Minutes for Meeting of Mar. 26th, 2008

Note on meeting of 3/12

Because of a variety of travel and other conflicts, no meeting was held on Mar. 12th.

Next Meeting

April 9th

Attendance

• Brian
• J5
• Vincent

Regrets

• Behdad
• Luis

Missing

• Jeff
• Lucas

Asia.Summit

Three coordinators of the GNOME.Asia Summit attending this meeting

• Emily Chen

• Will LaShell

• Alfred Peng

Minutes

• Since this meeting did not meet quorum, little was discussed aside from talking about the GNOME.Asia Summit. The "Old Items" section is pretty much a copy of the previous week's minutes with some updates to reflect what was discussed on the list.

GNOME.Asia Summit

• Sun Microsystems has become a sponsor, providing $10,000. They also have $2,000 from other sources.
• The organizers are considering reducing the length of the summit from 3 days to 2 days to reduce costs.
• The organizers have done some work to further reduce their minimum budget. Previously it was $24,515, with $16,056 being for 3-day rental at the Tsinghua Science Park venue. They have talked with 2 other venues. For a 2-day event, Tsing-Hua Science Park will charge $9,127, UNIS Center will charge $4,901, and Tsing-Hua University will charge $1,408. However Tsing-Hua University cannot guarantee the space will be available. The organizers plan to provide us with an updated budget by the end of the week.
• They are expecting 300 people to attend. However, the largest room available at Tsing-Hua University would only hold 200 people, which might limit the number of people who could attend. It was mentioned that it's important, from a cultural point of view, that there's enough room for everyone willing to attend.
• The target for attendance is students, so it's nice to be near a university.
• The organizers would like the Foundation to help with funding, and will provide the board with numbers by the end of the week.
• The organizers would like the Board to assist them in contacting potential sponsors. If the organizers sent us brochures, would the board be willing to forward them to sponsors we have worked with in the past? Or should we provide them with a list of contacts and let them contact the potential sponsors directly?
• The organizers would like advice about how to time the release of the call for sponsors, call for participants, and other aspects of coordinating the event. It was suggested the Behdad or Baris would be good to talk with the GNOME.Asia Summit organizers to help them know how to do this.
• They would like help to better advertise for the GNOME.Asia event on the GNOME website. Vincent will help with this once the GNOME.Asia website is up.

Discussed on board-list

* GTK+ Hackfest went well. Behdad said that they might need the $5,000-6,000 originally allocated for the event from foundation money. The $20,000 that was raised paid for the venue and travels, but not hospitality and other on-the-spot charges.

* Lucas put together a proposal on how to boost Friends of GNOME. He has a new mug design, and a plan to allow people to pay money over time via PayPal. Some discussion about how to further promote Friends of GNOME by better advertising it on the websites, and talking with the marketing team about how to better market the program.

* Discussion about providing PayPal service for Libre Graphics Meeting under the same conditions as we provide for GIMP (i.e. 5% cut that goes to the Foundation)

* Lengthy discussion about Epiphany and Mozilla relations. The board and/or release team may need to provide some direction in terms of ensuring how the new Epiphany+WebKit will meet requirements to be included in future GNOME releases. The Epiphany team wants the board to do a press release, though there was some disagreement whether this was appropriate. The Epiphany team was asked to send an email to d-d-l or gtk-devel-list to explain their plans before a decision is made.

* Discussion about providing GNOME certification for non-GNOME programs that are approved for use with GNOME for programs like firefox and thunderbird.

* Zana provided administrative updates on finances.

* Agreement to pay customs/import tax for the machines that Google will give to GNOME.