.

Reportage

Pro-bono lawyer

  • OSMF's pro-bono lawyer, who has been mostly ill during the past year, is back.
  • It might be legally possible for minors to become OSMF associate members - in progress.

Upgrading all Local Chapters to current Local Chapter agreement

Related to action item "Eugene Villar with help by Amanda McCann to upgrade all Local Chapters to current Local Chapter agreement".

Action item ownership: 2021-03 Amanda McCann, 2022-03 Eugene Villar with help by Amanda McCann, 2022-06 Dorothea Kazazi, after request by Amanda McCann.

  • Eugene has created an email reply regarding the difference of the current Local Chapter agreement to the previous one.
  • Amanda has asked Dorothea to take over the action item.

Suggestions:

  • Eugene could reply to any emails received from Local Chapters about the update..
  • Eugene could take over other action items from the action item list.

Windsor Hackforge Local Chapter application


Related to 2022-02-10 action item "Eugene Villar to to talk to the Windsor-Essex Hackerspace regarding their local chapter application".

  • Eugene received a reply from Windsor-Essex Hackerspace and a message from a local mapper in Canada about the evaluation of the local chapter application.
  • Some members of Hackforge started conversing with local community members from Canada via email - Eugene was copied on the emails.
  • The board can proceed with the next step of the application.

Extracting usernames from CiviCRM

Related to action item: "Guillaume Rischard to find how to extract usernames from CiviCRM".

  • Completed.

Copyright enforcement

Related to 2022-06-09 action item: "Guillaume Rischard to arrange a meeting with Robert Kaye of MusicBrainz and the board about their experience with copyright enforcement".

Meeting on 2022-06-16 of some OSMF board member with Robert Kaye of MusicBrainz, who shared about his experience with copyright enforcement.

Updating the local chapter template agreement with regards to commercial activities

Related to 2022-02-26 and 27 action item: "Jean-Marc Liotier to write up a proposal for the minimum local chapter criteria before the March 24 board meeting. Will be supported by Eugene Villar. From: Board 2022 screen-to-screen session "Local Chapter minimum criteria (including formalisation/clarification on commercial activities)".

Fédération des Pros d'OSM
Association of professionals/companies who operate in the French OSM services market.

Fundraising workshop

Related to 2022-05-23 action item: "Mikel Maron to clarify whether the Aspiration tech workshop was offered for free to OSMF board members".

  • The workshop will be offered for free to the OSMF board members.

Fastly blogpost

Related to 2020-10 action item: "Mikel Maron to write draft about Operations Working Group (OWG) and work with Paul Norman".

Post will be written by Grant Slater (Senior Site Reliability Engineer).

MapBuilder implementation proposal

Related to 2022-03-24 action item: "Tobias Knerr to ask Microsoft to share their new MapBuilder implementation proposal with the whole board".

Software dispute resolution panel for iD

Related to 2022-02-10 action item: "Tobias Knerr to update the membership about the status of the software dispute resolution panel for iD".

Tobias asked for feedback from the board on whether to update the membership now or wait to receive the response of the software dispute resolution panel for iD to the board's suggestion for the panel to take on the OSM-Carto project.

Points mentioned during discussion:

  • Waiting for the panel's response and sending a single email is fine.
  • Tobias can update the membership that the panel had no issue raised for the iD editor yet and that the panel's status might change.

Treasurer's report

Deferred as the Treasurer was not present.

Updated membership prerequisites plan

The board was seeking feedback on osmf-talk* and on community.openstreetmap.org about their plan to limit new OSM Foundation memberships to people who have at least registered three months ago and mapped 15 days.

* Mailing list for OSMF members (join OSMF here. Past messages here).

Initial motion
"The board intends to accept new normal and associate memberships applications only from persons who have mapped over 15 days, and have registered at least three months ago.""

If you want to get involved with OSM, mapping is at the core at what we do - low requirement, you should have an idea about mapping.

On the board approving new members who have not fulfilled the mapping requirements

Suggestion during the membership consultation: to mention during the sign-up process for becoming an OSMF member that we have a fallback opportunity for people with disabilities who can't map to fulfill the minimum mapping requirement.

  • Purpose: Clarify the purpose of the exceptions.
  • Frequency: the board expects to rarely have to decide on such exceptions.
  • Board workload: If voting on the exceptional cases proves to be a lot of workload for the board, the board can make later changes.

On implementation and requiring an OSM username during sign-up

Current status: During sign-up, new OSMF members are asked to provide their OSM username and they have the option to state "no OSM username".

