Working Group Minutes/EWG 2024-01-24

From OpenStreetMap Foundation

Formal proceedings

Attendees:

  • Salim Baidoun
  • Andrew Hain
  • Adam Hoyle (until Vector Tiles included)
  • Tobias Knerr
  • Roland Olbricht
  • Emerson Rocha

Minutes of previous meeting

The minutes of the previous meeting have been approved.

Active Projects

Refactoring of OSM website notes

Adam has approved the pull request with a note that the commissioning is subject to approval by Andy Allan.

Motion: Roland shall ask the board to pre-approve the budget to make this piece of work funded. The motion has passed with unanimous consent.

Emerson volunteers to contact Gregory to make sure he is ok to start the work and that Emerson will act as a point of contact once the board has pre-approved the budget.

Vector Tiles

Adam has been meeting with Paul once a week and tracking progress using a spreadsheet. A link to the tracking spreadsheet is available on request (to EngineeringWG / Board members). Adam volunteers to report at EWG meetings and add progress updates to the public minutes.

Time Spent so far - Software design and development phase - 44% - Other - 2.3%

An investigation of what has been approved points to the minutes of 2023-11-29. Paul's proposal is linked there, and the minutes claim that the proposal has been approved in its entirety but under the general constraint of terminating the contract if the Foundation runs out of money. The milestone is both big and late in the project, hence to be understood as being preferably sacrificed.

Budget planning

Technically, the EWG has not approved the budget request yet. Nonetheless, no one has objected the ciculated draft even after over two weeks minus blackout period effects. The budget request shall be resent to the board to avoid any potential loss or misunderstanding in transit.

Motion: to approve the budget as listed in the above mentioned document. The motion has passed with unanimous consent.

Roland has informed the EWG that there might be a necessity to cut down on Paul's work. This shall be discussed in the chat.

Future Projects

Microgrants

Salim has got access to relevant material. The EWG prefers to save the microgrants from budget squeezing. The EWG has been informed about the board's intent to require approval of any contract totalling over 10 000 EUR a year. Inform of the future 10k limit.

Roland volunteers to grant Salim access to the EWG repo on GitHub.

The EWG is aware of a large and recent discussion on community.osm.org about Microgrants 2020 in hindsight. As lessons learned, the EWG shall rather live than just fulfill the Conflict of Interest policy. In particular, it is necessary to communicate proactively.

It may or may not make sense to call for, form, and appoint a jury. Performing community consultation makes sense independently of this to assure that the selection process is widely understood and acclaimed.

Action item for the complete EWG: formulate communication topic. Agree on topic and narrative. Ask the community on Discourse for process, open-ended framing to avoid preempting board.

The current plan is: Spend 30k€ on microgrants this year (max 6k€ per project).

Salim will send email on the progress with grants to the EWG. The template on GitHub needs some adjust but will be done before the next meeting with all the relevant fields.

Well-known links:

GDPR

Action item: ask Simon Poole and LWG and MMD both whether the wiki page is still at least generally correct.

(Further disucssion skipped due to running out of meeting time)

Milestones for future projects

(skipped)

Any other business

Google Summer of Code

Motion: Tobias will do the application.

The motion carried unianimously with 1 abstention.

EWG page update

Much of the text on the OSMF website about the EWG had been mostly unchanged since the founding of the group, Tobias has updated it.

Status of Wiki

There are Wiki admins with elevated rights. There are some active users. There is no working group for Wiki.