[Osmf-talk] February 27th Board Meeting
Allan Mustard
allan at mustard.net
Thu Feb 27 22:40:41 UTC 2020
Thanks for the comment. We will meet with the OWG and sysadmins at the
face-to-face meeting in London next month and learn from them what they
need aside from what was contained in the OWG's recently approved budget
request for 2020. As you should be aware, if you listened in to today's
meeting, the OWG proposed three budget options: low, medium, and high.
The board approved the high option, recognizing that the OWG's needs are
real and that support of its needs is one of our highest priorities.
You are spot on that the OWG needs more members. The current members
are overworked. I would ask that you volunteer anyway, given that
telecom also involves budgeting and hardware/software maintenance and
management--your skills would most likely be applicable. Then I would
ask you to help recruit some other new OWG members If you come to Cape
Town in July, I will buy you a beer for every new OWG member you
recruit. :-)
The Board will look at this ongoing problem, however, from a more global
perspective than merely slow servers--with respect to operating the
servers, has the OSM "do-ocracy" reached the outer boundaries of what a
"do-ocracy" can reasonably handle? We may need to examine other support
models. Some of them will be controversial, but OSM has clearly grown a
great deal since 2004, what worked 15 years ago may not necessarily be a
good model today, and we owe it to the community to brainstorm about
what to do about the impact of that growth on our ability to manage
infrastructure.
Regarding tile servers, the current debate is whether we should serve up
tiles at all. Based on the SWOT analysis and my (to date 32) conference
calls with various people in the OSM global community, there is a wide
variety of viewpoints: that we should not serve up tiles to anyone (the
"dog in a manger" approach), that we should serve unlimited tiles to all
comers (the "black hole for resources" approach), that we should serve
both raster and vector tiles, that we should serve raster but not vector
tiles, and vice versa, and everything in between. I anticipate a
vigorous debate about this across the OSM community before any decisions
are made. This is in any case on the Board's radar.
As for your comment that running the servers is "one of the few actual
responsibilities the Foundation has," I respectfully beg to differ. My
understanding of the Companies Act of 2006 and the Articles of
Association is that the Board bears other fiduciary responsibilities to
OSM and to the community, and you may rest assured that when it comes to
this board, its members take those fiduciary responsibilities very
seriously.
Thank you again for caring and writing.
cheers,
apm
On 2/27/2020 3:31 PM, Clifford Snow wrote:
> I listened in on today's Board meeting. I'd like to suggest going
> forward that the Board get regular status reports from the Operations
> Working Group. Lately tile have been slow to load, at least in the US.
> Grant Slater has been great about communicating with the community
> when problems arise.
>
> Since running the servers is one of the few actual responsibilities
> the Foundation has, it should be one of the key priorities. According
> to Grant, we need about 30% more capacity. OWG is also looking for
> more members to help. (I'd love to volunteer, but my background,
> telecommunications, mainly involved getting data between data centers
> and the user) Having the Board step up to insure our IT infrastructure
> is capable of meeting the needs of the user would be a welcome step.
>
> Sincerely,
> Clifford
>
> --
> @osm_washington
> www.snowandsnow.us <https://www.snowandsnow.us>
> OpenStreetMap: Maps with a human touch
>
> _______________________________________________
> osmf-talk mailing list
> osmf-talk at openstreetmap.org
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