Decision: The Membership Working Group (MWG) to update the sign-up form regarding the OSM username.

Vote on amended motion

Amended motion:
The board to accept new normal and associate memberships applications only from persons who have mapped over 15 days, and have registered at least three months ago, or if approved by the Board for exceptional circumstances.

Approved on 2022-06-30 with 5 votes in favour: Eugene Alvin Villar, Guillaume Rischard, Jean-Marc Liotier, Mikel Maron, Tobias Knerr.
1 abstained: Amanda McCann
1 did not vote: Roland Olbricht (not present)

On membership feedback via a survey

The board has promised to the membership that they will be able to provide feedback via a survey on the introduction of the membership prerequisites.

Action item: Tobias to take steps on running the survey regarding the members' feedback, including contacting Allan Mustard and preparing an online collaborative document with the survey questions to share them with the board.

Consider directing the OWG to cut tile access off due to attribution or other legal policy reasons, if flagged by the LWG

Suggested by Guillaume Rischard.

Currently:

  • The Operations Working Group (OWG) blocks websites from scraping osm.org tiles. They do not take action regarding websites with attribution issues, as they don't want to take legal decisions.
  • The Licensing Working Group (LWG) gets complaints about websites without attribution, but can't block sites.

Points mentioned during discussion

  • LWG is currently focused on attribution cases.
  • Example of other reasons to block tile access: If someone has a Nazi website and we don't want them to use tiles from osm.org
  • On workload: Could lead to increased workload for LWG/OWG if people see OSM-based tiles hosted by others without OSM attribution and contact OSMF asking us to block them.
  • OWG meeting in a few hours.

OSM Carto

  • Some conflicts in the OSM Carto project.
  • Not under the jurisdiction of OSMF - but the board has been asked to get involved.
  • The board should not have a strong position but should have a discussion with people involved and have a clear view on the issues and solutions.

Amanda has contacted the Software dispute resolution panel for iD (SDRP) and is waiting for their reply. Also emailed the OSM Carto maintainers just the day before the board meeting, to notify them about it.

Points mentioned during discussion

  • When you are a large project, it is normal for some people to have issues.
  • Maybe the board can help.
  • We need more tile servers and map styles.
  • Some OSMers are asking the board to kick-out OSM Carto maintainers.
  • It is not the first time the board has been asked to facilitate solutions.

Suggestions

OSM account creation API

  • Larger policy issue than the MapBuilder discussion.

On board and Microsoft communications

  • Tobias Knerr was engaged in the conversations with Microsoft on behalf of the board, to make sure that the Data Working Group (DWG) requirements forwarded to Microsoft will be fulfilled.
  • There had been private conversations between Guillaume Rischard and Harsh Govind (Microsoft), and additional requirements were mentioned during the board meeting discussion.

On Microsoft's MapBuilder

  • Goal: Encourage people who use BingMaps, an OSM-based product, to contribute to OSM.
  • Issue: OSM account creation is a barrier to people who want to make a small change to the map.

On OSM account creation

  • Allowing the anonymous creation of notes acknowledges that OSM account creation can be barrier.
  • We don't allow anonymous edits.

On MapBuilder implementation attempts

First attempt:

  • Collective account for MapBuilder - blocked by DWG.

Second attempt:

  • Microsoft mediated OSM account creation:
    • People with Microsoft accounts get shown the OSM contributor terms and get an OSM account, connected to their Microsoft account.
  • Currently the account creation is done manually by Microsoft employees, as there is no official API for the creation of OSM accounts.
  • OSM communications: forwarded by Microsoft to the user's Microsoft account.

Concerns:

  • There is no contract between the contributor and the OSM Foundation if Microsoft created the account.
  • Against the terms of service, which do not allow impersonation, as Microsoft users would be impersonating Microsoft.

Ideas for future:

  • Their Microsoft mediated OSM account, to be possible to become a normal OSM account with no connection to MapBuilder.

On Mapbuilder implemetation slides: To be shared by Guillaume on board chat.

On API for creation of OSM accounts

  • Development: Code might be written by Microsoft and used by other parties, if the board and Microsoft agree.
  • Technical implementation: has not been discussed - would probably require an API key mechanism and people to accept terms by OSMF.
  • Disagreement by some board members if that is the way forward.
  • There will be questions about API management and granting access.
  • Downsides: spam/legal aspects.

