The board is requiring that the OWG cut its budget from the 2024 proposal. Although we're still waiting to see what this means in terms of actual opex, capex and cash flow numbers, we already know that this will involve significant cuts. The OWG budget already had a cash flow about half of the previous two years budgets and we had already deferred as many capital expendutures as possible to bring the capex down by 75% over our 2023 request and by 80% of our 2022 request. This means there's nothing "optional" to trim and everything that can be deferred has been.
The only way to get any meaningful cuts to cash flow and opex is to go to operating a single primary site while maintaining current power usage or slightly higher.
Putting aside the technical details, this means loss of redundancy and cutting back some services. We would still maintain redundancy within a single site so if a single machine fails we don't have primary services go down. The savings given here are very rough as additional research and modeling is required
We've identified a few options for the necessary service cuts:
- Shutting off standard tile layer access for all apps and for any site other than openstreetmap.org. This would save about €5k in opex and the freed up machines could be used for other services or shut down and sold to save power. Third-parties which currently use osm.org (e.g. websites, apps, and desktop editors like JOSM) could use commercial tile providers.
- Shutting off nominatim access for all apps and for any site other than openstreetmap.org. This would have the same impact as shutting off the standard tile layer, except for geocoding.
- Terminate Discourse translations, en.osm.town hosting, and GPS tile layer. This would save about €2.5k, and users could use browser translation plugins, other general-purpose mastodon hosts, or the GPX API
- Trim high disk space usage features like GPS uploads. This would save disk space on DB servers and allow us to push back upgrades by several years. This would save only €1.5k in 2024, but could save €15k in 2025 by removing the need to replace aging servers.
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We are taking it as given that the OSMF will no longer be providing note taking or admin assistance foundation-wide which will trim the OWG budget a bit. It will also mean we may stop regularly publishing minutes and will get work.
We would, of course, be abandoning any hope of options 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, and parts of 3.4 and 4.5 of the OSMF Strategic Plan.
Please keep any political discussion about why we need to make cuts or additional fundraising to a different topic. I want to focus on what cuts the community would object to the least, as the people in charge of the budget have said we are required to make cuts.