Working Group Minutes/EWG 2021-11-01

From OpenStreetMap Foundation

These notes are a draft.

Formal proceedings

Minutes written by Roland.

New members

Should EWG Membership application logistics be handled by someone other than the chair to reduce the workload on Roland? Robert volunteers. This includes to handle the currently running application.

Actual business

Budget

The OSMF's treasurer Guillame Rischard wants to discuss our budget proposal with us, but cannot attend to meeting. The topic is postponed.

Reply from the DWG

Last time we decided to each rate as much as possible of the tasks proposed by the DWG (see eMail) whether they are low hanging fruits, complex, or whether the needed effort is unknown.

Unfortunately, we have not managed to complete our estimations. Only Tobias has made an analysis. As not all members have the documents from the mails, they should be made available again. As we have not yet got apporoval for publication and there is significant personal data, we make them available only for the EWG members so far.


A second question has been for each inidivdual issue whether the maintainers would merge a pull request for that at all. Given that the maintainers may have slow anser times themselves, we should have a mitigation strategy for this.

Our ideas

See the pad for idea brainstorming.

Again, we do not have coast estimats yet. We also need to identify and ask the maintainers here for each issue whether they would merge a pull request at all.

Brandon has meanwhile blogged about the Unicode issue, and this has sparked some interesting discussion. There are indeed cases of Mojibake, even on a smaller scale, around the globe. Adam reminds of the LCCW meeting on Nov 6th to discuss the issue. Shall get back on the agenda when Brandon can participate the next time.

Prepare Call for Proposals?

postponed

Microgrants

This takes the major part of the meeting. One thing we agree that we should do is to have a scoring system ahead of assessing the proposals. Once the scoring is made, it shall be presented for comments to the community at large.

A more controversial point is part of the oversight strategy: One position is that we only want people who are fully capable of communicating with the community without our help. The other position is that communication is difficult, and we should rather be prepared to help with communication than to narrow down the selection to really the outstanding communicators.

Another idea is bind the payment to blog posts on the milestones. Not clear whether many contractors are capable to write compelling blog posts.

Links for the Microgrants: Policy Framework, Hiring Framework not designed for microgrants, but sharing some of the challenges.

Some more bullet points:

  • Visibility of the projects after selection.
  • Digest of procgress made from version control comments.
  • Do something ourselves. Keep CWG on loop. Not everybody is a communicator.
  • Plan for assisting. Meetup for all the projects together to encourage proper documenting.
  • Help in communicating is ok, but contractors should be familiar with how the community works.

Any other business

Next meeting: 2021-11-15