Minutes for Meeting of October 29th, 2009

Next Meeting

November 12, 2009

Attendance

Behdad Esfahbod
Brian Cameron
Diego Escalante
Germán Póo-Caamaño
Lucas Rocha
Rosanna Yuen
Stormy Peters
Vincent Untz

Regrets

Srinivasa Ragavan

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.
System administrator hiring - waiting for funding.
Update foundation.gnome.org website.

Old items

None

New items

The NLnet grant that Shane Coughlan applied for on October 1st relating to GNOME Usability was not approved. We can try again in December. We should think about what additional projects the GNOME Foundation should consider applying for this grant. NLnet has a special interest in areas of intersections between Free Software and Open Standards, and especially anything to do with ODF. So perhaps we could put together other proposals that are more clearly aligned with their areas of interest.
The GNOME Foundation sent a request on November 3rd to Richard Stallman to make a statement about his keynote at the GCDS conference.
Discussed the need to set up more formal guidelines for future speakers at GNOME events to better communicate what is expected from speakers. Vincent will touch base with Matthew Garrett and the community to determine how the GNOME Code of Conduct needs to be updated to reflect speakers.
There has been a recent complaint that a GNOME community member had a blog post which does not follow the GNOME Code of Conduct. The board is discussing how to addressing this particular issue. More generally, we need to make sure that GNOME Foundation members sign the GNOME Code of Conduct, and perhaps make it a requirement for new members to sign. Also need to update the GNOME blog and planet so that it is more clear that people should follow the GNOME Code of Conduct.
Approved paying the GStreamer Summer of Code costs out of the money the GNOME Foundation is holding for the GStreamer project.
Approved the budget ($3,631) for DíaGNOME @ EncuentroLinux
Did the bi-annual review of Stormy's progress, and since it is the end of the fiscal year, the board calculated her bonus. In the past two quarters she received a discretionary bonus of $1,800 for a yearly total of $3,150. For fund raising, she received a yearly bonus of $11,500. This is a total yearly bonus of $14,650.

Action Items

Completed Actions

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. The GNOME legal team provided suggested text in mid-October. Now Germán is working to actually add the text to the document.
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. Ongoing.
Diego - Contact the sysadmin team about account creation. Talk with Bruno about who needs accounts.
Diego - Keep track of FISOL invitation (Chiapas, Mexico) - take over from Germán.
Vincent - Will contact advisory board members to see if they will sponsor upcoming events.

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 - 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. Ongoing.
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.
Germán - will get in contact with GUADEC organizers to clarify their bid.
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 & 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.
Srini - Send out the GUADEC call-for-hosts, and the next meeting with be an IRC meeting to discuss Done. Srini has the meeting logs, but not yet published in the wiki. Yet to format and upload and announce the meeting logs.
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 - 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 - Create a more public process for suggesting and deciding upon topics for future advisory board meetings. Conversations in progress.
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. This is blocking on a release team action that Lucas has ("push for a "web services" set of libraries") http://autonomo.us/2008/07/franklin-street-statement/

New Action Items

Brian - Touch base with the GNOME Marketing list to discuss other opportunities for seeking NLnet grants.
Brian - Follow up with Richard Stallman about his statement about GCDS.
Lucas - Work to ensure that Foundation members sign the GNOME Code of Conduct, and make it a requirement that new Foundation members need to sign this.
Vincent - Touch base with Matthew Garrett and with the GNOME community to determine how the GNOME Code of Conduct needs to be enhanced to reflect speakers.
Vincent - Update the blog and planet to highlight that people are expected to sign and follow the GNOME Code of Conduct.

Discussed on board-list

Preparation and review of the GNOME Q3 report.
Discussion about the budget ($3,631) for DíaGNOME @ EncuentroLinux, which was approved at the meeting.
Request from Christian Schaller to pay for the GStreamer-related Google Summer of Code costs. The GNOME Foundation holds money for the GStreamer project, and the board agreed to pay these costs out of their money.
Discussion about Stormy's bi-annual review. Feedback was collected from all the board members to share with her, and discussion about her bonus.
Discussion about asking Richard Stallman to send a statement about his keynote at GCDS. The request to Richard went through a few rounds of review to make sure before sending it on November 3rd.
Discussion about a recent complaint that a GNOME community member had a blog post which does not follow the GNOME Code of Conduct.
Discussion about making the GNOME bugzilla data available for requests to do academic research on the data.