Per EWG’s request, I am now opening a 2-week public consultation to ask whether the OSM community has any issues to raise regarding this topic. You can answer either in this thread or in the previously linked issue at the EWG Bidding repository.
Well the very obvious issue is that you are asking the community to discuss this in a financial vacuum.
Not only is no price tag associated with the proposed activity, neither the EWG nor the OSMF have a published budget which could be used to actually fund it.
I’m sure there are lots of things that the community would find great to have in the abstract, but except if the EWG has invented an unlimited money making machine, spending more money in one place will take money away from another task. And you are not being transparent about what that would be.
192 hours at 14 GBP per hour would bring costs to 192*14 = 2688 GBP.
line for clarity. Maybe it also appear in summary at the beginning?
as mentioned in later section: I agree that if it can be spend for something better or it is better to keep funds as a reserve it would make sense to do so, and funding this one makes sense if it is better than alternatives. Including not spending funds at all.
The 2026 OSMF budget was approved at the public meeting last month (the minutes are still not finalized, but will be available here later this month: Board/Minutes/2026-01 - OpenStreetMap Foundation).
One of the lines approved for the EWG is “Various website work”, with £25k allocated for it. A similarly named budget line was approved in previous years, and the EWG has been putting in requests for bidding on this line at GitHub - osmfoundation/ewg_bidding.
However, in 2025, no bid was put in by the EWG, mostly because of the lack of time from its volunteers. That meant that the allocated 2025 budget for this line was unspent.
However, funding for website development has not stopped from the OSMF side, as our Core Software Development Facilitator and Core Software Engineering have been working to advance development of our website and core software, but this came from a different funding line, as it’s STF money. And, of course, for iD continuous development since 2021, again a different funding line.
As volunteers, time is limited, and the EWG has welcomed this proactive approach, which helps prevent this line from going unspent again during 2026. We still, however, need to decide how much of the line to spend in the proposal if it goes forward.
Thank you for raising this point here and for the proposal to tidy iD tagging’s repository.
At short term, it’s great to give some funding to a very time consuming work. I support it.
At medium and longer term, it would also be great to invest on a new process to save us not only funding but also time with shouldn’t-be-an-issue tasks.
It’s true some tagging require particular investigation to be implemented in editors. Other don’t.
Okay to fund the cleaning, but what will ensure us the issues list doesn’t become messy again?
It is all about financials (and staffing), you are not going to find somebody saying triaging issues and PRs is not a good thing including myself. Do I consider the situation with PRs and issues particularly dire for either project, not really, they are about what you would expect, but others might disagree.
But you would expect that the EWG has at least a rough idea of their own priorities and could use those to decide the issue assuming they have budget.
Just a reminder: the budget still hasn’t been published even though in the mean time there has been another public board meeting.
PS and off topic: wrt the last board meeting, organisations wanting to benefit from sticking official “OpenStreetMap” participation on their grant/project applications is nothing new. During my time and I believe later this has always been rejected as of literally no actual benefit to the OSMF and at odds with the structure of the project. Naturally if we now have under utilised employees that can be sent off to waste their time this might be viewed differently, but how would I know, see the missing budget.