OSMF updates/2021-08

OSMF updates - August 2020 to August 2021*
* With some more recent news.

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About this page

• Content: Highlighting updates related to the Foundation - mostly news from the volunteer Working Groups, the Board of Directors, the Local Chapters (in relation to OSMF), the Advisory Board members and the rest of Foundation bodies. In some cases, diary entries and posts from individuals are linked, if they are related to the work of their working group/committee/etc.
• Details: For more details you are invited to read the minutes or reports of the Board and the Working Groups (links on each section).
• Accuracy: These reports do not go through a formal acceptance process, like the public Board minutes are. This might change. Reports are made known to the Working Groups and committees first, before being sent to the membership.
• Previous reports: here.

Adopted/Completed/Approved

Adopted - Attribution Guidelines On June 2021 the board adopted the proposed attribution guidelines.

Timeline

• 2018-11 The Licensing Working Group (LWG) starts working on a draft attribution guideline.
• 2019 LWG members solicited feedback from attendants of the State of the Map US conference and at the international State of the Map conference in Heidelberg.
• 2019-08 and 09. The August 2019 version became available to the community (osmf-talk message) and is added to the OSM wiki.
• 2020-01 The version with changes due to the feedback from the State of the Map US conference and State of the Map 2019 was made available to the board.
• 2020-02
  • The LWG updated the document based on input from the board, shared the updated version with the board and notified it that it would be starting another round of public feedback to hopefully conclude the matter.
  • The February 2020 LWG version became available to the community on the OSM wiki.
• 2020-06 The OSMF board
  • modified the draft and presented the updated version during the 2020-06 board meeting.
  • had a meeting with Corporate Member representatives on the Advisory Board on attribution.
• 2020-10 The board had meetings with Corporate Member representatives on the Advisory Board and with the LWG. The board version was subsequently modified.
• 2020-12 Board meeting decisions to:
  • Publish the current board draft after giving the Licensing Working Group (LWG) a heads up.
  • Ask LWG to summarise the points they still consider open from the comments on the board document and ask Dermot McNally (LWG member), who has no conflict of interest, to present that report at the next LWG meeting.
  • A. R. McCann (Board) to work with external counsel to try to find the solutions to these issues that are most favourable to us.
• 2021-01 The LWG was working on the requested document ("gap list") summarising the points they still considered open on the board version of the attribution guidelines.
• 2021-02 The LWG sent the "gap list" document to the board.
• 2021-03 The board contacted Kyle Mitchell (Intellectual Property lawyer suggested by Allen Gunn, who has been the external facilitator of some of the past board face-to-face meetings) for external legal advice on the draft attribution guidelines. The initial email was approved by Dermot McNally (Licensing Working Group) and included the board draft of the attribution guidelines and a list of questions by the board and the LWG.
• 2021-04 Kyle Mitchell responded.
• 2021-05 The board forwards Kyle Mitchell's response to the LWG and answers regarding the "gap list" points.
• 2021-06-01 LWG and Board online discussion. Decisions and next steps here.
• 2021-06-11 Preparations for vote on Attribution Guidelines (board chat)
• 2021-06-12 Publication of current draft v0.9 and request for feedback from the community and the membership.

LWG: Attribution guidelines related minutes

• 2021: Jan, Feb: Attribution guidelines gap list and board status update on outside counsel, May, Jun, Jul: Publishing the Attribution Guidelines
• 2020: Jan (“Twitter attribution thread”), Feb, Mar, Apr, Jul, Aug, Oct, Nov
• 2019: Jan, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec
• 2018: Dec

Board attribution guidelines related minutes

• 2021: Jan Attribution guidelines update, Feb 12 (mid month board chat), Apr 09 Kyle Mitchell's response regarding attribution guidelines and ODbL, Apr 16 Attribution guidelines (dedicated chat), [[Board/Minutes/2021-05#Draft_attribution_guidelines|May]
• 2020: Jan Attribution and lack thereof, Apr Update on LWG's rewrite of attribution policy, May Status of Attribution policy, Status of Facebook attribution issue on mobile, Jun Status, Meeting with Corporate Members of the Advisory Board on attribution, Oct screen-to-screen discussion, update, Nov update 1, update 2, Dec update (informal board chat), update (public board meeting).
• 2019 Oct Attribution by Facebook.

Board attribution guidelines related circular

• 2020-03-26 Circular 2021/Res11: Authorise Allan to send attribution guideline letter to Intellectual Property lawyer.

Other attribution guidelines related minutes

• 2020-12-04 Board and LWG meeting (Dermot McNally) on draft attribution guidelines - The meeting was set-up in short time. The LWG was invited but only Dermot McNally could participate in such short notice.
• 2020-10-15 Board and LWG meeting on draft attribution guidelines
• 2020-10-09 Board and AB Corporate Members representatives meeting
• 2020-10-02 Session Make progress on attribution guidelines and enforcement, during board screen-to-screen October meeting
• 2020-06-22 Board and Advisory Board Corporate Member representatives meeting

OSMF members' related discussions on the osmf-talk* mailing list:

• Attribution guideline status update: 2019 Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec
• Attribution: board letter to Facebook: 2019 Oct, Nov

* osmf-talk is the mailing list for OpenStreetMap Foundation members (Join the Foundation). All past messages are available here.

Adopted - Strategic plan outline The board drafted and adopted on July 2021 the following strategic plan outline, which was shared shared with OSMF members on 14 May 2021 for comments.

Aim for next years: create a fully-fleshed strategic plan, as this is just an outline.

Previous related board discussions

• 2021-07-16 Next steps for the draft strategic plan outline now that it's been out for comment (mid-month board chat - not open to observers)
• 2021-05-14 Any other business - Strategic plan outline (mid-month board chat - not open to observers)
• 2021-02-26 Strategic plan outline - update (public board meeting)
• 2021-02-06 Strategic plan - Agree on "plan for the plan" (screen to screen board meeting)
• 2021-01-15 Strategic plan outline (mid-month board chat - not open to observers)
• 2020-12-18 Members: Can we get an update on the status of the Strategic Plan?
• 2020-10-09 On strategic plan creation (From online meeting with three of the six Corporate Members of the Advisory Board)
• 2020-10-02 and 03 Action item: Allan to to circulate a strategic plan outline to the rest of the board members and drive forward the topic (which would then serve fundraising asks in 2021) (Topics: OSMF fundraising and Wrap-up session)

Created - Software dispute resolution panel for iD editor The OSM Foundation Board in August 2020 discussed the creation of a Software Dispute Resolution Panel, that will - on request - seek to resolve disputes that arise over features of the iD editor, the main editor on www.openstreetmap.org. Other OSM-related software products may also use this panel if they choose to opt-in.

The full proposal for the panel can be found here (es, fr, gl, pl), where feedback was requested. (Comments by OSMF members on the osmf-talk thread and digest).

On January 29th 2021 the OSMF Board appointed the following nominees to the Software Dispute Resolution Panel (5 out of 7 people nominated by Working Groups):

• David Morais Ferreira (nominated by the Data Working Group (DWG))
• Minh Nguyen (nominated by the Licensing Working Group (LWG))
• Wille Marcel (nominated by the Licensing Working Group (LWG))
• Ilya Zverev (nominated by the Membership Working Group (MWG))
• Richard Fairhurst (nominated by the Operations Working Group (OWG)

The panel members are charged with the following:

• form the Panel and elect a chairperson;
• establish on the OSMF website (www.osmfoundation.org) a page devoted to the work of the Panel, including the Panel's membership, contact information, and procedures for submitting disputes, and contribute as appropriate to the Panel's page on the OSM wiki at Software Dispute Resolution Panel;
• establish a collective email address in the osmfoundation.org domain for receipt of dispute resolution requests;
• decide who among them shall serve initially for one year and who for two years, in order to establish a rotation that preserves institutional memory as the Panel turns over, and report that to the Board (thereafter all Panel members' terms of office are intended to be two years in duration);
• on 29 January 2022 issue a report to the Board with recommendations as to a) whether the Panel as constituted is effective, b) how it could be improved, and c) whether it should continue to exist;
• implement its remit to adjudicate software disputes that were not amicably resolved via community discussion, and establish internal procedures for that purpose.

Board's proposal for a software dispute resolution panel.

2020 board discussions

• Jul Digest provided by Allan Mustard
• Aug
  • Comments on talk@ mailing list (thread)
  • Board meeting topic
  • The board emailed the Working Groups (WGs) to see whether any would be willing to take up that task.
• Sep
  • Update during closed board chat
  • The Data Working Group volunteered.
  • Update during board meeting
• Oct Creating software dispute resolution panel: who and how (screen-to-screen board meeting)
• Nov
  • Next steps (board meeting topic)
  • The board emails the Working Groups asking if they are interested to nominate people.
• Dec
  • Update and next steps (board meeting topic)
  • Question by OSMF member: How much effort is needed for participating on the Dispute Resolution Panel?

Created - Special committee on takeover protection The board on July 28 2021 appointed Andy Allan and Michael Collinson to the special committee on takeover protection. The committee's remit is to recruit additional members and investigate, then recommend to the Board, possible remedies to any potential threat of a hostile takeover of the OpenStreetMap Foundation. The remit includes but is not limited to specific attention to paid voting as mandated by the Foundation membership at the 2020 annual general meeting.