Logging-in to OSM account with third-party accounts

  • Already possible, e.g. with Github, Maps.me.

Other points mentioned during discussion

  • Some approaches give too much control to a company.
  • Important: what are the requirements for people contributing to OSM. The specific mechanism (directly registering or proxy mechanism) is not important.
  • The board has spent a lot of time on the issue.
    • The board members that are interested can work on the topic.

Suggested next steps regarding MapBuilder

Guillaume has emailed the DWG enquiring about their feedback to the second suggested Mapbuilder implementation.

  • Get feedback from Licensing Working Group (LWG) and Operations Working Group (OWG) on the suggestion of an API for creation of OSM accounts.
  • Instead of creating an API, use the existing system and work on making it easy for Microsoft users to log-in.
    • Would fulfill all Data Working Group (DWG), OWG requirements.
    • Does not open the door to spam or abuse.
  • The whole board to have visibility on the discussions with Microsoft.
  • Guillaume to contact Tom Hughes (sysadmin/OWG) who is involved with blocking.
  • Provide to Microsoft the feedback by DWG and Tom Hughes.

Action items

  • Tobias Knerr and Guillaume Rischard to communicate with Microsoft (MS) that the board has received the proposal and is checking with Working Groups (WGs).
    • Ask MS for input on ideas, such as the suggestion of using a plugin to add third party logins to the OSM website.
    • ask MS to prepare a very brief document about technical proposal, where the board can comment on.
  • Guillaume Rischard to ask the Licensing Working Group (LWG) for potential legal issues on the API creation during their next LWG meeting.

Advisory Board - monthly update

Presentation by Mapbox Workers Union

Presentation by Mapbox Workers Union. Cancelled.

Any other business

State of the Map 2022

  • Tickets are available for the State of the Map 2022 conference. June 30 was the last day to buy the early bird (cheaper) tickets.
  • There will be a board "ask us anything" session.

Guest comments or questions

Responsibility for what is shown on openstreetmap.org

Question by Jeroen Hoek (guest) if the OSMF ultimately responsible for what is shown on openstreetmap.org and if not, who is? For many users this is the face of OpenStreetMap after all; our calling card.

Additionally, comment by Jeroen Hoekin (guest) in the chat:
"I would like to invite to OSMF board to reach out to stakeholders outside of the (remaining) Carto maintainers as well (i.e., mappers, other contributors to Carto, etc.) to gain a broader understanding of this issue and its effects on the community. Communication is one problem, but the main issue is that community and end-user needs are apparently not met and that the OpenStreetMap project is being harmed by the current situation. Getting the Software Dispute Resolution Panel involved might help, but I'm not sure if that can address the stagnation of Carto (and thus openstreetmap.org's standard layer)".

Comments by board members

  • Yes, OSMF is responsible. However the way responsibilities are structured does not mean at this time the board can direct how the OSM Carto project runs or is organised.
  • People think that vector tiles are around the corner, but probably are not, though there is work on vector tiles.
  • Some board members had discussions with OSM Carto maintainers.

On files hosted on OSM wiki with unclear or invalid copyright status

Comments by Mateusz Konieczny (guest):

  • ~30,000 files hosted on the OSM wiki with unclear or invalid copyright status. Examples:
    • OSM map without attributing OSM contributors.
    • files where it's unclear if the uploader was also the creator.
  • 5,000 of these have already been processed.

On OSM logo
Mateusz Konieczny was unsure about the legal status of the OSM logo and who was the creator of the original logo (not the current one).

  • Supposedly on CC licence, requiring attribution of the creator.
  • People are not usually attributing the creator when using the logo.
  • Concern in the case of people inheriting the copyright of the original logo.

Comments by board members:
- Creator of original logo was probably Matt Amos or Steve Coast.
- No urgency or concern about the copyright status of the logo.
- If it was easy, OSMF could try to get the rights for the original logo, but probably not need to expend much effort on the issue.

On OSM Carto issue

Comments by Mateusz Konieczny (guest), who is also one of the OSM Carto maintainers.

  • Part of the problem is that while most complaints are demanding that something should be done by maintainers - if no-one is willing to work on it - including complainers - then OSMF has limited ability.
  • OSM maintainers are not obligated to spend a lot of time on specific things.
  • Some people expect that people will be hired specifically for OSM Carto.

Next meetings

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See the Monthly Board meetings page to find out where board meetings are announced and for a subscription link to have future board meetings automatically added to your calendar.

Meeting adjourned 89' after start.

Acronyms

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