Minutes for Meeting of January 21st, 2010

Next Meeting

February 4th, 2010

Also note that there will be a general Foundation IRC meeting on January 30th

• When: Saturday, January 30th, 16:00 UTC
• Where: irc.gnome.org, #foundation

Attending

• Behdad Esfahbod
• Brian Cameron
• Diego Escalante Urrelo
• Rosanna Yuen
• Srinivasa Ragavan
• Stormy Peters
• Vincent Untz

Regrets

• Germán Póo-Caamaño
• Lucas Rocha

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.

New items

• Dave Neary sent a proposal to the GNOME Foundation board that he will organize and coordinate a 2 day professional training session before GUADEC - in the same location as the conference, ideally. This will include defining the syllabus, finding & paying trainers from within the GNOME community and also giving part of the training.

  • The board agreed to move forward, but we still need to work out details such as how the profits will be split, how much of a discount attendees who sign up for the training will receive towards GUADEC, etc.
• FOSS Nigeria 2010 (April 23-25 in Kano, Nigeria)

  • http://fossnigeria.org/

  • The board agreed to pay travel costs associated with sending Luis de Bethencourt to the event. This will be funded from the general travel budget.
  • If others have an interest in also participating, please let the GNOME Foundation know.
• The Libre Graphics Meeting 2010 requested assistance with their Pledgie campaign.

  • http://pledgie.com/campaigns/2926

  • The GNOME Foundation has done this in previous years. This involves hosting their money in the GNOME Foundation bank account, and not charging a fee.
  • ACTION - Rosanna will provide a list of stipulations that they need to agree to in order to ensure that there is not too much work.
  • Assuming that they are agreeable to these stipulations, the board agrees to provide this service to LGM.
  • ACTION - Vincent will send an email to the LGM organizers to let them know that we will work with them.
• Budget for Accessibility Hackfest
  • Received a request from the GNOME travel committee for $12,000, and they say that they could possibly reduce this to $8,000. The board agrees to provide the $10,000 provided by Mozilla for a11y purposes to fund this event, and to let the organizers know if they can further reduce costs to $8,000 that would be best.
  • ACTION - Diego will respond to the a11y hackfest organizers and let them know.
• Update about Annual Report for 2009
  • Paul Culter recently sent an update to the board.
  • ACTION - Brian will suggest to Paul that there be more discussion on GNOME marketing list to find volunteers.
  • Paul proposes that the Annual Report will have the following sections. Help is needed. Feedback about the proposed list of articles would be helpful, and volunteers are needed to help write some sections of the report. The proposed list of articles includes:
    • Letter from the ED (Stormy - confirmed)
    • A Year in Review (Paul - edited version of the quarterly reports by team)
    • GUADEC (Tentative - Need Author)
    • Boston Summit Review (Jason Clinton)
    • User Groups (Tentative)
    • History of the Pants (Paul)
    • GNOME Foundation in 2009 (May be duplication between this and Stormy's introduction)
    • Sponsored community activities (Year of the hackfest)
    • Finances (TBD, email sent to Germán)
    • Did You Know? (A collection of little facts that can be sprinkled through the report)
• Foundation and CEO Goals Document
  • The goals document was sent to the foundation-list, so the board is now awaiting feedback.
• Status about the need to acquire hardware for the GNOME servers hosted at Red Hat.
  • Stormy sent an email to the advisory board.
  • ACTION - Stormy will set up a "Wish List" Wiki page to highlight things that the GNOME community needs help with funding with a link from Friends of GNOME.
• Usability and Marketing hackfest update.
  • Need to seek sponsorship.
  • ACTION - Stormy will send an email to the Advisory Board asking for sponsors for the Usability hackfest.
  • The Marketing hackfest is targeting March. Paul Cutler and Jason Clinton are organizing. The board will wait until the hackfest is more defined before helping with seeking sponsors.
• Employee Handbook
  • Draft is mostly done and under review.
  • ACTION - Rosanna will review the "Records Retention" and "Employee Reimbursement" policies in the Employee Handbook and to provide feedback about whether we should adopt the proposed policies from Karen, or whether we should modify them to reflect what we currently do. For example, does the Records Retention Policy match what we do, or do we need to change our process to match the proposed policy?
• Planning for an upcoming IRC board meeting
  • Announced on January 21st.

Action Items

Completed Actions

• Brian - Will suggest to Paul Cutler that there be more discussion on GNOME marketing list and desktop-devel-list to find volunteers to help with the Annual Report. This is a new action item that was done quickly after the meeting.

