Minutes for Meeting of Jan. 2nd, 2008

Next Meeting

2008, Jan. 16rd

Attendance

Members of current board and board-elect attending.

• Behdad Esfahbod
• Anne Oestergard
• John Palmieri
• Vincent Untz
• Jeff Waugh
• Brian Cameron
• Lucas Rocha

Missing

• Quim Gil
• Glynn Foster

Regrets

• Luis Villa

Minutes

Conference Calls

The new Board needs to find a way to proceed with the conference calls for the meetings. So far, Sun has been provinding the infrastructure.

• ACTION: Brian to check with Sun about conference calls infra for Board meetings

Summer Event in Peru

Diego Escalante requested sponsorship from GNOME Foundation to bring latin american GNOME contributors to a summer FLOSS event in Peru. The Board has aproved a $3000,00 sponsor for this event. Diego is also discussing with GNOME Chile about a Latin American tour of some key GNOME contributors from Europe and/or US. A request related to that will come as soon as they have more concrete information.

• ACTION: Vincent to send a confirmation to Diego about this sponsorship request

Sysadmin Hiring

Vincent sent a message to sysadmins asking their opinion before going on with the hiring process. Jeff thinks that, because of lack of structure and leadership in the sysadmin group, it's really hard to get a collective opinion from them, only individual opinions. For Jeff, we should guess the best we can and go ahead and start the hiring process. Vincent suggested to wait some more time before going ahead.

Annual Report 2007

Lucas said the design work starts on January 15th. The content is mostly done. The idea is to release the Annual Report in the beginning of February. The printing service to be used is still undefined. Anne suggested asking Advisory Board members about potential printing services. Jeff suggested asking Andreas Nilsson about local printing services in Sweden (as they might be cheaper than in Australia).

• ACTION: Lucas to ask Andreas Nilsson about printing services in Sweden
• ACTION: Lucas to send a message to AB members about printing services

GTK+ Hackfest

Behdad said everything is going fine. He should follow up with Mathias Hasselmann to find and book the venue.

Planet GNOME Maintainership

Jeff talked with Lucas and Vincent about co-maintaining Planet GNOME. The guidelines are being worked out by Jeff. Andreas and Tuomas worked on the guidelines for the hackergotchis, which is good.

GNOME @ FOSDEM

FOSDEM is in good hands. Some people from GNOME-NL are taking care of the GNOME booth. A call for talks is about to be sent by Christophe Fergeau.

• ACTION: Vincent to check with KDE guys about meeting them at FOSDEM to talk about joint activities

Bostom Summit 2008

Jeff said is good time to make the booking of the venue. The expected day is Columbus Day holiday's weekend.

• ACTION: John to talk with Jonathan about the Summit venue booking

GUADEC 2008

GUADEC dates were officially announced. Lucas said it would be nice to have a press release for GUADEC in Istambul.

There is a proposal to use a proprietary system for handling GUADEC 2008 registrations and billing. John said he only feels it's ok if we publish a major plan to use free software in the future editions of the conference. It seems that None of the current FLOSS systems help on the billing part. Jeff said there's no option for FLOSS systems for what we want. In his opinion, the current Drupal at guadec.org is badly deployed which makes things more complicated. Jeff suggests to host the guadec.org website in a GNOME's Wordpress MU and make it the conference web frontend. On the GUADEC financial handling side, Anne suggests to take all payments to GNOME Foundation's office in Boston and then transfer to the GUADEC organizers as they need. Anne suggests to ask Zana to contact our Bank to know our options. John thinks any solution we choose now should be reusable for next editins. The payment nd agenda sustems would be separate from cms. LUCAS TO SUGGEST BARIS TO MAKE SOME FLIERS TO PROMOTE GUADEC.

• ACTION: John to contact Zana about financial handling between GNOME Foundation and GUADEC organizers
• ACTION: John to ask Baris about their timeline around the website, registration, and billing systems
• ACTION: Behdad to work on the initial version of the GUADEC press release

Membership Committee situation

According to Lucas, the MC is not in a good situation. For some reason, the new volunteers are not processing the membership applications and handling daily requests.

• ACTION: Lucas to check with new volunteers if they need any help
• ACTION: Jeff to make sure the new MC volunteers have their accounts, in case this is blocking their work

Thanks to parting directors

This was the last meeting with the 2007 board. Big thanks for the parting directors Glynn, Quim and Anne for the nice work on the board.

Positions within the Board

Lucas suggested to start discussing the positions in the mailing list and then wrap it up in the next Board meeting.