Minutes for Meeting of August 6, 2009
Next Meeting
August 20, 2009
Attendance
- Behdad Esfahbod
- Brian Cameron
- Diego Escalante Urrelo
- Germán Póo-Caamaño
- Lucas Rocha
- Rosanna Yuen
- Srinivasa Ragavan
- Stormy Peters
- Vincent Untz
Minutes
Recurring Items
- Review past action items.
- Approve and make sure that minutes of last meeting were sent.
- Make sure to start up the gobby server for better note taking.
- Sysadmin hiring - waiting for funding.
- Update foundation.gnome.org website.
Old items
- None
New items
- GCDS press release is out, so we can now publish the minutes for the two previous meetings.
- ACTION - Brian to publish meeting minutes.
- Finalize and approve plans for OSiM.
- OSiM is the Open Source in Mobile conference which will be from September 15-16 in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
- The board approved paying for Dave Neary's hotel fees. Vincent will also attend, but his expenses will not be covered by the Foundation.
- Stormy compiled feedback from her discussions with advisory board members, and will send out a summary of this feedback to the foundation-list, with a small introduction. The document is currently in draft form and will be made public as soon as it is finished.
- ACTION - Stormy to email feedback from advisory board survey.
- Stormy will take care of making the GUADEC survey results public, with an introduction to highlight it was a survey and not a vote.
- ACTION - Stormy to make GUADEC survey results public.
- The Free Software Foundation invited the GNOME Foundation to do a joint outreach program to promote women in open source. The board is supportive, but we need to find volunteers to run the program.
- ACTION - Diego will send an email to the gnome-women mailing list and otherwise try to find people to help organize.
- The GNOME Foundation will do a joint FSF announcement to support diversity. The FSF is working on a first draft. This should not block the decision about whether we do a joint outreach program, as mentioned above.
- ACTION - Stormy to keep following up with FSF.
- The Foundation insurance agent recently asked the board if we would like to do automatic renewal. The board decided no.
- There was discussion about doing a Zeitgeist hackfest in Bolanzo. We received a budget from Daniel Siegel with proposed dates (November 9-12) and list of attendees. The board decided to pay for the event even if we do not find any sponsor.
- ACTION - Vincent will contact advisory board members to see if they will sponsor.
- Dave Neary sent the board a proposal to partner with the Mobile User Experience conference in London November 17-18th, www.userexperienceconference.com. This was approved.
- ACTION - Vincent will ask Dave if he can take responsibility for the GNOME parts and make sure someone from GNOME can attend, perhaps Paul Cooper.
- Discussion about printing the annual reports.
- ACTION - Lucas will look into the costs of printing the annual report and how many annual report copies should we print, and report back to the board. Lucas will also check with Rosanna to find out how many copies were printed and left over from last year's printing.
City of Largo hackfest update. Lucas had a meeting with Dave yesterday, and will send out the minutes from that meeting to the board tomorrow with the details. Wondering about whether one topic vs two topics would be best (gnome-shell & deployments are candidates). We can do both if all attendees are each on one topic. Else, we probably want to focus on gnome-shell since it is more urgent for the community.
- ACTION - Lucas to send out minutes from the Largo hackfest meeting.
- Discussion about doing next year's budget.
- ACTION - Lucas to work on budget since he is now vice-treasurer.
- Find a good time for the next meeting - For now we will keep the meeting at the same time. (Thursday, 17 UTC, and the board will check again in 2 months after Germán gets more free time)
Action Items
Completed Actions
- Brian - Publish past board minutes. Done.
- Brian - Find out status about GNOME.Asia Summit this year. There was an IRC meeting between the organizers in Vietnam, the organizers from last year's event in Beijing, Brian, and Stormy. Much of the preliminary details for arranging the event were discussed. They have three options for venues in Ho-Chi-Minh-City which will provide the space at no cost, but in exchange for making them a sponsor. Current proposed dates are November 20-22. They need to work on a budget, and to get the website updated. A follow-up meeting is planned.
- Lucas - City of Largo, Florida hackfest organization. Planning an IRC meeting next week and will let the board know when the IRC meeting will happen. The IRC meeting has happened, but Lucas still has an action to publish the minutes.
Lucas - Send KDE & GNOME board minutes to the KDE board to be reviewed before they are made public. The KDE board provided comments and the updated minutes were published by Brian.
- Stormy - Putting the 401k program for Foundation employees is still in process. Document reviewed by SFLC and signed. To be mailed tomorrow morning.
- Stormy - Setup Google Adwords. Done.
- Stormy - Compose the GCDS press release. Done, published by Vincent.
- Vincent - Check to make sure that gnome-legal is still alive since Luis is not going to be able to focus so much energy on this. Done: it is alive. Luis will review the list of subscribers.
- Vincent - Find people to help organize the next GUADEC. Done during GUADEC: Vincent pushed a few people.