Board discussions related to takeover protections:

• 2021 Apr 30, Apr 09, Feb: Takeover protection (including Updating the conflict of interest policy?) (board screen-to-screen meeting)
• 2020 Sep 24, Sep 24. Members: How have all the new active contributors affected the takeover risk/approach?, Oct: Regulating corporate participation in foundation bodies

In addition to the board discussions related to takeover protections listed above, the Membership Working Group:

• in 2020 created and implemented the Active Contributor Membership program, which aims to remove some of the barriers for becoming an OSMF member and
• is working on the membership prerequisites.

Completed - Community survey and Local Chapters and communities survey Community survey

The board conducted a community survey, which run from January 16th to February 14th 2021. The survey was available in 18 languages.

• Results released
• Raw data posted on the OSMF website and can be downloaded, together with summary statistic.

Discussions

• Discussion on talk@ mailing list (register to the talk mailing list here)
• Comments to Allan Mustard's (OSMF Chairperson) diary entry

Analyses

• Guillaume Rischard (board): OSMF survey on board priorities - a quick analysis using the Borda count and comments below
• Stats: Paul Norman: Survey responses by country and their correlation with mappers eligible for a fee waver as an active contributor
• Stats: Paul Norman: Correlation of survey responses with OSM.org views
• Maps: Michal Migurski: Summary Maps of OSMF 2021 Survey Results
• Maps: Michal Migurski: Summary Maps of OSMF 2021 Survey Results (Part 2)
• Maps: Øukasz: A very quick and dirty stab at visualising OSMF 2021 survey results

Selected comments

• PierZen: Individual Comments from participants about Diversity and Inclusion committee

The results were also presented on 10 and 11 March 2021 by Allan Mustard (OSMF Chairperson) during video conferences open to the OSM community to answer questions. An instance of Microsoft Translator was active so that anybody with the respective app could follow the presentation in the language of their choosing.

Local Chapters and communities survey
The Local Chapters and Communities Working Group (LCCWG) sent a survey to Local Chapters and community groups to get their views on why they applied/will apply to become a Local Chapter. One response was requested from each Local Chapter or group. The duration was: 2020-03-05 to 2020-04-11. Language: English.

Some points from the feedback received.

Table with other past OSMF surveys here.

Completed - Funded work on projects used in core infrastructure (Nominatim, osm2pgsql, Potlatch, iD) The board funded work on the following projects used in core infrastructure:

• osm2pgsql - Proposal by Jochen Topf - Report for project on Jochen's blog
• Nominatim - Proposal by Sarah Hoffmann - State of the Map 2021 presentation was the result of OSMF-funded work.
• Potlatch - Proposal by Richard Fairhurst - Diary entry

Please see the message by the board on osmf-talk (mailing list for OSMF members) and the subsequent discussion.

The proposals for osm2pgsql and Potlatch were originally submitted as Microgrant 2020 proposals (Potlatch 2 proposal, osm2pgsql proposal) but were not selected. The board approved to fund these projects directly, together with Nominatim and iD.

iD editor

• Funding of iD was discussed with members in a separate thread.
• Quincy Morgan was contracted and worked on the iD editor. For personal reasons, Quincy left (Joint statement with the board) and the board is looking to hire an iD developer. Please see the section "Ongoing - Plans to hire a Senior Site Reliability Engineer and an iD developer".

Related board discussions:

• 2020 Jul 16, Jul 30

Board decision: 2020/Res38 Funding of projects used in core infrastructure (Nominatim, osm2pgsql, Potlatch)

Completed - Funded work on 12 projects via the trial round of Microgrants The trial round of Microgrants (financial help provided by the OSM Foundation to applicants for OSM-related projects) ended (1 year period since dispersing funds).

Selection

• Committee members were selected by the board from interested applicants.
• 12 proposals had been selected (presentation of some of the proposals on the OSM blog).

Projects' reports
Almost all projects have sent their final reports and you can read them on the OSM wiki. The respective project proposal is linked towards the top of each page.

• A Free Video Tutorial for Beginners about Mapping Pacific Islands using OSM and QGIS (proposal)
• Report: HIV facilities mapping in the Philippines on OpenStreetMap
• Report: Leaflets to promote OSM - see https://osmuk.org/leaflets/
• Report: Map Maintenance with StreetComplete
• Report: Mapping Uganda's New Cities
• Report: Mapping Villages and Settlements in Kosovo
• Report: Road Completion project
• Report: OSM Ireland Buildings
• Report: OpenStreetMap Calendar
• Report: Tactile maps for blind or visually impaired children
• Teaching and learning OSM in Albania through LibreTech School (proposal)
• Report: Water and Sanitation mapping in Nairobi's informal settlements

An apology was issued by board members Mikel Maron and Joost Schouppe regarding conflicts of interest in the awarding of microgrants in 2020, as both were closely associated with successful grantees.

Final report by the Microgrants committee

• Final report (file type: .odt, file size: 29 KB) and
• Presentation (.pdf, 53 KB, 8 pages) by Hanna Krüger (microgrants committee) during the September board meeting.

Background
The trial run of the OSMF microgrants program was overseen by the Microgrants committee, whose composition was decided by the board. Initially, the program was set to fund 10 projects with a budget of up to 5000 Euros per project and for a maximum of 50.000 Euros. The policy framework can be read here. All the project proposals (funded or not) are visible on the OSM wiki and some of the 12 selected proposals were presented on the OSM blog. You can read the initial call here.

Timeline
2021

• Sep Presentation of final report during September board meeting
• Jul Microgrants - what's next?

2020

• Feb Call for microgrants committee members.
• Mar 5 selected committee members from 13 applications
• Apr Call for microgrant applications, board update
• Jun Selection of 2 observers out of 4 applicants, report, board update
• Jul Announcements of 12 selected microgrant proposals.
• Aug Microgrants tracking and reporting status
• Sep Conflicts of Interest disclosure

Timeline with more details here.

Completed - State of the Map 2021 international conference The volunteers of the State of the Map organising committee successfully organised the virtual, international State of the Map 2021 (second virtual conference). Talks were pre-recorded and broadcasted live. Live question and answer sessions took place, where community members were able to ask questions to the speakers via the conference platform.

The conference included several kinds of sessions:

• 20 minute talks,
• academic talks (Proceedings published on Zenodo),
• 60-90 minute workshops,
• 60-90 minute panel discussions,
• 5 minute "lightning" talks
• spontaneous break out sessions for birds of a feather meetups and other activities
• (virtual) poster exhibition

The programme can be found here.

• See the posters and their descriptions at https://2021.stateofthemap.org/posters/
  • Helga Tauscher: "Let's meet at an island!"
  • Éva Pudleiner: "Equine Tooth Fairy visits"
  • Minh Nguyen: "Mapping Points of Interest in Santa Clara County, California (Silicon Valley)"
  • OpenMapChile SPA: "Map of Urban Trees, Valdivia-Chile 2021""
  • Shreeparna Sahoo: "Accessibility to Hospitals Providing Covid Treatment Using OpenStreetMap"
  • Sergey Kaldyrkaev "Penza mapping party 2021 poster"
  • Grant Huang: "OSM 15min cities"
  • Michael Staniek: "Overpass NL"
  • PoliMappers Team: "PoliMappers Poster"
  • Muhammad Saleem: "Rethinking temporal-spatial data quality aspects for OpenStreetMap"
  • Sarah Lohr: "Mapathon experiment"
  • Ayako Takahashi: "YouthMappers AGU, Aoyama Gakuin University, Japan 2020-2021 report"
  • Janina Schüssler: "Heigit Healthcare Poster"
  • Heikki Vesanto: "OSM Ireland Buildings"
  • Yusuf Mert Üstün: "Batumi Land-use Development Project"
  • Raphael Schumann: "Natural Language Processing and OpenStreetMap"
  • Jiri Vlasak: "Divide and map"

Recordings of the talks in track 1 are being made available on the State of the Map 2021 website, on media.ccc.de and on YouTube.

Live translations of talks
We are happy to have made the conference more accessible by providing live translation to other languages. While watching the live talks, attendees could connect to a Mumble server and join their preferred language channel. Over 40 live translations of talks were done by volunteers (thanks!) in the following languages: Bahasa Indonesia, Bengali, Italian, Polish, Spanish and Russian. Translations were recorded for future subtitling of the videos.

Feedback was supplied by some community members:

• EN Organizer experience and learnings from State of the Map (SotM) 2021 by arnalielsewhere
• EN The State of the Map Conference 2021: feedback by DeBigC.
• EN State of the Map 2021 – observations by Imagico
• EN Inclusion in OSM by Mariotomo
• EN State of the Map 2021 Report: A Global Community, and Task-Based Editing is hot! by Martijn van Exel
• EN anonymous feedback by conference participants
• ES Mi experiencia como organizadora y aprendizajes del State of the Map (SotM) 2021 by arnalielsewhere, traducción: Cyberjuan
• RU Телевизор для картографа by Ilya Zverev.

If you would like to create a State of the Map 2021 t-shirt for personal use, the winning logo by Julie Mattelaer can be found here. Reduced versions for stickers can be found here.

