Apologies: CJ
Present: Gareth, Robert, Stephen, Steve,
Chair: Gareth
Minutes: Gareth
Guest: None

Operations

Financial Report

Stephen circulated the financial update by email.

The accountant has advised that OSM UK needs to decide how much of the previous conference surplus will be committed to a future State of the Map Europe or similar conference. Money that is not committed may be taxable.

The board discussed whether the £12,000 previously earmarked for a future conference should be increased to account for inflation.

Stephen will confirm the financial position with Gregory. He will contact Louise after the summer holidays to discuss the tax position and agree how much should be passed forward. He will also check whether any sponsorship income was restricted to a particular purpose.

The board also discussed some of the issues with Panoramax reported by the French community. OSM UK remains interested in contributing towards a Panoramax instance that would benefit the UK. A decision is needed by the end of the summer holidays.

Membership Renewals

During April there was one new member and five membership renewals.

Mappa Mercia

The replacement Mappa Mercia website is available on GitHub Pages but still needs to be reviewed by Gareth.

If the site is satisfactory, the DNS will be switched to the new site and the old server will be shut down and deleted.

Gareth will review the site.

New Tile Server Setup

DNS was switched back to AWS because of instability on the Mythic Beasts VPS.

The Mythic Beasts server will instead be used as a staging tile server while the problems are investigated. It is now available as staging-tiles.

There was no update on LiDAR.

Steve has submitted a mod_tile pull request which addresses a memory leak. He needs assistance deploying it to the staging server so that members of the community can be invited to stress-test it.

Steve will arrange the deployment, with CJ assisting with the PostgreSQL configuration.

CiviCRM Scheduled Jobs

Mythic has updated CiviCRM.

Several errors are still being logged by scheduled jobs and need to be investigated. Some additional work may also be required on CiviCRM tags and email templates following the update.

Gareth will review the CiviCRM event log and investigate the remaining errors.

Co-operative Bank KYC

There has been no further communication from the Co-operative Bank concerning the Know Your Customer checks for the other directors.

Projects

2026 Q2 Quarterly Project: Addresses

The second quarterly project for 2026 concerns addresses.

CJ has identified a large number of address datasets and possible workflows. Robert has been investigating how some of these datasets can be used.

The board previously discussed producing a proof-of-concept UK address-only extract. Questions remain about the specification, including:

• What the final extract should contain.
• Whether inferred information should be included.
• Whether addresses should be attached to buildings, entrances or separate nodes.

Robert has not yet investigated the proposed address export.

He has tested Owen Boswarva’s council tax extracts in West Suffolk with reasonable success. However, there are enough inconsistencies in the source data that conflation probably cannot be accelerated beyond working through one postcode at a time.

There are approximately 1.7 million different UK postcodes. Taginfo UK currently reports approximately 752,000 unique postcode values in OpenStreetMap.

Robert will publish an outline of his address-conflation process and ask whether contributors would like datasets prepared for other counties.

Robert is also considering hosting an online session to demonstrate how he has worked with the council tax datasets. CJ would like this to include a discussion about possible conflation approaches.

Quarterly Project Selection

OSM UK received an email asking whether members were involved in selecting quarterly project topics.

The existing selection process was explained and a new community forum discussion was created to collect proposals for the third and fourth quarterly projects of 2026.

The board discussed whether a standard proposal template would make it easier for members to suggest and compare projects.

Gareth will cross-post the discussion to Talk-GB.

Future Events

Loughborough University Guest Lecture

Jez had offered to give a guest lecture at Loughborough University, but the university has not contacted him again.

Geograph AGM

Geograph is holding its AGM in Nottingham in June and had asked for an OpenStreetMap speaker.

Jerry was suggested but was unable to commit. Robert also posted the request on the community forum and shared it with the East Midlands meetup, but a speaker could not be found.

An invitation has been extended to David Martin from Geograph to attend a future OSM UK meeting when schedules permit.

Geomob London

Steve plans to attend Geomob London on 20 May.

AOB

NetUK

Steve reported that NetUK will take place in July and may provide an opportunity to showcase OpenStreetMap.

The board discussed whether there is a suitable OpenStreetMap presentation or proposal for the event. Steve will consider coordinating a presentation, potentially focusing on the use of OpenStreetMap for infrastructure mapping.