Board/Minutes/2018-02-15

Location: Mumble, Thursday 2018-02-15 at 21:00 London time

Participants

Board members

Kate Chapman (Chairperson)
Frederik Ramm
Heather Leson
Mikel Maron
Peter Barth (joined at 15')
Martijn van Exel (sent apologies and joined at 28')
Paul Norman (joined at 29')

Guests

6 guests

Open to all OSMF members.

Guests are welcome to speak at the end of the meeting on the topics that have been discussed. Please note that text messages sent on Mumble chat may not be seen by people who join using mobile apps.

Not Present

Administrative

Previous minutes

Board/Minutes/2018-01-18 Accepted
Board/Minutes/2018-01-25 Accepted

Circular Resolutions

None

Previous action items

The list is sortable and collapsible and items that were assigned to two persons appear twice.

Name	Date	Action item and status
All	2018-01-25	Update board member biographies on the OSMF wiki
All	2017-11-16	In 2018 send an email to members, months in advance of the Annual General Meeting, encouraging them to discuss and perhaps propose their own resolutions.
Frederik/Paul	2016-05-28	to prepare transparency document from transparency session
Heather	2018-01-25	~~to talk to Paul and get more details about the board representative on the trademark license subcommittee and then contact the Licensing Working Group, if required.~~ # Done
Ilya	2016-08-19	to look at implementing means for members to view the membership register # Got key from Tom for accessing the server. Administrative work done, programming not yet.
Kate	2018-01-18	to initiate discussion about 2018 priorities over email.
Kate	2018-01-18	to update the etiquette and add a reporting plan
Kate	2018-01-18	to email F. Davey about Conflict of Interest advice and cc Paul
Kate	2017-08-24	to write to the Advisory Board list about microgrants
Kate	2017-08-24	to contact Michael about closing inactive mailing lists that she is an admin of
Kate/Martijn	2016-05-28	to draft diversity policy # No progress to report. Low priority.
Martijn	2018-01-25	to review the submitted documents of the OSM Belgium Local Chapter application.
Martijn	2018-01-25	to initiate the local community and membership consultations regarding the OSM Belgium Local Chapter application.
Martijn	2018-01-25	~~to ask the Working Groups if they would like administrative assistance~~ #Done
Martijn	2018-01-25	~~to send the thank you email to Pine for the large Bitcoin donation~~ #Done
Martijn	2017-11-16	to create the draft of the microgrants policy, separating it from the attempted combined draft with the updated travel policy
Martijn	2017-10-26	to raise the question to the Advisory Board about whether they would like to have an archive of the AB mailing list. # Martijn will prepare a brief orientation document for the AB and will ask then.
Martijn	2017-07-18	to look at the process of regular reporting by the Local Chapters to the board and vice versa.
Martijn/Kate	2016-05-28	to draft diversity policy # No progress to report. Low priority.
Mikel	2018-01-25	Mikel to work on potential updates on the circulars' procedure to vote on.
Mikel	2018-01-25	~~to go back to the State of the Map Working Group with the board's suggestion to consult and work with local SotM organising teams on the SotM policy.~~ #Done. The SotM-WG does not have enough bandwidth. New action item to be added for Mikel and Heather.
Mikel	2018-01-18	to make sure the osmf-announce read-only mailing list is restarted - with help from Martijn, Paul & the MWG.
Mikel	2017-08-24	to send email on the list to find businesses that would like to offer input on the Welcome Mat
Mikel	2016-08-19	to send round bullet points on diversity policy proposal
Paul	2018-01-18	~~to communicate the acceptance of the proposed membership fee waiver program to the MWG~~ # Done. The MWG will test the form before making it public.
Paul	2017-02-21	to separate the State of the Map (SotM) net profit discussion items and start the follow-up discussions
Paul	2016-10-28	to create a page on the wiki, listing software products which are used by OSMF and are closed-source and/or are externally hosted # Was Peter's
Paul/Frederik	2016-05-28	to prepare transparency document from transparency session
Peter	2017-04-18	to make a list of requirements for email self-hosting and discuss them with the Operations Working Group

openstreetmap.org added to Easylist

Openstreetmap.org occasionally displays banners that announce our own community conferences and events. Recently, openstreetmap.org was added to EasyList, which is a source for popular ad blockers, including uBlock Origin and AdBlock Plus. This means that anyone visiting openstreetmap.org and using an ad-blocker which utilises Easylist, won't be able to see the banners promoting our events, unless s/he explicitly whitelists our site on their ad-blocker. Two pull requests have been created by Firefishy on the Easylist Github account: 900 (closed) and 906 (open on 2018-02-15, now closed) to allow OpenStreetMap.org events self-promotion.