Completed - Google Summer of Code 2021 Four student projects had been accepted to take part in the Google Summer of Code 2021.

• Opening hours tag evaluator by Vuong Ho.
  • Mentors: Simon Poole, Rebecca Schmidt
  • Greetings, First period update, Final report
• Interface for reporting search bugs for Nominatim by Yash Srivastava.
  • Mentors: mtmail, lonvia
  • We'd like to have an interface where people can report search results that they think to be wrong.
• Quality Assurance Reports Extraction Tool (Nominatim) by Antonin Jolivat.
  • Mentors: lonvia, mtmail
  • Nominatim contains OSM data in a processed form that allows to discover a lot of inconsistencies. The goal of this project would be to identify possible sources of inconsistencies and write and automatic extraction tool that exports the possible errors to a json file suitable for Osmoscope.
  • Starting journey, update, Final report.
• Element History Widget by Zohaib Ansari.
  • Mentors: Simon Poole, Rebecca Schmidt
  • This will be a standalone library to display multiple versions of any selected OSM element and allow comparison between the different versions.
  • Plans, Progress so far, Final report, Roadmap.

Overview of OSM's projects on the Google Summer of Code website

Updated - Privacy Policy, in order to cover aspects specific to surveys The board has updated the OSMF Privacy Policy in order to cover privacy aspects specific to surveys.

Table with past OSMF surveys here.

Updated - Local Chapter Agreement Organisations that apply to become Local Chapters, have to sign the Local Chapter Agreement once accepted. The agreement mentions that the Local Chapter has to supply an annual report to the OSMF board.

The following changes were approved:

• 2021-03 Improving the ability to upgrade.
• 2021-05 Asking local chapters to supply information on unsuccessful applications to join as members.

The OSMF Secretary was empowered to sign the updated local agreement with all existing local chapters. Germany, Poland and DRC have already signed.

Done - Two Board screen-to-screen meetings The board had two facilitated screen-to-screen board meetings (not open to observers), each during a weekend:

• on October 2020
• on February 2021

The 2021-02 meeting sessions and some collaborative notes can be found below:

• 2021-02 Action items and decisions
• Taking stock of OSM today
• Report on community survey
• Strategic plan - Agree on "plan for the plan"
• Decide on our response to the moderation subcommittee report (“Diversity”/feedback from LCCWG/Code of Conduct issues)
• Discuss rebooting the Engineering Working Group
• Discuss membership prerequisites, steps towards Annual General Meeting (AGM) resolution
• Addressing lack of gender diversity in OSM community
• Takeover protection (including Updating the conflict of interest policy?)
• Scoping Exercise (not publicly minuted)
• Do Reality-based assessment of risks and opportunities of collaboration of work with other OSM actors (HOT, companies, local chapters)
• Encouraging more volunteers to join other working groups
• Discuss institutionalising budgeting and fund-raising processes
• How do we define “core”, in terms of categories (e.g. software) and what is in each category?
• Discuss paid votes, steps towards AGM resolution
• Discuss Local community/Chapter support and expansion
• Decide to what extent management of financial risk should be formalized - and how to implement that

The 2020-10 meeting sessions and some collaborative notes can be found below:

• 2020-10 Action items and decisions
• Taking stock of past 6 months
• Legal team and Brexit implications - resolve how to respond
• Creating software dispute resolution panel: who and how
• Managing staff: what questions need to be resolved
• Develop plan for conflict of interest on Working Groups
• Make progress on attribution guidelines and enforcement.
• Supporting API: confirm goals and identify next steps - supporting Andy Allen’s rewrite of the API
• Regulating corporate participation in foundation bodies
• 2021 Budget: review budget draft, and what do we need to finish and approve?
• Articles of association: Evaluate membership pre-reqs, identify any needed changes/updates
• Improving member and volunteer recruiting, e.g via communications working group
• Board capacity and sustainability
• OSMF fundraising: where are we this year: are we done for 2020? What is fundraising process against 2021 budget?
• Board transparency, e.g via communications working group
• Wrap-up session - Review progress and unfinished business, summarize actions, map the path ahead

Done - Two "Ask me anything" sessions by board members There were two "Ask me anything" sessions by board members during the past year.

2020-11 Questions by Reddit users
Reddit users were invited to ask questions to OSMF board members. You can read the questions and answers on the Reddit website. There was a mention that the discussion would be copied to the OpenStreetMap wiki.

2021-07 Questions by State of the Map ticket holders
Community members that attended the virtual State of the Map 2021 conference could ask live questions during a video-session with some of the board members.

Approved - Opensnowmap and GeOSM trademark licence applications

• 2021-07 Approval of the OpenSnowMap trademark licence agreement.
• 2021-03 Approval of the GeOSM trademark license agreement.

Commitment to open communication channels The OSMF board has made a commitment on 2020-08 on behalf of the Foundation that essential communications will always be accessible through an open, preferably self-hosted platform. They may be published on proprietary channels as well, but only in addition to an open channel.

For the purpose of this commitment, essential communications include:

• Publications or consultations by the board, working groups, committees or other Foundation bodies.
• Communications mandated by OSMF policies/guidelines/frameworks and similar documents.
• Anything related to how the OSMF is governed, such as Annual General Meetings and elections.

By open platforms, the board means those that are accessible through open-source software and open protocols, and do not require an account at a third-party service to access. (Read-only public access is sufficient for one-way publications, but not two-way communications).

The Working Groups (WGs) have been consulted prior to the decision. The consultation didn't identify any major roadblocks, as the WGs already do this for the most part (with some caveats).

See also: FOSS Policy, OSMF webpage, FOSS Policy Special Committee, announcement to OSMF members

Ongoing or discussed

Please note that the list below mostly does not include regular work by working groups and topics have been mentioned during board meetings.

Ongoing - Investigation into moving OSMF out of the UK, and into the EU

The OSMF board is considering relocating the OSMF to the EU and is consulting the members for feedback, advice and whether they’ve missed anything.

Comments by members on the osmf-talk^* mailing list: thread 1, thread 2.

* osmf-talk is the mailing list for OpenStreetMap Foundation members (Join the Foundation). All past messages are available here.

• Collaborative spreadsheet by the community.
• Spreadsheet with answers to the board's questions, sent directly to the board.

Please note that there were extensive discussions about Brexit and its effects by the Licensing Working Group (LWG) (search the LWG minutes for "Brexit") and the issue was also previously discussed by OSMF members and the board.

Recent board discussions about relocation

• 2021-07 Spreadsheet for collating information on a possible move out of the UK
• 2021-06 Investigate moving OSMF out of the UK, and into the EU (mid-month board chat)

Ongoing - Plans to hire a Senior Site Reliability Engineer and an iD developer Hiring an iD developer

2021-09 update: OSMF has contracted Martin Raifer to work mainly on iD. He's going to continue working for 25% of his time for HeiGIT (Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology). This was announced during the September 2021 board meeting.

After two and a half years developing iD, Quincy Morgan wished to pass the torch on iD development, for personal reasons. The joint statement of the board with Quincy regarding iD development was here (en). (es, fr, gl, nl, pl, ru, zh-hant).

• The interim maintainers of iD are Milos Brzakovic and Ninoslav Petrovic, as part of their work on the Maps and Geospatial team at Microsoft (announcement on the dev mailing list).
• The OSMF board has conducted some interviews with interested developers and is currently discussing with one of the candidates. What the board was looking for.

iD related board discussions/posts during 2020 and 2021:

• 2021
  • Jun 15 Apply to maintain and develop iD (blog post)
  • Jun 11 Hiring - iD and Senior Site Reliability Engineer status updates
  • May 14 iD next steps (mid-month board chat)
  • Apr 26 Joint statement from Quincy Morgan and the OpenStreetMap Foundation’s Board, regarding iD development (blog post)
  • Apr 09 iD updates (mid-month board chat)
• 2020
  • Jun 08 Toward resolution of controversies related to iD (blog post)
  • Jun 11 Responses to request for comments on iD governance (mid-month board chat)
  • Jun 26 Responses to request for comments on iD governance
  • Sep 10 Plan on supporting core infrastructure: thoughts on deliverables
  • Nov 12 Funding for senior site reliability engineer (SSRE) & iD - update (mid-month board chat)

Hiring a Senior Site Reliability Engineer

The OSMF board plans to hire a senior site reliability engineer (SSRE). The person has already been selected.

Related:

• 2021
  • Jul 16 No update (mid-month board chat)
  • Jun 11 Hiring - iD and Senior Site Reliability Engineer status updates
  • May 28 Where we are with hiring a Senior Site Reliability Engineer,
  • May 14 Hiring a senior site reliability engineer - status update (mid-month board chat)
• 2020
  • Nov 12 Funding for senior site reliability engineer (SSRE) & iD - update (mid-month board chat)
  • Aug 27 Funding and hiring for Site Reliability Engineering position where a budget of GBP 130K for all expenses linked to the SSRE position was approved.
  • Jul 30 Proposal to hire a senior site reliability engineer.

