Working Group Minutes/DWG 2019 05 22

From OpenStreetMap Foundation

DWG Meeting on Wednesday 22nd May 2019 at 19:00 UTC

DWG members present

  • Michał Brozozowski (RicoElectrico)
  • Vladimir Marshinin (mavl)
  • Paul Norman (pnorman)
  • Nelson A. De Oliveira (naoliv)
  • Tom Pfeifer (Polarbear-osm)
  • Frederik Ramm (woodpeck) (minutes)
  • Andy Townsend (SomeoneElse) (chairing)
  • midgard
  • +3 more lurking

Workload and Members

Paul Norman is to leave DWG due to his new workplace being likely to give rise to conflicts of interest. More active DWG members are required to cope with the number of tickets and issues (currently 15 open issues and 35 OTRS tickets). We discuss practical issues holding back our most recent new members from realising their full potential, and agree on a shortlist of 8 potential candidates we will reach out to. (Action items: Frederik, Andy, Vladimir.) We decide not to "advertise" for members publicly at this point. All DWG members are invited to add new potential members to our internal wiki page.

In order to make our expecations and criteria more transparent, we will polish the existing drafts of "DWG conflict of interest policy" and "DWG membership policy", send them round email for last comments, and then publish them in the DWG area of the OSMF wiki. (Action item: Frederik.)

The "issues" reporting on the web site and OTRS are still lacking proper integration which makes our work more difficult. We will typically create OTRS tickets only for those issues that have a bigger impact or lead to conversation.

Mails via the DMCA form are to be channeled into OTRS (Action: Paul).

Offensive User Names

Currently, it is not possible for us to change a user name (needs admin intervention), and as long as the account is not fully disabled, the user can always change their user name. We decide to add "blocked users should not be able to change their user name" to our feature wishlist.

There is one user, formerly called "Vigilante", whose user name is now a Macedonian slur translating as "Death to Albanians". This user is already blocked, and votes are taken for a permanent ban and subsequent renaming of this user. The result is unanimous, and by counting Guillaume's previously declared vote reaches the threshold set in our ban policy ("half of the DWG have expressed an opinion and three quarters of those who have expressed an opinion are in favour"). We will inform the admins of this decision (Action item: Andy).

The Rochester Vandal

A persistent vandal in Rochester, NY has created hundreds of accounts with sometimes offensive user names, skirting IP blocks by using different IP numbers, and performed Pokemon vandalism. All his edits are reverted and accounts blocked in a timely manner. We discuss referring him to the police but decide not to, since his activity seems to be petering out. There is one item about e-mail checks on our wishlist that would make it more difficult for this vandal to create new accounts but it has not yet been implemented.

Redaction Bot

The software is successfully run by both Nelson and Vladimir who can redact changesets if necessary. The "redaction bot" leaves less collateral damage when reverting older changesets than a normal revert might.

Reporting / Transparency

The Q1/2019 report is being prepared. (Action item: Nelson.) We discuss that we should perhaps highlight select individual cases in an anonymised form within the quarterly report to make the "unwritten rules" more visible.

OTRS auto-reply

Some people seem to be unable to send emails to data@osmfoundation.org (a Google-managed target address). We decide to investigate sending automatic "your ticket has been received" replies from OTRS to assure people that the email has worked. It is not yet clear if the feature can and should be enabled. (Action item: Frederik.)

End / Next meeting

The meeting ends at 21:45 UTC. The next meeting will likely be in late July but has not been scheduled yet.