Board/Minutes/2023-04-13

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Draft minutes.

Please note that mid-month board chats are not open to observers and that these minutes do not go through a formal approval process.

Location: Video room at https://osmvideo.cloud68.co
using BigBlueButton.

Date and time: Thursday 13 April 2023 - Countdown

Acronyms

Participants

Board members

  • Arnalie Vicario
  • Craig Allan
  • Mateusz Konieczny
  • Mikel Maron
  • Roland Olbricht
  • Sarah Hoffmann (Chairing)

Not Present

  • Guillaume Rischard

Officers and board
Biographies

Minutes by Dorothea Kazazi.

Guests

Not open to observers.

Re-registration to the EU transparency register

Related to the 2021-12-11 (Annual General Meeting) derived action item "The Board to choose a new board member with legal responsibility and in charge of EU relations for the EU transparency register.

Previous board discussion:

Topic suggested by Sarah Hoffmann.
  • Lost account. Passwords we have probably don't work.
  • Have to re-register from scratch.

Points mentioned during discussion

  • Low maintenance and not a lot of work.
  • Could be used in case of fundraising/lobbying.

Suggestion: Wait for one year for OSMF registration in the EU.

Action item

Sarah to re-register OSMF on the EU transparency register.

Status of the strategic plan

Summary of recent strategic plan meeting

Yesterday there was a meeting of Sarah Hoffmann, Craig Allan and Allan Mustard, at Sarah's request.

Current plan

  • Plan will be communicated to the community.
  • Break the plan in 4 clusters: community, technical, financial, institutional re-arrangement of the Foundation.

On community consultation

The group is preparing a draft letter to distribute to the community and social media.

  • Once the draft is ready, it will be circulated to the board.
  • Responses: should be sent to osm-talk list and community pages.

Distribution:
Sarah, Craig and Allan have created a list of interest groups, including board, Working Groups, Advisory Board, Local Chapters and a lot of informal structures working on OSM, which should all be contacted.

On timeline

  • Consultation starting this Monday with the first cluster.
  • Every 2 weeks, the group will start a consultation on a different cluster.
  • The last session will start on 29 May and will end in the second week of June.

Suggestions:

  • Raise the attention on the Advisory Board. Good signal to Corporate donors and get feedback also from Local Chapters.
  • Schedule an Advisory Board meeting.

Point mentioned during discussion: Forums generate more discussion than mailing lists.

Action item

Mikel to schedule an Advisory Board meeting, probably in May. Sarah, Allan and Craig might present their work on the Strategic Plan.

Management of board passwords

Topic suggested by Sarah Hoffmann.

Fall-out of the search for the password for the Transparency register.

Suggestion: Create a password-protected file which contains non-critical and non-personal board passwords (e.g. for accounts that are used once a year or less). The master password will be known to board members and could change when the board changes.

Passwords not to be included:

  • OSMF board member email accounts
  • OSMF board member OSMF website accounts

Passwords that might be included:

  • Board non-personal ones.
  • EU transparency register.
  • US administration.

Options:

  • Keeping the file on the Board wiki or Nextcloud.
    • Board wiki has versioning.
    • Dorothea can keep the file updated.
  • Online synchronisation of passwords, but is an expensive option.

Point mentioned during discussion:

  • OPS use a tool which is probably not good for board members.

Action item

Dorothea to look for board accounts that might need storing credentials.

Follow-up to FPOSM and 'interest group chapters': discuss next steps

There was no decision on the board member who will:

  • work on the FPOSM intermediate agreement.
  • work on a template agreement for interest-group chapters.

Arnalie declared a conflict of interest (board conflict of interest policy) on doing work for interest groups. There was a comment by a board member that she could start the work.

Point mentioned during discussion:

  • Discussed earlier during Allan's time - affects informal groups.
  • Wikipedia has local chapters, thematic groups and user groups.
    • "User groups" sounds nice.
  • The Local Chapter agreement can be used.

On suggested future work

  • Document what is existing now and challenges of previous local chapter applications.
  • Make more explicit the criteria for Local Chapter approval and acceptability guidelines.
  • Where do Local Chapters differ from user groups and where are they the same.

On intermediate FPOSM agreement:

  • Sarah used the existing local chapter template agreement and tried to remove the geographical mentions, but that does not work.
  • Suggestion to ask the LWG for existing agreements or an FPOSM agreement with the conditions agreed during the March 2023 board meeting.
    • There are signed agreements already on the board wiki.

Action items

  • Arnalie to share with the board until the end of May the revised draft minimum criteria for being a local chapter / acceptability guidelines, before asking feedback from the community. (See Action item from 2023-03 screen-to-screen board meeting: Until end of June 2023 draft clearer minimum criteria for being a local chapter / acceptability guidelines)
  • Mikel to take the GeOSM trademark agreement as a starting point and modify it with the conditions approved during the March board meeting. Will happen in around 2 weeks.
  • Sarah to email FPOSM.

Second 2023 screen-to-screen board meeting

The meeting will be facilitated.

Action item

Mikel to contact Allen Gunn (Gunner), who has acted as a facilitator before.

Contracting for Vector tiles work

Is the issue blocked or are we waiting for something?

  • Guillaume is handling it.

Email request for funding / contracting

The board has received an email from an OSMer, offering services as a contractor or employee.

  • Mateusz has replied (representing himself).
  • We don't have the budget for this for the next 6 months.
  • EWG might have interest and funds for a project, but not a huge package.

Suggestions:

  • Respond that the EWG is looking at funding projects. We would like to bring on more tech roles, the first one would be to focus on the OSM website. From a board perspective we don't have funds for full-time employment due to budgetary constraints.
  • Could suggest a more concrete project to the EWG.
  • Ask the sender to join an EWG meeting.

Action item

Mikel to respond to the email request for funding / contracting. Roland to follow-up (as an EWG member).

Response from Microsoft regarding MapBuilder

  • The board had received a response from Microsoft, to which it has not replied yet.
  • Microsoft would like to restart the automatic accounts.
  • Some edits from MapBuilder go straight away, some through a staging area.

Brief discussion about differently licenced data.

Suggestions:

  • Get from Microsoft the specific plans for single sign-on and how we can help facilitate them.
  • Microsoft should start the discussion on Github https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website
  • Ask Microsoft what "contribution to Microsoft" means in the context of Map builder.

Action item: Mikel to respond about single sign-on and ask for clarification about "contribution to Microsoft".

Sovereign TechFund

The German government has now officially started their FOSS support fund, with minimum funding EUR 150000.

Sarah Hoffmann has a meeting with Andy on Tuesday about the Sovereign TechFund.

  • In theory, it is only for libraries.

Suggestion for application:

  • Maintenance work for OSM website, modernising code, finding a permanent solution for doubling of code.
  • Andy would probably do PR merging and reviewing.
  • Other financing could support feature work.

Donation website

Question by Mateusz Konieczny regarding content on https://join.osmfoundation.org/donate/ - where is the text defined in the code?

Suggestion: Ask Grant Slater.

Board chat ended 56 minutes after start.

Next meeting

Public board meeting on Thursday 27 April 2023, 13:00 UTC

Open to OSMF members.

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.


Acronyms