Working Group Minutes/EWG 2021-11-15

This minutes are a draft.

Formal proceedings

We set as a policy for the minutes to avoid names unless strictly necessary. The rationale is that we do not want that some superficial and potentially outdated by years minutes suddenly become the first search entry for a persons name.

The sole exception to this is the list of attendees and apologies in the minutes.

Attendees

- Adam Hoyle - Tobias Knerr - Robert Koeze - Paul Norman - Roland Olbricht - Rob Savoye

Guest: Guillaume Rischard for the budget topic.

(no apologies)

Actual business

Where to send a frontend developer?

We have someone who is interested in helping to develop OSM frontend software. He/She/* has contacted us to join the EWG, but he/she/* is without any OSM experience. There are also every now and then similar mails to osm-talk where developers very broadly ask where they could help.

Which concrete venues can we offer to such people in general, and this applicant in particular?

The Top Ten Tasks list and the developers Wiki page are as a starting point OK. There also has been a mentor program of the OSMF, but its status is unclear (please check!).

For students and people in comparable situations, the Google Summer of Code has proven to be a good starting point. Although not all people stay, some people made bonds with OSM there.

A task for us ourselves can be to reach out to developers whom they search as co-developers.

For the applicant in particular, Robert offers to reach out for further contact and direct him/her/* to the HOT job listings. Independently of this, we encourage him/her/* to re-apply in about a year with more experience in OSM.

Budget

The board is basically OK with the budget. We explain to Guillaume that the 50k are a wild guess and actual numbers can easily be much lower. It is unclear whether we ever see bids on any tender. Some job offerings of the OSMF have failed in the recent past for exactly that reason. The board is OK with that, it is well-affordable for the OSMF. If we figure out to need much more or much less, the board encourages us to simply tell them.

The DWG list

We want to identify good candidates for first projects, but we have no experience and not even an established process to accomplish anything. Thus we need projects that are doable easily enough. We decided last time that everybody rates 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.

The final candidates are: - 3.1 Hide note comments and potentially some related if this one is a success. - 7.2 Self deletion facility - 7.1 Personal "killfile"

Our ideas

There is in the end only one idea that is actionable: Pedestrian and bike routing on areas.

The Unicode issue is a good candidate for a bunch of MapRoulette challenges to deal with Mojibake encoded in well-formed UTF8 in the database, but we would like to get an informed opinion by Brandon first. See also Brandon's blog post.

The OSM sandbox is mostly covered by the Dockerfile in the openstreetmap repository. That the osm-test database does no work is a known issue.

For the data model improvements there are only two people whom we trust to be able to do that. We shall first ask whether any of the two is aviable for the job, and most likely none of the two.

The moderator tool improvements are superseded by the DWG list.

Adam has ideas how to evaluate and track progress. In addition, we can ask the microgrants committee how to do the bid.

Any other business

Topic for next time: review Microgrants framework.

We should use our budget to pay for Dorothea's assistance.

Next meeting: 2021-11-29