Suggestions

Letter of support from the board.
probably won't have an effect - they are defining anything not on our site as 3rd party content.
Going public.
probably not of big interest to many people. Additionally, some OSM users find these banners annoying.
See what other communities are doing.
visiting one Wikimedia Foundation site with a popular ad blocker activated, resulted in a notice being displayed: "your adblocker is blocking our sites".
Have the banner point to a landing page on our site, which has a link to the external conference site.
Not get too involved, there are other priorities.

Action item
Kate to follow up with Grant about the technical workaround of having a landing page on openstreetmap.org

Comments from Nakaner (guest)

The issue will be mentioned by weeklyOSM
The German OSM page has an alternative banner design

Accepting Liberapay Donations

Liberapay is a non-profit microdonation provider that allows its users to recurrently donate money to projects and people (like Flattr). It seems that they have scraped all organisations from Github and are now soliciting donations for them. People using Liberapay can indicate that they want to recurrently donate to an organisation - however they are not charged, until the organisation signs up. The OpenStreetMap Foundation has not signed up. Liberapay has emailed the board, stating that there are people using their platform that want to recurrently donate to the OSMF.
Lead: Frederik

Current amount pledged to OSM: ~20 EUR/week
(which OSMF is not receiving, as we have not signed up).

Points during discussion

Liberapay seem to be genuinely non-profit
their approach to solicit donations received negative comments
if other similar projects appear, signing up to all of them doesn't scale

Suggestion
keep a small number of donation channels

Action item
Frederik to contact Liberapay mentioning that we appreciate their support and tell them that we would like them to stop soliciting money in our name. (Done - we have opted-out)

General Data Protection Regulation

The General Data Protection Regulation will come into effect May 25, 2018. The Licensing Working Group (LWG) is working on a document with a set of recommendations. Related LWG discussions: Feb 2018, Nov 2017, Sep 2017, July 2017
Lead: Heather

Peda joined at 15'

Points during the discussion

Not everything has to be implemented by May 25th, but we have to be as ready as possible.
GDPR could be used to create trouble.
The communication aspect is important: we have to explain the need for the changes to mappers and data consumers, as we will likely receive complaints from them.

Suggestions

creation of a community FAQ
have a GDPR section on the website
have an implementation plan by the next board meeting
have a published plan by May 25th (when GDPR will come into effect)

Action item: Heather to follow up with LWG, OWG and CWG'

OSMF Data Center

A Request for Proposals (RFP) to provision space in a data centre to continue to run the OpenStreetMap project's infrastructure will be circulated soon. Hosting is mainly supported by Imperial College, University College London and Bytemark - of the 3 data centers, the IC one has been our primary data center for many years. IC currently wants to reclaim the space for offices so the Operations Working Group (OWG) has drafted an RFP document that was shared with the board. Related OWG discussion: Dec 2017
Lead: Kate

It is not possible to expand the RFP to include cloud options, within the current time-frame.
Looking at EU countries, as there is need that OWG members will be able to travel to the data center easily if needed.
Thanks to the OWG for their work.

Voting

Motion to accept the Request for Proposals regarding a new data center, which was submitted by the Operations Working Group.
Accepted with ultimately 5 votes in favour: Kate, Heather, Frederik, Mikel, Peter Not voted 2: Martijn (absent - joined later), Paul (absent - joined later)

Action item
Kate to notify the OWG that the RFP has been accepted (Done)

Post-meeting addition

If you are in a position to propose new datacenter arrangements, read the request for proposals.
Please spread the word - thank you!
Deadline for proposals: Feb 28th, 2018.

Face to Face Meeting 2018 - logistics

The Board will have a face to face meeting in 2018 (April 28-29, Karlsruhe). Related discussion: Jan 2018
Lead: Frederik

Martijn joined at 28'
Paul joined at 29'

Hotel will be booked for Friday and Saturday - people need to notify Frederik if Sunday is needed.
Frederik offered to get the train tickets.
Related page on the board wiki.