Ongoing - Work on updating the Etiquette guidelines and on moderation of two of the OSMF-hosted mailing lists In December 2020, the OpenStreetMap Foundation (OSMF) Board set out to “find partners to help instate a moderator team for the OSMF-talk¹ and talk² mailing lists" and in their December 2020 meeting requested that the Local Chapters and Communities Working Group (LCCWG) take the lead on this initiative. Subsequently, this group has been formed as a subcommittee of the LCCWG. The Moderation subcommittee is a temporary group of OSM community members working on this Scope of Work via this Implementation Plan (hack.md). Learn more about participants and find links to any draft documents on the subcommittee's page. The moderation subcommittee will not be doing the moderation themselves.

¹ osmf-talk is the mailing list for OpenStreetMap Foundation members (Become a member of the OpenStreetMap Foundation). You can read all past messages here.
² talk is a general mailing list for OpenStreetMap. Anyone can subscribe to it. You can read all past messages here.

Work of the LCCWG moderation subcommittee, formed for this task, so far:

• Suggested update of the etiquette guidelines. The authors recommend applying the updated guidelines (once they are approved) to all OSMF-run platforms (forum, wiki and national mailing lists) as well. Feedback could be provided on the discussion page from August 13 to September 8, 2021.
• 2021-07 Suggested process for moderation - feedback could be provided on the discussion page from July 23 to August 18, 2021.
• 2021-01 This report on the 29th of January.
• 2021-03 A draft implementation plan

The next presentation by the Moderation subcommittee will be during the November board meeting.

The initial action by the board was the result of a statement sent on December 9th 2020 by a group of community members to osmf-talk (OSMF members' mailing list): Calling People to Take Action and Confront Systemic Offensive Behavior in the OSM Community (.pdf on the wiki, Gdoc here) asking amongst others:

• people to support the statement, help co-write and translate it and
• OSMF to implement the suggested changes.

The content of the statement was locked on December 16th 2020 after being published (the content was being updated even after people/groups had started signing it) and it includes the names of 310 community members and 47 organisations in support.

Related discussions:

• 2021-09-24: Local Chapters and Communities Working Group Moderation Subcommittee - status update presentation
• 2021-07-30: Local Chapters and Communities Working Group Moderation Subcommittee - status update presentation
• 2021-05-28: LCCWG Moderation Subcommittee - status update
• 2021-03-26: Presentation from Local Chapters and Communities Working Group moderation subcommittee during board meeting.
• 2021-02-12: LCCWG moderation subcommittee (mid-month board chat - not open to observers)
• 2021-02-06: Decide on our response to the moderation subcommittee report (board screen-to-screen meeting)
• Messages on the osmf-talk mailing list.
• 2020-12-18: comment by Nicolas and comment by Pierre Béland (guests).
• 2020-12-10: Question by Rebecca Firth (guest), as a representative of the group that has drafted the call to action.

Ongoing - Work on membership prerequisites The OSMF membership voted in 2020-12 and decided the following:

"The board of directors shall, together with the OSMF Membership Working Group, work on a set of proposals to ensure that all successful applicants for membership or associate membership in the OpenStreetMap Foundation have made a reasonable amount of contributions to OpenStreetMap. The specific form of the contributions (e.g. mapping vs. non-mapping) does not make a difference for the fulfillment of these prerequisites. The board shall submit these proposals as possible resolutions at a general meeting in 2021."

If you would like to help the volunteers of the Membership Working Group to work on this, please email mwg@osmfoundation.org

The rationale is presented here.

Related board discussions:

• 2021-02 Discuss Membership prerequisites - steps towards Annual General Meeting resolution (board screen-to-screen meeting)
• 2020-10 Articles of Association (board screen-to-screen meeting)

Ongoing - Work on making it possible for Active Contributor awardees to receive (regular) OSMF membership The OSMF membership voted in 2020-12 and decided to allow Active Contributor awardees to receive (regular) OSMF membership, rather than just associate membership.

The volunteers of the Membership Working Group are working on implementing this decision. If you would like to help them, please email mwg@osmfoundation.org

Background
The OSMF's Active Contributor Programme started last year, and it grants free OSMF associate membership (rather than normal membership) to people who “can demonstrate that they have consistently made sizeable contributions to OpenStreetMap”. By default, if you have made a map edit to OSM on at least 42 days in the past 365 days, you can become a member. Otherwise the Board can look at your non-mapping contributions (decision is on a case by case basis). The program has been very successful, with several hundred] OSMers becoming members of the Foundation.

Initially this program only granted people associate membership of the Foundation, rather than (regular) membership. Associate membership is nearly identical, but there are some legal differences, like a requirement to give the Foundation your address. Importantly, associate members are not legally members of the Foundation, and cannot be elected to the Board, nor vote on changes to the Foundation's Articles of Association. The volunteers of the Membership Working Group are working on implementing the 2020 decision to allow Active Contributor awardees to receive normal membership.

Ongoing - Work on a trademark agreement with Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team OSMF is currently talking with Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) and is working on a draft agreement regarding granting rights to HOT for the use of OSM marks.

Related:

• 2021-09 Followup on HOT draft trademark agreement (Licensing Working Group), HOT draft trademark agreement (mid-month board chat)
• 2021-08 HOT draft trademark agreement (Licensing Working Group), HOT trademark grant (mid-month board chat)
• 2021-07 HOT draft trademark agreement questions (Licensing Working Group)
• 2021-07 Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team trademark (Licensing Working Group)
• 2021-07 Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team trademark (Licensing Working Group)
• 2021-07 Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team trademark (Licensing Working Group)
• 2021-07 Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team trademark (Licensing Working Group)
• 2021-02 board chat, public board meeting and the board approved £1800 for consultation by Lawdit on the HOT trademark grant
• 2021-01-19 HOT and OSMF board members meeting (Participants: McCann (OSMF board) and Abelshausen (HOT board))
• 2021-01-14 HOT board and OSMF board meeting.
• 2020-12 HOT emailed the OSMF board regarding coordination between OSMF and HOT in order to improve OSM as a global project and suggested meetings of the two boards.

Discussed: Encouraging more volunteers to join working groups Collaborative notes by board members on encouraging more volunteers to join working groups (session during 2021-02 screen-to-screen meeting).

Discussed: Addressing lack of gender diversity in OSM community Collaborative notes by board members on addressing lack of gender diversity in OSM community(session during 2021-02 screen-to-screen meeting).

Invitation to make a community presentation at a board meeting

If you are part of a local chapter, or a local community, putting together an organised project, or developing software, the board of the OSM Foundation would like to hear from you at the monthly board meetings. Please get in touch with the board at board@osmfoundation.org.

Invitation call.

Working Groups updates

Working Groups are the main way in which the Foundation supports OSM in specific areas. Working Groups' members are volunteers.

Like everything in OpenStreetMap, we are very open and always welcome new working group members and helpers. If you support the ideals of OpenStreetMap and open data and want to help, just email the group that interests you.

Communication Working Group, Contact/Join

• Communicating the work of the Foundation and related news, through official channels.

News distribution

• Blog posts are tweeted, and are also announced on language-specific channels on Telegram.

Get notified of new blog posts and translations (whenever available) by subscribing to our language-specific RSS feeds:
AL, DE, EN, ES, FR, GL, FA, HR, HU, IT, LT, NL, PL, PT-PT, PT-BR, SQ, UK, RU, ZH-HANT

Distribution of promotional material
Please see the OSM Promotional Material Programme.

Mastodon server
The en.osm.town mastodon server was set up, is run and moderated by Amanda McCann (CWG volunteer and board member). In August 2021 the board voted and approved to pay for future costs of running the en.osm.town mastodon server/instance from now on.

Translations
Information on languages and translations by volunteers from August 2020 to August 2021 - as well as how to help.

Minutes
See minutes.

New members: Welcome to Rebecca Firth, Benjamin Dills, Mikel Maron, Pete Masters.
Members leaving: We thank Hrvoje Bogner and Wille Marcel for their work.

Working Groups: Communication | Data | Engineering | Licensing | Local Chapters and Communities | Membership | Operations | State of the Map

Data Working Group, Contact/Join

• Resolving issues in copyright violation, disputes, vandalism, and bots, beyond the normal means of the community;
• Helping to set policy on data;
• Detecting and stopping vandalism and imports that do not comply with guidelines.

July 2020 to April 2021

1,391 tickets were created in OTRS in these 3 quarters (355 of these were copied from the web site issue tracker). Issues of minor importance are sometimes handled directly in the web site issue tracker and will therefore not be counted.

A total of 2,534 messages were received in the context of these tickets, and 3,628 messages and memos were written by DWG members.

~ 143 tickets were follow-on tickets to older issues, 94 were discarded as spam. 948 tickets created in this period were closed, and additionally, ~262 tickets from previous periods were closed.

The median time for the first (non-automated) response to tickets was:

• 2021-Q1: 04 hours
• 2020-Q4: 14 hours
• 2020-Q3: 22 hours

~11 DWG members were active in each quarter (~92% of cases were handled by the five busiest members).

The majority of tickets were handled in English (4,031), but we also used the languages Dutch (39), German (49), Russian (38), French (14) and Italian (5). (We will also often include auto-translated versions of English messages in responses.)

Generally, all these numbers should be taken with a grain of salt because edge cases can be mis-counted in our statistics. Also, due to reorganisation or cleaning out of old information, it is possible that previous quarters shown in the above graph differ slightly from the numbers published at the time.

