Working Group Minutes/EWG 2021-10-04

From OpenStreetMap Foundation

Formal proceedings

Minutes

Robert has taken notes, Roland has written the minutes.

We would prefer assistance from Dorothea for the notes. We can ask the board to hold a vote on that matter.

New members

No discussion has taken place during the meeting. The discussion shall take place on the mailing list.

Further advertisement

Shall we focus already and asking directly people we want to have on board? We still will encourage applications by the working group website.

We do not continue to actively solicit members for the moment being. Active reach-out has probably reached the people that it's going to reach. Let's revisit in a couple of months.

There is no preferably or particularly useful size we should target for the working group. It will depend on what we end up doing, i.e. projects. Roland asks if we want a minimum number of people present for a vote. We don't have any number currently in mind. Tobias notes that when it comes to grants and things we will need a more formal process for voting.

If people aren't doing work/participating/attending meetings, they should step down.

People to ask directly

Let's remove recruitment of new members as a formal topic from the agenda. The ideas from the last minutes are still valid, but asking people from the mentioned groups personally is more prospective than asking the groups as complete groups.

Yash came to us independent of Google Summer of Code.

The video link is intended to be long time stable. As the meetings are public, it can be published in the wiki.

Meeting every 2 weeks works. It's going to be impossible to find a time that is convenient for everyone, thus we stay with the current schedule.

No objections to moving up the meeting an hour in response to daylight saving times.

Tobias has added note to Engineering Working Group#Join us about process for membership applications

Member statements

No tight coordination is necessary because the various post go to different channels anyway.

Actual business

Ideas for initial projects

We will need to generate ideas for project proposals - could ask either general community or specific groups. E.g. what software issues are impeding their work.

We haven't contacted the Data Working Group. This would make sense for Roland to do as the chair. We should ask them for their list of projects.

Budget

Paul mentions that we need a budget before we do a call for proposals. - How are we going to allocate the money? - What areas do we target?

We do have a prospective budget that we can go off of for now. In order to go to the board we need to have an overall ask. Not just percentages.

The board won't do budgetary approvals apart from approving the general budget. We do need to decide how to approve applications, process for dealing with them. The report on Microgrants might be a place to look. Let's leave this discussion for procedures until it comes out.

Tobias points out that in order to go to the board with an ask we'll need an idea of what we plan to do in terms of projects. We should try to come up with a list of projects over the next couple of weeks.

Prepare Call for Proposals?

We should put the call out on the blog and mailing list. We can then reference the blog post elsewhere.

Let's collect a text over the next 2 weeks so we can present a draft at the next meeting.

Tobias: we should also look at generating ideas of our own.

Top Ten Tasks

Tobias: most of the top ten tasks are too large.

Adam: the welcoming new users task is already being worked on.

Idea: Pad for idea brainstorming

Any other business

Roland asks if we need a formal second chair should he be unable to attend? No, we can just sort that out in the meeting.

There is a bug in planet-dump-ng. Johan contacted Paul about getting this fixed.

This software is only useful is you're running an instance of OSM. It is mission critical. Brandon notes that in some ways this is a fix that would fall to the Engineering Working Group. This might be higher priority than we're able to deal with as we're currently setting up.

There have not been any dumps in the last week or so due to this bug. So this is very pressing. Since this is a pressing issue this might be something for the OWG.

Next meeting

Next meeting on Monday 2021-10-18 19:00 UTC.