Minutes for Meeting of October 1st, 2009
Next Meeting
October 15, 2009
Attendance
- Brian Cameron
- Germán Póo-Caamaño
- Rosanna Yuen
- Srinivasa Ragavan
- Stormy Peters
- Vincent Untz
Regrets
- Behdad Esfahbod
- Diego Escalante
- Lucas Rocha
Absent
- None.
Minutes
Recurring Items
- Review past action items.
- Did each person with action items send their status reports to the board list before the meeting?
- Approve and make sure that minutes of last meeting were published to foundation-announce and foundation-list.
- 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
- Agreed that, moving forward, each person with action items will send status reports to the board list before the meeting.
- Meeting minutes for last meeting were published to foundation-announce and foundation-list.
- Canonical is sponsoring the Zeitgeist Hackfest for €2000
- Still talking with possible sponsors for upcoming events.
- Boston Summit. Much has already been decided on the mailing list.
- GNOME.Asia - progressing smoothly. Website is up, and now actively seeking sponsors. Call for Participation is ready.
- nlnet Grant - The GNOME Foundation is seeking a grant from nlnet to improve GNOME Usability and improve the HIG.
- The October advisory board meeting will be about finances, and provide an opportunity to get wider review for the proposed budget.
- GNOME.Asia moving along well.
Action Items
Completed Actions
Old Actions
Behdad - Tasked with scrubbing the GnuCash file so it can be made public. Behdad sent a scrubbed GnuCash file to Rosanna to check, but 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 on August 10th, and they have been pinged on September 6th and 17th.
- Brian - Look into organizing a hackfest on "how to make it easier for more people to do some usability magic". Discussions on usability list just starting, and making progress with seeking nlnet grant.
- 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.
- Diego - Keep track of FISOL invitation (Chiapas, Mexico), take over from Germán. In response, they have the space covered (I understand that with a recommendation from Federico). They are eager to work together next year to have more GNOME people. Diego will add this to his calendar and keep in touch with our contact (Freddy Arguello).
- Germán - Put together a proposal for how to address board members who become inactive. Still pending.
- Germán - Take over John Palmieri's previous task to propose new obligations that people who receive travel subsidies should be asked to do in return.
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. Waiting for Paul to get the general marketing message behind the ruler before publishing it. Paul was pinged on September 17th about it. http://www.gnome.org/friends/drive/
- Lucas - Put together budget for Boston Summit.
Lucas & Alberto - Set up a Euro bank account. Still in progress.
- Paul - Will provide an overview of hiring a sysadmin and the benefits that has for the overall GNOME community.
- 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 John Palmieri for status about importing Paypal data into GnuCash. John Palmieri was pinged, but no response yet.
- 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. UPDATE: The system administration team is now looking into this, but waiting on a requirements document from the marketing team. Done. Stormy recommended CiviCRM and it is on system administration team TODO list.
- 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 - Contact advisory board members about raising fees. Waiting on a waterfall financial model (done) and a 2010 budget before sending this out. Almost done - ready to go if everyone has given their feedback on the finances. Done.
- Stormy - To propose a case study on how the improvements we made with bugzilla made a difference as input for the marketing materials for why the Foundation needs to hire a system administrator.
- Stormy - Send the Texas Instruments Zoom 2 netbooks to the Boston Summit (perhaps to John Palmieri or Rosanna). John Palmieri will not be at the Boston Summit. Who is the best person to send to? Done. Sent to Jonathan Blandford who will take them to the Boston Summit.
- Stormy - Create a more public process for suggesting and deciding upon topics for future advisory board meetings. Conversations in progress.
Stormy & Zana - Have discussion on marketing list to determine how to best replace the U.S. event box. Done. (No feedback. Moving forward with what we used to have.)
- Vincent - Will contact advisory board members to see if they will sponsor upcoming events. Some advisory board members have been contacted, but work still ongoing.
- Vincent - Will look into who the GNOME Foundation should send to the Mobile User Experience conference, perhaps Paul Cooper. Vincent mailed Paul and is waiting for an answer.
Vincent & Lucas - Determine how to announce the endorsement of Franklin Street Statement on Freedom and Network Services: http://autonomo.us/2008/07/franklin-street-statement/
New Action Items
- Brian - Send email to the board list to schedule a special meeting for Stormy's review. Previously we were doing reviews quarterly, but moving forward these reviews will be done bi-annually.
- Srini - Send out the GUADEC call-for-hosts, and the next meeting with be an IRC meeting to discuss Done. Sri has the meeting logs, but not yet published in the wiki. Yet to format and upload and announce the meeting logs.
Discussed on board-list
- Final review of the proposed GNOME Foundation budget for next year. Plans to share it with the advisory board at the next meeting.
- Shane Martin Coughlan is working with the GNOME Foundation to apply for a grant for GNOME usability projects, such as improving the HIG.
- The GUADEC Planning IRC meeting went well, and information will be published soon.
At the Boston Summit, Colin Walters is handling Coffee and will also make sure the doors are unlocked in the morning. Jon McCann will be handling openings and closings and Adam Jackson will make sure the Beer Summit goes well.
- The FSF is discussing doing a grant for the Women's Outreach program with us.
- The board agreed to Stormy taking 4 days off to participate at an event in Sweden on her own time.
- The Travel Policy is available online at:
- Received a proposal for a WebKitGTK+ hackfest in A Coruña during November, and asked for a budget.
- Received a proposal for funding GNOME events in Brasil from Izabel Cerqueira Valverde, and asked for a budget.
- Discussion about asking RMS for a response to those offended at his keynote at GCDS.
- Discussing sending Bryen M Yunashko to either the Boston Summit or CSUN in relation to GNOME accessibility.
- Negotiating moving the GNOME.Asia domain to a different server.
- Starting to discuss possible co-location conferences in 2011.