Activity reports: 20210 Q1, 2020 Q4, 2020 Q3

Lists of cases and actions by the DWG: 2021 Q1, 2020 Q4, 2020 Q3

Notable cases
2021-Q1

• User conflict over sports clothing shops
• User conflict over a series of bicycle / mountainbike routes
• User conflict over a series of bicycle / mountainbike routes
• Complaints about note closures
• Argument over road name and road importance in Iran
• Misdirected complaint based on an attributed OSM map on a 3rd-party website
• Asian railway mapping from undisclosed source

2020 Q4

• Edits around Armenia and Azerbaijan
• "Schoolkid" vandalism in north-east England
• Using external websites as a source that in turn used Google
• Blocked for studying
• Anonymous Notes in Brazil
• Uptick in "private access" issues

If you feel that you have been unfairly treated by the DWG, a related section was added to the DWG page.

New members: We welcome Rafael Avila Coya (Spain), Lukasz Kruk (Poland) and Jesús López Témez (Spain).

Working Groups: Communication | Data | Engineering | Licensing | Local Chapters and Communities | Membership | Operations | State of the Map

Engineering Working Group restart Contact/Join After a period of inactivity (with the exception of organising the annual participation in the Google Summer of Code), the Engineering Working Group (EWG) has been re-established by a board decision on 2021-07-30. The re-started group is still in its infancy and is welcoming additional members.

• 2021-08-31 First meeting of the newly (re-)created EWG. Meetings will be held every 14 days.

Charter
Approved by the board on 2021-07-30 (Consultation of OSMF members).

What we do
The Engineering Working Group is charged with

• Handling software development paid for by the OSMF
• Putting out calls for proposals on tasks of interest, and accepting proposals on other tasks
• Offering a platform for coordination of software development efforts across the OSM ecosystem
• Managing OSM’s participation in software mentorship programs

For handling paid development, "tasks" include development of new features, maintenance of code, documentation, and other tasks that improve the developer experience. We encourage applications from skilled individuals who aren’t professional developers, professional contractors or companies, as well as those who are. In our first round we will look for projects that don’t need much management and will apply the principles of the Hiring Framework. We encourage standardization and shared efforts between projects by bringing together developers with similar interests. This work also includes responding to emails and directing people at other people or appropriate resources. Join us We are looking for people with experience with the OSM software ecosystem, developing software, or managing software development. Prospective Budget Our first budget will outline further detail, and is subject to change after the Working Group forms and we have initial meetings. - Estimated 50k initial budget, same scale as microgrants.
- 50% of funding to core OSM software used to edit OSM or OSM-specific software run on the OpenStreetMap website.
- 30% of funding to OSM quality assurance and analysis tools and OSM-specific software in common use (category name to be determined).
- 20% of funding to consumer-facing OSM software and new software.
All code written must be open-source and available without charge.
We would like to budget for administrative assistance for meeting minutes, document management, and other administrative tasks and believe this is best handled through existing contracts the board has in place.

Join the Engineering Working Group to support the OSM developer ecosystem.

Minutes.

Previous related board discussions:

• 2021-07
• 2021-06
• 2021-05 Responding to proposed Engineering Working Group restart (board chat)
• 2021-04-30 (public board meeting), 2021-04-09 (board chat)
• 2021-02 Discuss rebooting the Engineering Working Group (Screen-to-screen board meeting)
• 2020-09 - Engineering Working Group / Personnel committee roles and next steps

Working Groups: Communication | Data | Engineering | Licensing | Local Chapters and Communities | Membership | Operations | State of the Map

Licensing Working Group, Contact/Join

• Licensing matters relating to using our geodata, (our end user license, community guidelines, License FAQ).
• Licensing matters relating creating our geodata, (contributor terms, imports, using aerial imagery ...)
• Legal matters relating to responsibility and risk, (trademarks, safe harbour, privacy, child protection, ...)

Overview of activities August 2020 to August 2021 here.

Minutes: Licensing Working Group

Working Groups: Communication | Data | Engineering | Licensing | Local Chapters and Communities | Membership | Operations | State of the Map

Local Chapters and Communities Working Group, Email, Chat: IRC, Element Aims:

• Building local community cohesion
• Facilitating a global exchange of ideas
• Improving the Local Chapters affiliation scheme

Overview of activities August 2020 to August 2021 here.

Working Group members' changes:

• New members: We welcome to Jonathan Beliën (OpenStreetMap Belgium), Nicholas Chavent (Francophonie community), Naveen Francis (India local community), Besfort Guri (FLOSSK (OSM Kosovo)), Adam Hoyle (OpenStreetMap United Kingdom), Anisa Kuci (Wikimedia Italia), Sophie Mower (HOT) and Jorge Gustavo Rocha (OSGeo Portugal).
• Member leaving: We thank to Stefano Sabatini for his work.

Working Groups: Communication | Data | Engineering | Licensing | Local Chapters and Communities | Membership | Operations | State of the Map

Membership Working Group, Contact/Join

• Member self service area
• Administering the membership database
• Processing Active Contributor memberships
• Answering routine membership queries
• Increasing the OSMF Membership

Besides the ongoing regular work described above, some of the issues discussed by the group have been:

• Logistics of the Active Contributor program
• Possible implementation of the Active Contributor program to grant normal OSMF memberships
• Membership renewal date handling
• Workload
• Nominations for the Software Dispute Resolution Panel
• Practices for conducting MWG online business

Processed: more than 743 active contributor membership applications since 2020-08-01, which resulted in:

• 743 new Associate OSMF members, of which
• 730 had at least 42 mapping days during the last 365 days prior to their application, while
• 13 had other significant non-mapping contributions. Applications for non-mapping contributions are assessed by the board and 13 were approved from the 19 which were received.

About the active contributor membership program
In August 2020 the Membership Working Group launched the active contributor membership program: an easier and costless way for active OpenStreetMap contributors to apply to become an Associate member of the Foundation with no need to pay the membership fee. One needs either at least 42 mapping days in the last 365 days or other contributions) to have a voice in the OpenStreetMap Foundation, which is supporting the project, and be able to vote for the board members of your choice.

Initial effect of the Active Membership Contributor program analysed in December 2020. The program started in August 2020.

About the program: If you are an active OpenStreetMap contributor (with at least 42 mapping days in the previous 365 days or other contributions) you can become a member of the OpenStreetMap Foundation, which is supporting the project, without paying any membership fee. Find out more and the links to apply here. Joost Schouppe (past MWG member) looked in December 2020 at the initial impact of the active contributor membership program and analysed which countries are over- and under-represented in the membership of the OpenStreetMap Foundation.

Announcement of the active contributor membership program in different languages

• DE Aktiver OSM-Mitarbeiter? Sie können jetzt einfach der OpenStreetMap Foundation beitreten
• EN Active OSM contributor? You can now easily join the OpenStreetMap Foundation.
• FR Contributeur OSM actif? Vous pouvez désormais rejoindre facilement la Fondation OpenStreetMap.
• GL Es unha persoa que contribúe de forma activa a OSM? Agora pódeste unir á Fundación OpenStreetMap.
• NL Actieve OSM-bijdrager? U kunt nu gemakkelijk lid worden van de OpenStreetMap Stichting (OpenStreetMap Foundation)
• PL Jesteś aktywnym współtwórcą OSM? Teraz możesz w łatwy sposób dołączyć do Fundacji OpenStreetMap.
• RU Активный участник OSM? Вступайте в Фонд OpenStreetMap
• Add a language

• Membership statistics

Members (leaving): We thank Paul Norman and Joost Schouppe for their work.

Minutes: Membership Working Group

Working Groups: Communication | Data | Engineering | Licensing | Local Chapters and Communities | Membership | Operations | State of the Map

Operations Working Group, Contact/Join

• Ensuring the operation and smooth running of the XML editing API and data distribution services.

Github:
OSM operations, OSM website and other repositories.

The spending plan for 2022 is at https://operations.osmfoundation.org/2021/07/22/plan.html

Overview of news and activities August 2020 to August 2021 is here.

Working Groups: Communication | Data | Engineering | Licensing | Local Chapters and Communities | Membership | Operations | State of the Map

State of the Map Working Group, Contact/Join

• State of the Map Policy
• Responsible for the organisation and execution of the annual OpenStreetMap Foundation Conference "The State of the Map" (SotM).

The volunteers of the State of the Map organising committee successfully organised the virtual, international State of the Map 2021 (second virtual conference). Talks were pre-recorded and broadcasted live. Live question and answer sessions took place, where community members were able to ask questions to the speakers via the conference platform.

See the section "Completed - State of the Map 2021 international conference" for more details.

The SotM 2021 logo was created by Julie Mattelaer.

Live translations of talks
We are happy to have made the conference more accessible by providing live translation to other languages. While watching the live talks, attendees could connect to a Mumble server and join their preferred language channel. Over 40 live translations of talks were done by volunteers (thanks!) in the following languages: Bahasa Indonesia, Bengali, Italian, Polish, Spanish and Russian. Translations were recorded for future subtitling of the videos.

Organising a State of the Map conference is a huge effort! But it can be broken down to small and straightforward tasks. We are looking for you! Are you interested in taking over one of our tasks? This page shows you what the team is doing when the conference is not virtual – maybe there’s something here that you can help with. Or ask us (sotm@openstreetmap.org) for more details of tasks you are interested in!