Old Actions
Behdad - Tasked with scrubbing the GnuCash file so it can be made public. Still pending.
- Brian - Get information about what should be in an "Employee Handbook". Still pending.
- Brian - Since there was little interest on the foundation-list about getting international general liability and accident insurance, the board decided to not pursue getting such coverage at this time. Brian agreed to follow-up with the lawyers to find out what sort of text we should include in the travel subsidy agreement to ensure that people who receive subsidy understand that the Foundation is not providing coverage. An email was sent to the GNOME legal team, awaiting response.
Brian - Follow-up on legal-private@gnome.org to ensure that Luis' old items are being managed. An email was sent to the GNOME legal team, but waiting response.
- Review of charter and bylaws and work towards a new draft.
- Address GNOME logo trademark issues.
Should the Foundation endorse the Franklin Statement on Freedom and Network Services: http://autonomo.us/2008/07/franklin-street-statement/
- Diego - Contact the sysadmin team about account creation. Talk with Bruno about who needs accounts. Diego has done a lot work contacting people about this, and is close to completing this task, but is still pending.
- Germán - Put together a proposal for how to address board members who become inactive. Still pending.
- Germán - Take over J5's previous task to propose new obligations that people who receive travel subsidies should be asked to do in return.
- Germán - To send an apology email to the journalists from LWN and Ars Technic that we did not end up flying to GUADEC. Still pending, priority #1.
Lucas - Work with Andreas for the donation ruler. Try to put $15k in the ruler in "yellow" ($10k for Canonical, $5k for Google) to indicate that these funds are matching. http://www.gnome.org/friends/drive/
Lucas & Alberto - Set up a Euro bank account.
- Rosanna - Research the GNOME Guidestar website and update if necessary. Rosanna sent an update about the status of Guidestar, but work is still needed. Need to find someone to keep the website up-to-date.
- Rosanna - to send check to pay 401K setup fees.
Srini - Ping J5 for status about importing Paypal data into GnuCash. J5 was pinged, but no response yet.
- Srini - Put out call for GUADEC hosts. First check with Stormy what questions the bidders should answer so that we can take an informed choice. Draft completed, but still under review.
- Stormy - GNOME Foundation needs a CRM. Dave Neary agreed to set up one, he just needs to be told which one. Stormy will research over the next week.
- Stormy - Should the GNOME Foundation buy a blanket LWN membership. Very low priority. Will bring it up with Jonathan Corbet when they next meet.
- Stormy - Start discussion on marketing list for our plan for activities for next year, including raising fees.
- Stormy - Contact advisory board members about raising fees. Will do this after the discussion on the marketing list, probably next week.
- Vincent - Check with Luis about Franklin St.
- Vincent - Implement an automatic reminder email for meetings. Still waiting for the time of the bi-weekly meetings to be settled before doing this.
New Action Items
- Brian - To publish meeting minutes now that the GCDS press release is done.
- Diego - Will send an email to the gnome-women mailing list and otherwise try to find people to help organize.
- Lucas - Will look into the costs of printing the annual report and how many annual report copies should we print, and report back to the board. Lucas will also check with Rosanna to find out how many copies were printed and left over from last year's printing.
- Lucas - To send out minutes from the Largo hackfest meeting.
- Lucas - To work on next year's budget and annual report since he is now vice-treasurer.
- Stormy - To email feedback from advisory board interviews.
- Stormy - Will take care of making the GUADEC survey results public, with an intro to highlight it was a survey and not a vote.
- Stormy - To follow-up on the joint FSF announcement to support diversity.
- Vincent - Will contact advisory board members to see if they will sponsor the Zeitgeist hackfest in Bolanzo.
- Vincent - Will look into who the GNOME Foundation should send to the Mobile User Experience conference, perhaps Paul Cooper.
Discussed on board-list
- Stormy has found a volunteer to lead our customer case study effort.
- Further ongoing discussion about the best way to respond about the fact that some people at the GCDS were offended by Richard Stallman's keynote. The board is seeking advice from appropriate persons and waiting response.
- Got approval to publish the minutes of the GNOME/KDE boards meeting during GCDS.
- Open Source America went live: the GNOME Foundation is now a part of this effort.
- Rosanna succeeded in getting a non-profit rate in Paypal (charges are now 2.2% + $.30 instead of 2.9% + $.30)
- Forwarded a trademark infringement issue to the legal team.
- Discussed sponsorship options for hackfests with various potential sponsors.
- Got updates about the GUADEC 2008 finances.
- Published the GCDS press release.
- Received invitation to a Mexican event, the Festival Internacional de Software Libre 2009 Chiapas Mexico. Contacted Sandino Flores and Federico Mena-Quintero to see if they can represent GNOME.
- Discussed partnership with Mobile User Experience Conference, thanks to Dave Neary.
Private Items
- N/A