Following the announcement of our selected jurors, I am pleased to also launch the Engineering Microgrants program for this year. As in previous years, the process will involve collecting your project ideas, scoring them, and then selecting winners with the help of our newly appointed jury. To ensure transparency and fairness, there will be multiple rounds of review, including checks on both the scoring and the feasibility of proposed ideas and their implementation.
For 2025, we have a total budget of £30,000 available for microgrants. This amount may be distributed across several projects. The EWG keeps the £6,000 limit; The EWG encourages the jurors to forward project ideas above that limit to EWG back and to the Foundation to find other means of funding when possible.
In terms of timing; with summer approaching, we invite you to start submitting your ideas using the designated GitHub template we have prepared so we can finalize and announce the winner/s mid-July. All proposals should be submitted via the GitHub templates, which are designed to ensure transparency and to help prevent conflicts of interest. There is always a possibility that the jurors may request additional or new details about the proposed idea, or they might modify or change the template. However, you will all be kept informed of any such developments.
If you have any questions or comments before submitting your ideas, we encourage you to reach out to the jurors and Engineering Working Group by replying to this post. The jurors may also contact some applicants for clarification, either before or after the scoring process, to help ensure a fair and thorough evaluation.
We strongly encourage everyone with impactful ideas-whether individuals or groups-to participate. Even if your proposal is not selected this time, it may be considered for future rounds of microgrants.
I suspect that you’re not being entirely serious here, but do we have any idea how long that would last (for non-iD usage of the replacement for Bing imagery)?
Well all the non-JOSM uses are likely not an issue as they fit in the Bing free tier now and I believe Azure continues to have one.* As mentioned elsewhere it is really just a question of providing personal data to MS and liability if something goes wrong (with other words the money would potentially not even be spent).
With other words JOSM would have to provide the numbers as they obviously are the ones with non-trivial use.
* naturally the other issue is the missing agreement on using Azure maps for OSM.
Hey Salim, thanks for launching this year’s program and for all the work behind it!
A few quick questions:
If a project improves core OSM tools like the website or iD, is there any support to help coordinate or prioritize integration with maintainers?
For standalone tools, is there any support for hosting if the project is lightweight and useful to the community? Or should hosting be included in the proposal?
Has there been any recent list or thread collecting promising but non-implemented project ideas? I have a few I might submit, and others I’d be happy to share in case they’re useful to others.
you can propose getting a support or coordinating it indeed, we are open for all options, yet I advise that you place all options and scenarios in your proposal.
answered
I will need to get back to you on that, yet the previous projects and ideas are stored.
A quick, not tongue in cheek, observation: the issue with this is that somebody would have to actually operate any service that would continue on after the project completed, not just obtain funds for hosting.
That would require the EWG reaching an agreement with the OWG best before even awarding funds/hw support to a project.
Sorry, I’m not sure if I understood correctly here. In the first message, you said that the jury wants to announce the winners by mid-july. So the deadline is July 15th to announce the winners or to submit the idea?
(just to be clear, I was initially asking for submission deadline )
Applicants must make a good-faith effort to avoid conflicts of interest to ensure their proposal is judged on the merits of their application.
this probably should be stronger and outright exclude people like me (who were for example on OSMF board where it was set up, even if they were not pushing for it) and people involved in running it