Committees, Special Committees and other Foundation bodies

Committees
Committees are defined in the Articles of Association 91-94, and not typically employed by the Board. OSMF currently has one such committee.

Committees, Special Committees and other Foundation bodies: Personnel committee | Diversity and Inclusion Special Committee | FOSS committee | Takeover committee | Microgrants committee | Software dispute resolution panel | Advisory Board

Personnel Committee Aim, composition, related board discussions

A personnel committee comprised of board members and with the following charter was formed in October 2020 to provide human resources (HR) and organisational support for people doing work for the Foundation for most of their time over the year. The people are:

• administrative assistant (contracted),
• iD developer (Martin Raifer was contracted in 2021-09. Previous contracted developer: Quincy Morgan)
• near future: Senior Site reliability Engineer (to be employed),

Input was asked from OSMF members (Discussion: Seeking input on the personnel committee).

Committee composition
The composition of the committee (except the chairperson), has not been fornalised.

• Chairperson: Jean-Marc Liotier - elected in December 2020.
• Current: Guillaume Rischard (OSMF board), Jean-Marc Liotier (OSMF board), Mikel Maron (OSMF board)
• Previous: Guillaume Rischard and Joost Schouppe

The formation of the committee was initially discussed during the March 2020 board screen-to-screen meeting with a resulting action item to "Scope out boundaries on committee, safety measures, how to mitigate effects on volunteers, e.g. de-motivation".

Related board discussions
For discussions related to hiring/contracting for specific positions, please see the related section "Plans to hire a Senior Site Reliability Engineer and an iD developer" of this update or the Board minutes.

• 2020 Dec Elect officers (election of Jean-Marc Liotier as personnel committee chairperson and discussion about the committee)
• 2020 Oct
  • Personnel committee (Public board meeting - adoption of personnel committee charter)
  • Managing staff - what questions need to be resolved (board screen-to-screen meeting)
• 2020 Sep Personnel committee
• 2020 Mar Personnel committee (board screen-to-screen meeting)

Committees: Personnel committee | Special Committees: Diversity and Inclusion Special Committee | FOSS committee | Takeover committee | Other Foundation bodies: Microgrants committee | Software dispute resolution panel | Advisory Board

Special committees
Special committees are different from the committees above (defined in the Articles of Association 91-94) and cannot be considered to be a subgroup of them. See rules 6, 7 and 8 under section 9 of the Board rules of order.

Diversity and Inclusion Special Committee, Contact The Diversity and Inclusion Special Committee (DISC) was appointed by the OSMF Board in January 2020.

Minutes and actions
There were no minutes or published work between the period covered by this report (August 2020 to August 2021). The committee is marked as inactive on the OSM Foundation website, pending work by the LCCWG moderation subcommittee on mailing list behavior for the 2 mailing lists osmf-talk¹ and talk².

¹ osmf-talk is the mailing list for OpenStreetMap Foundation members (Become a member of the OpenStreetMap Foundation). You can read all past messages here.
² talk is a general mailing list for OpenStreetMap. Anyone can subscribe to it. You can read all past messages here.

In October 2020 there was a call by Mikel Maron (board member) to revitalise the committee.

Committees: Personnel committee | Special Committees: Diversity and Inclusion Special Committee | FOSS committee | Takeover committee | Other Foundation bodies: Microgrants committee | Software dispute resolution panel | Advisory Board

FOSS policy special committee Published - Report on free and non-free tools in the OSM Foundation (.pdf) and recommendations by the FOSS Policy special committee and recommendations - 2021-01 - Raw data

• Community discussion on the report (comments on the diary entry by Felix)
• Membership discussion on the osmf-talk mailing list: January thread and February thread (only OSMF members can post on the list - subscribe. Messages are available to all here).
• 2021-01 Notes from the discussion during the board meeting where the report was presented.

Committees: Personnel committee | Special Committees: Diversity and Inclusion Special Committee | FOSS committee | Takeover committee | Other Foundation bodies: Microgrants committee | Software dispute resolution panel | Advisory Board

Special committee on takeover protection Composition and remit

The board on July 28 2021 appointed Andy Allan and Michael Collinson to the special committee on takeover protection. The committee's remit is to recruit additional members and investigate, then recommend to the Board, possible remedies to any potential threat of a hostile takeover of the OpenStreetMap Foundation. The remit includes but is not limited to specific attention to paid voting as mandated by the Foundation membership at the 2020 annual general meeting.

Board discussions related to takeover protections:

• 2021 Apr 30, Apr 09, Feb: Takeover protection (including Updating the conflict of interest policy?) (board screen-to-screen meeting)
• 2020 Sep 24, Sep 24. Members: How have all the new active contributors affected the takeover risk/approach?

In addition to the board discussions on takeover protection, the Membership Working Group:

• in 2020 created and implemented the Active Contributor Membership program and
• is working on membership prerequisites
  

...both also being considered as additional measures for takeover protection.

Committees: Personnel committee | Special Committees: Diversity and Inclusion Special Committee | FOSS committee | Takeover committee | Other Foundation bodies: Microgrants committee | Software dispute resolution panel | Advisory Board

Other OSM Foundation bodies
The Microgrants committee, while having the word "committee" in its name, was not created as a committee defined in the Articles of Association 91-94, and thus is listed under "other Foundation bodies".

Microgrants committee Completed - Trial run of Microgrants

The Microgrants committee members were selected by the OSMF board to oversee the trial round of the Microgrants program (Duration: October 2020 - October 2021). You can read more about the trial run of the program in the section "Nearly completed - Funded work on 12 projects via the trial round of Microgrants".

Final report by the Microgrants committee

• Final report (file type: .odt, file size: 29 KB) and
• presentation by Hanna Krüger (.pdf, 53 KB, 8 pages) during the September board meeting.

Timeline
2021

• Sep Presentation of final report during September board meeting
• Jul Microgrants - what's next?

2020

• Feb Call for microgrants committee members.
• Mar 5 selected committee members from 13 applications.
• Apr Call for microgrant applications, Board update.
• Jun Selection of 2 observers out of 4 applicants, report, Board update.
• Jul Announcements of 12 selected microgrant proposals.
• Aug Microgrants tracking and reporting status.
• ep Conflicts of Interest disclosure.

Timeline with more details here.

Committees: Personnel committee | Special Committees: Diversity and Inclusion Special Committee | FOSS committee | Takeover committee | Other Foundation bodies: Microgrants committee | Software dispute resolution panel | Advisory Board

Software Dispute Resolution Panel for iD editor Mandate, terms of office, composition, conflicts of interest, transparency, evaluation

The OSMF Board decided in August 2020 to create a Software Dispute Resolution Panel to deal with disputes over changes to the iD editor. The full proposal can be found here. The community consultation thread is here, and a digest of that consultation can be found here. Working Groups were asked to submit nominations and the Board appointed the following five persons (from a total of 7 nominations) to the first Panel in January 2021:

• Richard Fairhurst
• David Morais Ferreira
• Wille Marcel
• Minh Nguyen
• Ilya Zverev

Mandate
The panel has the following mandate:
Initially, the Panel will deal solely with disputes over changes to the iD editor. If subsequently developers of other OSM-related software wish to use the Panel, they may request inclusion in the Panel’s remit. Opting into cooperation with the Panel is voluntary and will not, for example, factor into OSMF decisions related to funding.

Once a software product has been included in the Panel’s remit, the Panel shall be the venue for resolving disputes over that software without exception, that cannot otherwise be resolved in the everyday discussion and governance of the project. Developers may request dispute resolution at any time. Members of the community may, after having made their issues known to the developers and working through their processes in good faith, request dispute resolution from the Panel. The Panel may decline to handle any requests where community discussion on the issue is still in progress, or requests that it deems abusive, repetitive, frivolous or spurious. Members may appeal to the OSMF board if they consider a resolution process was unjustly declined.

The Panel is empowered to enlist assistance of subject-matter experts to study and resolve disputes, such as tagging presets. The Panel will examine all sides of any dispute and render a judgment. For tagging-related features, the Panel will advise against controversial presets or validation rules which are not based on sound and settled best practice. The panel will look at existing documentation, any recent community votes, usage numbers, and past discussions, and may convoke subject-matter experts. By having requested inclusion in the Panel’s remit, developers agree in advance to be bound by the Panel’s decisions.

Term of office

The term of office for members of the Panel shall be two years, except that in the first year of operation, two of the members shall have a term of office of one year. In this manner each year either two or three members of the panel will potentially turn over, allowing for some overlap and institutional memory. Members may be reappointed up to two times, but must step down after a maximum of three terms in a row, and may be reappointed after a one-term break.

Composition, conflicts of interest

Members of the panel must have a background as volunteer contributors to the OpenStreetMap project. In appointing members of the Panel, the working groups and Board shall strive for Panel composition (membership) that reflects all interests of the OSM community writ large. Members must not participate in cases involving software products developed, whether fully or partially, by employees of the same organization. Conflict-of-interest rules comparable to those for the OSMF board and working groups shall apply to the panel.

Transparency

Panel decisions will be recorded on the OSMF website.

Evaluation

The decision to install the Panel will be evaluated by the Board and in public discussion among the Foundation’s members after one year.

For more information and future changes, please see the dedicated page on the OSM wiki.