State of the Map Policy

The State of the Map Organising Committee is working on a policy related to the organisation of events that want to be named "State of the Map". The policy could cover areas such as trademark use, best practices and others. Anyone who is interested to organise an event past 2018 and wants to call it "State of the Map" will be kindly asked to contact the Foundation first to get the agreement in the use of the name. Advantages to organisers: Approval of the event ahead of time will allow for maximum exposure of the event through the website and though the other communication channels (blog/social media accounts). Related board discussions: Jan 2018,Oct 2017 Related policy: LWG trademark policy.
Lead: Mikel

Key points of draft SotM-policy

Informing the SotM WG of dates and location.
Being clear as to which organisation is running the event.
Being clear as to which event it is.
Must keep profits within OSM. Suggestion: organised by OSM Local Chapters or non-profits.

The SotM-WG:
- is looking for advice from the board on the draft SotM-policy.
- does not have the bandwidth to contact local communities and regional SotM organisers.

Comments during discussion
In relation to point 4:

SotM conferences have been organised in the past by individuals or by for-profit organisations (but not organised for profit). One of the reasons for the later cases is that organisations have bank accounts and it helps with the logistics.
The policy will confer the standard expectations and anyone not meeting all of them will have to contact the SotM-WG.

In general:

Previous unregulated practice is problematic from a trademark perspective.
The policy is to protect what regional SotM organisers are doing, instead of over-regulating it.
There is no community consensus regarding the scholarship program or the Code of Conduct (CoC).
The current wording of the requirements allows people to easily fulfill them.

Related to the Code of Conduct
Quote from the draft policy: "Every conference should have a Code of Conduct"

Comments:

Most Open Source/Data organisations seem to have one.
A CoC does not need to have complex written rules and we don't have to define what would be in it. Could be: "everyone behave nicely, otherwise you will be kicked out".
Having even a minimal CoC introduces the possibility that it could be extended with additional rules.
Not having a Code of Conduct might lead to people not attending and negative media attention.

Related to the Scholarship program
Quote from the draft policy: "Events larger than 200 people should align with our 3rd vision as well: run a scholarship program"

Comment:

There are alternatives to our usual scholarship program, e.g. waiving the entrance fee in exchange for people providing help during the conference (similar to what was done during SotM-EU in Karlsruhe).

Examples of regional SotMs with more than 200 participants in the past: SotM-France, SotM-EU

Action items

Mikel and Heather to contact local communities and regional SotM organisers about the SotM policy and then provide feedback to the SotM-WG and the board.
SotM draft policy document clean-up.

Dorothea's contract 2018

Dorothea's contract is up in March. We need to make a decision to extend it for a year (or some other period) and any terms that may need changing, if any. Related discussions: Jan 2018, Mar 2017 (closed portion), Apr 2017 (Voting - closed portion)
Lead: Martijn

Need feedback from the Working Groups about whether they want administrative assistance.

Decision: deferred.

Advisory Board - monthly update

The Advisory Board (AB) is an entity separate from the OSMF board of directors, composed of individuals - either nominated by corporate members of the OSMF or invited directly by the OSMF board of directors. The OSMF Board of Directors will publicly minute, in the board meeting minutes, any communication sent to, or received from, the AB. This monthly section is reserved for this purpose. Related discussions: 2018 Jan, 2017 Oct, May (F2F), Apr, Mar, Feb, Jan
Lead: Martijn

Post-meeting addition: The Board has forwarded the General Data Protection Regulation draft from the Licensing Working Group to the Advisory Board.

Any other business

More discussion about Easylist

Peter asked if any decisions were taken about Easylist, as he was absent at the beginning of the meeting (joined at 15').

Main points

when one opens webpages, there are numerous connections to 3rd party content sites (for example images, video) - it is just adverts that they block.
our banners link to "3rd party content" according to Easylist, but they are not adverts, so they should not be blocked.

What is the best way for a guest to provide relevant resources during a board meeting discussion?

Question from Nakaner (guest) about what is the best way for a guest to provide resources that might be helpful during a discussion - via a text message on the chat or by speaking?

- via text on the chat.

However, it was noted that board members cannot be expected to notice the chat during their discussions (Peda mentioned that he usually does).
Guests are welcome to speak at the end of the meeting.
It was also mentioned that members can send relevant information to the board prior to the meetings via email (if they know ahead of time that a point will be discussed).

Next meeting

Meetings now take place on the 3rd Thursday of the month, at 21:00 London time, unless rescheduled.

The next monthly board meeting will be on the 15th of March, at 21:00 London time, unless rescheduled.

Meeting end

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