Minutes for Meeting of November 12th, 2009

Next Meeting

November 25, 2009

Attendance

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

Regrets

• Diego Escalante
• 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

• Discussion about GUADEC 2010 bids. Plan to make an announcement soon.
• GNOME.Asia
  • GNOME.Asia needs $3,089.00 in addition to the funding they have raised to hold the event and maintain their travel budget. The board agreed to fund the $3,089 plus to also fund the stickers ($79) and the Press conference ($562) = $3,730 that were considered optional in their budget proposal.
  • Funding will come from $2,500 remaining in the budget for events and the rest will come from the surplus from the Boston Summit and other recent events.
  • Approved sending the money (the GNOME Foundation contribution and the money the the GNOME Foundation has collected for them so far) as soon as we have the transfer information.

• GNOME.Asia domain registrar change. Stormy will check director's email to verify the transfer from GoDaddy.com to Ghandi.net.

• Copyright assignment with Intel for clutter.
  • Vincent is working with Intel to determine what their lawyers are agreeable to doing.
• guifi.net is interested in participating with the GNOME community in a more formal way. The board agreed the advisory board is probably not the best forum for them to participate. Stormy agreed to work with Gil Forcada and the GNOME marketing list to help define how organizations like guifi.net should participate.
• Funding opportunity with NLnet: GNOME Marketing list was provided with information about the opportunity. Nobody has stepped up, though.

  • http://nlnet.nl/news/2009/20090801-call-en.html

• Code of Conduct improvements. Agreed Lucas' draft is okay. Will handle the issue of enhancing the Code of Conduct to reflect speakers separately.
• Advisory Board duties. Stormy sent a draft to the advisory board list and got no feedback. The board agreed it looks good. Vincent agreed to get this information on the GNOME website and to send an email to the foundation-list about it.
• The board agreed that the GNOME Foundation should hold an upcoming meeting more publicly via IRC. Diego will lead this.
• Researching the idea of the GNOME Foundation hosting free software services. Ongoing. Need to contact the involved parties.
• Richard Stallman is planning to send out an email soon to the foundation-list and gnome-women-list regarding his GCDS keynote.
• Need to find a new time for the meeting since the current time is not good for Srinivasa Ragavan. Stormy will set up a new Doodle meeting. Everyone: enter your times in Doodle, be flexible!
• The next meeting is scheduled for Thanksgiving in the U.S. Let's have the next meeting on Wednesday the 25th.

Action Items

Completed Actions

• 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.
• Germán - will get in contact with GUADEC organizers to clarify their bid.

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.

• 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 - 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. Lucas completed a draft currently under review.

• 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. Leaving this as an open item until the logs are available.
• Stormy - Should the GNOME Foundation buy a blanket LWN membership. Will bring it up with Jonathan Corbet next week.
• 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. Working with Max.
• 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 - 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.

• 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

• Diego - will work to organize an IRC Foundation meeting.

• Stormy - will check director's email to verify the transfer of GNOME.Asia from GoDaddy.com to Ghandi.net. (Done as of publishing time.)

• Stormy - will work with Gil Forcada from guifi.net and gnome-marketing to define the best way for organizations like guifi.net to participate in the GNOME community.
• Stormy - set up a new Doodle meeting survey to determine the best time for future meetings. (Done as of publishing time.)
• Vincent - follow up with Intel to determine what to do about copyright assignment for clutter.
• Vincent - Publish the new Advisory Board duties on the web and to send an email to the foundation-list to announce it.
• Everyone - provide available meeting times in Doodle after Stormy provides the survey. Be flexible!

Discussed on board-list

• Ongoing discussion regarding the bids for 2010 GUADEC.
• Review of the GNOME.Asia budget. The organizers requested additional funding from the GNOME Foundation to make the event as successful as possible.
• Approved sending Stormy Peters to the GNOME.Asia summit to give a talk.
• Discussion about GNOME.Asia domain being transferred to Gandi.net.
• Discussion to determine the status of the possible Largo hackfest.
• Approved a request in order to sponsor the airfare ($970 or ~€650) for Tobias Müller, a GNOME Foundation member, to attend as speaker to FOSS.in at Bangalore, India.
• Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier recommends that Larry Cafiero hold the U.S. GNOME Event Box. According to Joe, Larry is very active in promoting Linux, and is based on the West Coast so he can take the box to events that he is already attending.
• Discussion about formalizing the advisory board duties. Stormy wrote a draft which was reviewed before sending it to the advisory board list.
• Discussion about the GNOME Foundation hosting web services, such as Gobby and Tomboy/Snowy.
• Intel is interested in providing the clutter code to the GNOME. Currently they require all contributors to sign a copyright waiver, which is something that the GNOME Foundation does not normally require. Having discussion with Intel about what should be done.
• Discussion with Richard Stallman about the wording of his statement about his keynote at GCDS.
• The normal board meeting time does not work well anymore for Srinivasa Ragavan. Need to coordinate a new meeting time.