Committees: Personnel committee | Special Committees: Diversity and Inclusion Special Committee | FOSS committee | Takeover committee | Other Foundation bodies: Microgrants committee | Software dispute resolution panel | Advisory Board

Advisory Board The Advisory Board members are separate from the OSMF board of directors - individuals are either representatives of Gold/Platinum Corporate Members of the OSMF, Local Chapter representatives or invited directly by the OSMF board of directors and they can be consulted by the OSMF board. Meetings of Advisory Board members with the OSMF board

Meetings are now open to observers and happen approximately every 3 months.

• 2021-08-10 The board had an online meeting with representatives of 7 Local Chapters and 2 Gold Corporate Members on the Advisory Board. The meeting was open to observers (6 guests).
  • Microgrants update
  • Attribution Guidelines
  • Board session during State of the Map 2021 conference
  • Update on hiring of Senior Site Reliability Engineer
  • Update on hiring an ID developer
  • Engineering Working Group restart update
  • Strategic plan outline
  • Publication of the Advisory Board mailing list archive
  • 2021 Annual General Meeting: date set
  • Promoting gender diversity - Local Chapter question
  • Joining the board
  • Advisory_Board/Minutes/2021-08-10#Joining_the_board
• 2021-05-25 The board had an online meeting with representatives of Local Chapters and Gold Corporate Members on the Advisory Board. The meeting was open to observers.
  • State of the Map Program (SotM) Committee: How is the program committee determined.3F ensure Oceania is more active for future SotMs
  • OSM Special Interest Group: How OSGeo Oceania is supporting OSM
  • Update on hiring of Senior Site Reliability Engineer
  • iD Maintainance Plan post Quincy leaving
  • "Takeover Protection" threat models
• 2021-02-24 The board had an online meeting with representatives of 10 Local Chapters and 1 Gold Corporate Member on the Advisory Board.
  • Report on 2021 OSMF community survey
  • Board to share themes & plans from the 2021-02 Board Screen-to-Screen meeting
  • Roundtable update: 2021 plans from local chapters and companies?
  • Delegating some microgrant decision-making to Local Chapters
  • Shared platforms and services: what do Local Chapters need? How much can OSMF provide/co-ordinate/fund?
• 2020-10-09 The board had an online meeting with three of the six Corporate Members of the Advisory Board.
  • Attribution guidelines
  • Strategic plan creation
• 2020-10-05 The board had an online meeting with 4 Local Chapter representatives of the Advisory Board. (one of the representatives was from a local chapter that had been accepted but not signed the agreement yet).
• Overview of communications

Internal

Board - Transparency Board transparency discussion during the October 2020 screen-to-screen board meeting.

Board - Capacity and sustainability Board capacity and sustainability discussion during the October 2020 screen-to-screen board meeting.

Board - Delegate to Open Source Initiative OSMF is an affiliate member of the Open Source Initiative (OSI).

Decision to re-appoint Tobias Knerr as the OSMF delegate to the Open Source Initiative.

Board - Blackout period on voting on circular resolutions from December 20th to January 10th Decision to impose a blackout period on voting on circular resolutions from December 20th to January 10th.

Circulars usually follow a board discussion by mail (except the circulars on fee waiver application due to financial hardship), and are basically a show of hands. The duration of the voting is usually set to seven days.

Board members who might be away during the holidays will not have the chance to ask others to give an issue another thought before voting, or provide their point of view during the internal discussion. Therefore, it has been suggested to have a black-out period for non-urgent circulars during the holidays.

Related board discussions: 2018-12, 2019-12

Board - Not approved update to the Board Conflict of Interest policy Read about the rationale and the result of the vote.

Board - Apology about not disclosure of Conflicts of Interest An apology to OSMF members was issued by board members Mikel Maron and Joost Schouppe regarding conflicts of interest in the awarding of microgrants in 2020, as both were closely associated with successful grantees.

Related: Board Conflict of Interest Policy.

Board - Closed sessions of public board meetings The OSMF board currently has monthly public videomeetings (open to observers) and monthly board chats (not open to observers) - all are listed here.

The following closed sessions took place during the past year:

• 2021-07-30 Update on iD maintainer hiring process
• 2021-03-26 User suspension appeal (Related question from guest during board meeting)
• 2021-01-29 Software dispute resolution panel
• 2020-10-22 Discussing the suggested new contract for Dorothea, as worked out by TimeLessTime

Board - Reminders for formal requirements for circulars and conflict of interest cases Board members were reminded of the following:

Circulars (about circulars)

• Minimum duration of voting on circulars is 1 week, the duration can't be 1-3 days (can be extended to 2 weeks by request) - (7.2 on board rules of order).
• The content of the circular and links are public by default (7.6 on board rules of order).
• The title and the content must make clear what is approved and what happens when a circular fails.
• Comments on the circulars on Loomio are made public.

Conflict of interest

• Any board member with a conflict of interest during a circular/voting must declare it by clearly stating or writing that it exists - Board Conflict of Interest Policy.

Board - Presentations from Local Chapters, communities and community members during board meetings

Local Chapters presentations

• 2020-08 FOSSGIS presentation [Germany], (slides: .pdf, 94 KB, 8 pages)
• 2020-10 FLOSSK presentation [Kosovo], (slides: .pdf, 2.42 MB, 10 pages)
• 2020-11 OSM Ireland
• 2021-01 OSM UK presentation (slides: .pdf, 560 KB, 12 pages)

Presentations of communities that are not a Local Chapter yet

• OpenStreetMap Philippines

Notes from community members' presentations

• Sarah Hoffmann
• Jochen Topf

In 2020 the board started hourly discussions with Corporate Member representatives on the Advisory Board and inviting Local Chapter representatives on the Advisory Board to give 10' presentations during public board meetings. A year later, during the 2021-04 board meeting, delegation of the Local Chapter presentation scheduling was suggested by the Secretary (Amanda McCann), who was previously solely responsible for that. Mikel Maron and Eugene Alvin Villar offered to help with organisation.

Related:
Two of the local chapters presented their activities on blog.openstreetmap.org:

• 2021-06 Blogpost: Activities of Local OSM Chapter in Slovakia
  • IT Attività del ramo locale di OSM in Slovacchia
  • ES Actividades del capítulo local de OSM en Eslovaquia
• 2021-06 Blogpost: Projects of the Czech OSM community (projects of the whole community, the local chapter is considered as the legal organisation)
  • CS Projekty české komunity OSM
  • ES Proyectos de la comunidad OSM checa

Board - Granted signing authority to Licensing Working Group for academic use requests The Licensing Working Group (LWG) receives frequent requests from academics to use OSM derived figures in academic papers. The requests are not going beyond what is already granted through the license, but publishers, such as PLOS, frequently require explicit approval. This is pretty standard, and in line with our mission of use of open data. The board has granted:

• to the Licensing Working Group members signing authority for academic use requests such as this example of a permission form from PLOS,
• to Dorothea the ability to execute with the Secretary's signature on the forms.

Previously only Board members could sign such documents.

Board - Created default policy on Conflicts of Interest for Working Groups In December 2020, the Board adopted a default policy for Working Groups (WGs) in the OpenStreetMap Foundation, to be used if the working group doesn't adopt its own. The board Conflicts of Interest Policy is here (adopted 2020-05).

Some of the Working Groups have already their own conflict of interest policy:

• Communication Working Group (uploaded 2020-Nov, based on the board one)
• Data Working Group - Conflict of Interest Policy (uploaded 2019-Jun)

Related board discussions: Sep (mid-month board chat - not open to observers), Oct (screen-to-screen), Nov, Dec

Working Groups, Committees and other bodies - Nextcloud instance with OnlyOffice online suite for internal use The FOSS Policy Special Committee at the request of a working group and individual board members, asked cloud68.co to set up the Open Source collaboration suite Nextcloud with OnlyOffice for a testing period.

OnlyOffice provides collaboration tools for documents, calendars, and forms. According to the committee the tool was well received and it provides a fundamental pillar according to the FOSS Policy to offer Open Source alternatives for an inclusive community. It also fulfills the obligations of the OSMF to comply better with the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). After the end of the rest period, the FOSS Policy Special Committee recommended to the board to contract two years of the tool and evaluate afterwards the adaption and use, which was approved.

Related section of the report: "FOSS policy special committee".

Committees - Non-board members can sit on OSMF Committees (approved during 2020 Annual General Meeting) The OSMF's Articles of Association allow the Board to create “committees” to do things, but they can only have board members on them. This will not change the fact that most OSMF work happens in the volunteer Working Groups. The board thinks that there is probably some Foundation (or board) work that could be done by committees.

The Board asked the OSMF members to vote during 2020 Annual General Meeting so that they can create committees which can have OSMF (regular) members and associate members on it. The board mentioned that they will insist on at least one Board member on each committee, and require that the powerful position of “chair” be held by a Board member. The Board will still have to create these committees and decide what, if any, powers and duties they would have. The vote was approved by the membership.

Financial updates

The 2021 report by the Treasurer will be available by 11 December 2021 and linked from this page.

Closed - OSMF's Wise account was closed Wise (formerly Transferwise) is a financial technology company (not a bank) that the OSMF used to receive/send some payments. (Transfer)Wise decided to terminate its business relationship with OSMF. After a long search, we opened new accounts with Bank of Ireland. If you have previously set-up a recurring bank transfer for either your membership fee or for donations using our Transferwise accounts, please use one of our accounts listed here. We still have a bank account with Triodos, but we don't use it for all transactions, as it has high fees.

Completed - New bank accounts with Bank of Ireland There are various ways to donate or pay your membership.

If you have set-up a recurring order with your bank in the past, please note that we have new bank accounts.

Completed - Fund-raising for hiring a Senior Site Reliability Engineer, an iD developer and core infrastructure projects OSMF has contacted Corporate Members and other organisations, in order to raise funds for hiring a Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SSRE), an iD Developer and projects related to core infrastructure.

iD: On August 2020 the budget for iD development was set to 130,000 USD and OSMF committed 10-20K USD from existing funds. Quincy Morgan was initially contracted for the iD developer position, who now wishes to pass the torch on iD development, for personal reasons. The board has a promising candidate for the iD position.

SSRE: A 130K GBP budget was set for all expenses linked to the SSRE position was approved on August 2020. The board has selected the person the SSRE position, but they have not started working yet.

Projects related to core infrastructure
The board funded work on the following projects used in core infrastructure: Nominatim, osm2pgsql, Potlatch. (see the related section "2020-08 Approved funding of projects used in core infrastructure (Nominatim, osm2pgsql, Potlatch)").

Related board discussions:

• 2020-10 OSMF fundraising where are we this year: are we done for 2020? What is fundraising process against 2021 budget? discussion during board screen-to-screen meeting.
• 2020-08 Funding and hiring for Site Reliability Engineering position, where a budget of 130K USD for all expenses linked to the SSRE position was approved.

Treasurer's monthly reports during the past year

• 2021 Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, May (mid-month board chat), Jun (mid-month board chat), Jul, Jul (mid-month board chat), Aug
• 2019 Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec

Discussions on management of financial risk, budgeting and fund-raising Discussion: Decide to what extent management of financial risk should be formalized - and how to implement that during 2021-02 screen-to screen meeting.

Discussion: Institutionalising budgeting and fund-raising processes during 2021-02 screen-to screen meeting.

Operations Working Group: spending plan for 2022

Operations Working Group: spending plan for the year starting from 2022Q2. It will form the basis for a budget when a budget request is received from the OSMF Board. Published on July 2021.

Suggested - Operating Reserve Policy Jean-Marc Liotier (OSMF Board) after getting elected started a discussion on osmf-talk¹ about formalising the running of the OSMF operating reserves.

There was a related board discussion in February 2021 about deciding to what extent management of financial risk should be formalized - and how to implement that.

¹ osmf-talk is the mailing list for OpenStreetMap Foundation members (Join the Foundation). All past messages are available here.

Pending - 2021 budget

• 2020-10 2021 Budget: review budget draft, and what do we need to finish and approve? discussion during board screen-to-screen meeting.
• 2020-09 Budget progress (mid-month board chat)

2021-05 Approved payment of 100 Euros per hour to the Treasurer Financial issues

OSMF after January 2021 was using:

• Wise (formerly Transferwise), a financial technology company (not a bank) for some transactions,
• PayPal for memberships/donations and
• Triodos, a normal bank but with high fees, so not used for all the OSMF transactions.

Around March 2021, Wise informed us that it would close the OSMF account and sometime after that, the PayPal OSMF account was not accessible as well. You can read about it in the Treasurer's reports during the monthly meetings, as well as the April 2021 board discussion.

The board has "authorised payment of 100 Euros per hour to the Treasurer, to resolve the current blockage of PayPal and TransferWise accounts, to be charged after the first four hours of work, which will be free. The Treasurer shall keep documentation on steps taken and report daily to the Board on progress made".

2021-01 Approved $5000-7000 for contractor to work on CiviCRM for the Membership Working Group The Membership Working Group (MWG) has asked a contractor to work on CiviCRM¹, which includes coding and sign-up process workflow adaptations for automatic verification of usernames, validation of edits for active contribution memberships, and simplified sign-up to osmf-talk.

Details and board decision: 2021/Res01 Membership Working Group CiviCRM work budget ($5000-7000)

¹CiviCRM is an open source, internationalised suite of computer software which the OpenStreetMap Foundation self-hosts and uses to manage the Foundation's membership database, send emails to OSMF members (such as Annual General Meeting announcements), as well as to manage registration to the annual, international State of the Map conference.

2021-01 Approved paying Aspiration Tech (Gunner) $2,000 to facilitate February 2021 screen to screen meeting Recent board screen-to-screen meetings are facilitated by Gunner (Aspiration Tech).

Details and board decision: 2021/Res02 Pay Aspiration Tech (Gunner) $2,000 to facilitate the February 2021 Screen to Screen meeting.

2020-08 Approved funding of projects used in core infrastructure (Nominatim, osm2pgsql, Potlatch)

The board funded work on the following projects used in core infrastructure:

• Osm2pgsql - Proposal by Jochen Topf - Report for project on Jochen's blog
• Nominatim - Proposal by Sarah Hoffmann - State of the Map 2021 presentation was the result of OSMF-funded work.
• Potlatch 2 - Proposal by Richard Fairhurst - Diary entry

Please see the message of the board on osmf-talk (mailing list for OSMF members) and the subsequent discussion. Funding of iD was discussed in a separate thread.

The proposals for osm2pgsql and Potlatch were originally submitted as Microgrant 2020 proposals (Potlatch 2 proposal, osm2pgsql proposal) but were not selected. The board approved to fund these projects directly, together with Nominatim and iD.

Related board discussions: 2020 Jul 16, Jul 30

Board decision: 2020/Res38 Funding of projects used in core infrastructure (Nominatim, osm2pgsql, Potlatch)

Contracts: 2021-04 BigBlueButton renewal contract The BigBlueButton (BBB) instance https://osmvideo.cloud68.co/ is used by the OSMF board, some working groups and community members for video meetings. Community members are welcome to create accounts and use it for OSM meetings.

OSMF has a contract with Cloud68 for the service and the board decided to sign up for the Medium plan (€99/month).

Board decision: 2021/Res17 BigBlueButton renewal contract

Contracts: 2021-04 Approve Dorothea's new contract Dorothea Kazazi is contracted by OSMF since 2016 to help the board and some of the volunteer working groups. New contract (* .odt file size: 1.07 MB)

Board decision: 2021/Res13 Approve Dorothea's new contract

Contracts: 2020-11 Authorize the Operations Working Group to sign with the commercial Content Delivery Network The board authorised the Operations Working Group to sign with Fastly for the tile Content Delivery Network, including the standard contractual clauses.

Contracts: 2020-09 Accept contract with Quincy Morgan Quincy Morgan was contracted by OSMF to work on iD. Contract (27 KB)

Board decision: 2020/Res42 Accept contract with Quincy Morgan

Other updates

2020 Chairperson's and Treasurer's reports

• OSMF Chairperson's Annual Report for 2020
• Treasurer’s report for 2020

The next reports will be available by 11 December 2021, and linked from this page..

2020 Annual General Meeting - The four resolutions which were approved by the OSMF membership Please see the links below for details about the changes and the reasoning behind each resolution.

• Allow non-board members to sit on OSMF Committees (special resolution)
• Amend OSMF Fee Schedule to allow Active Contributor Awardees to receive (regular) OSMF membership, rather than just associate membership
• Work on membership prerequisites
• Instruct the Board to investigate paid votes

Special resolutions (in this case only the first one) can change the Foundation's Articles of association.

Four new OSMF-hosted mailing lists

• 2021-07 Talk-sa - Saudi list - past messages
• 2020-11 Talk-it-lombardia OpenStreetMap Italy regional talk list for Lombardy - Lista regionale della Lombardia - past messages
• 2020-08 Talk-pacific - OpenStreetMap Pacific - past messages
• Talk-oceania (no messages at this time)

- Public mailing lists on lists.openstreetmap.org (excluding osmf-talk, as it is not public - only OSMF members can subscribe to it, thus it's not listed])
- Page for OSM mailing lists on the OSM wiki (it includes lists hosted by external parties)

Local Chapter related OSMF news

See Local Chapters overview.

Membership statistics as of September 11th, 2021

See Membership statistics.

2021 board election and Annual General Meeting

The 2021 Annual General Meeting will take place on December 11th, at 1600 UTC on IRC

The Foundation will have an Annual General Meeting on December 11th, at 1600 UTC on IRC.

There will be a board election, with at least 4 seats available. See how to become a board candidate (Español, Français, Galego, Polski)

More information can be found on the OSM wiki and the OSMF website.

How can I help the Foundation?

Become a Member^* (for free if you are an active OSM contributor or for £15 per year)
Help a Working Group
Become a Local Chapter
Become a Corporate Member
Donate

*
Information on voting for the 2021 board election: Please note that new members who join from 2021-09-12 to 2021-12-11 (annual general meeting of OSMF) are not eligible to vote at the 2021 board election, according to our Articles of Association. They can attend the annual general meeting and public board meetings and participate in discussions on osmf-talk, the mailing list for osmf-members (archive). They will be eligible to vote at the 2022 board elections, once they renew their memberships, if needed. Thanks for understanding.

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