• Brian - Look into organizing a hackfest on "how to make it easier for more people to do some usability magic". The Usability hackfest is well underway. See http://live.gnome.org/UsabilityProject/London2010

• Diego - Will work to organize an IRC Foundation meeting.
• Diego - Start discussion about how to improve how money is allocated for hackfests.
• Diego - Will migrate the proposal for how hackfests are organized to the Wiki for more public review.
• Lucas - Will ping Paul for the 2009 Annual Report.
• Srini - Task taken over from Stormy. Create a more public process for suggesting and deciding upon topics for future advisory board meetings.
• Stormy - Will put together another revision of the goals proposal.
• Vincent - Add the link to the Usability hackfest to the main page.
• Vincent - Will send an email to the Libre Graphics Meeting organizers to let them know that we will help them, although we need to work on details. This is a new action item that was done quickly after the meeting.

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". Draft under review.
• Brian - Develop trademark usage forms for common use cases. James Vasile from legal is working with Brian on this.
• Diego - Taken over from 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. Not many replies from the community. Diego will draft something more concrete and ask for comments.
• Germán - Put together a proposal for how to address board members who become inactive. Still pending.
• 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, tarted discussion on foundation list, got a lot comments and feedback, and summarized the discussion points. The board seems to be still interested in proposing Code of Conduct as an official guideline for Foundation members as a way have a more clear message about the values of the GNOME community. Lucas will send an updated official proposal to members this week.
• Lucas - Ensure the work for updating the donation ruler design gets done. Lucas pinged Paul, Vinicius and Andreas on January 26th to come up with a simple plan to get the ruler online this week.

• Lucas & Alberto - Set up a Euro bank account. Still in progress. Lucas contacted Chema from GNOME Hispano for advice but still no reply.

• 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 - Will check who received the 2008 Annual Report and send an email to board-list letting everybody know who received them.
• Rosanna - Will send an email to Behdad describing the extra scripts that she needs.

• 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. This is done. Srini has the meeting logs, but these are not yet published in the wiki. Yet to format and upload and announce the meeting logs. Leaving this as an open action item until the logs are available.
• 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. Max sent a write-up. Working with the GNOME Journal folks to turn it into a GNOME Journal article (tentatively have an author).
• Stormy - To schedule a meeting with companies that do consulting work with GNOME to start discussions on how we can help (how can we work together). Sent email. Got a couple of positive responses. Will follow up with others and schedule meeting.
• Stormy - To follow up with the Advisory Board about acquiring a second machine. Email sent, but no response yet.
• 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. Ongoing. First draft is available, need to push this. Vincent sent a ping to put this on the wiki for public review.
• Vincent - Update the blog and planet to highlight that people are expected to sign and follow the GNOME Code of Conduct. Waiting for Lucas' action on Code of Conduct.
• Vincent - Follow-up with Intel to determine what to do about copyright assignment for clutter. Waiting for an official update from Intel. Ongoing
• Vincent - Will start discussion with the advisory board about co-locating in 2011 after the announcement. This is a topic for the next advisory board meeting in January, so discussion will be started a week before the meeting. Discussion with the advisory board happened during the last meeting. Survey ready to be announced, and it should bootstrap some discussion on foundation-list. We hopefully can take a decision before the first meeting of February.
• Vincent - Check records of organizations with existing contracts to use the GNOME trademark. Ongoing.
• Vincent - Follow up with Michael Meeks and Bradley Kuhn to see if there is an interest in defining a policy the release team can follow to know whether a project with a copyright assignment requirement can be accepted or not. What sorts of copyright assignments are acceptable? A first draft was received on the 20th. Need to take a closer look and get feedback from Michael.

• 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/

  • Status: No change. Will propose to not make any big announcement until we have something to announce with it (like web services we might propose), but just make it our policy until then.

New Action Items

• Diego - Will respond to the a11y hackfest organizers know they will have a budget of $10,000 for travel sponsorship.
• Rosanna - Will provide a list of stipulations that the Libre Graphics Meeting organizers need to agree to in order to ensure that there is not too much work.
• Rosanna - Will review the "Records Retention" and "Employee Reimbursement" policies in the Employee Handbook and to provide feedback about whether we should adopt the proposed policies from Karen Sandler, or whether we should modify them to reflect what we currently do. For example, does the Records Retention Policy match what we do, or do we need to change our process to match the proposed policy?
• Stormy - Will set up a "Wish List" Wiki page to highlight things that the GNOME community needs help with funding with a link from Friends of GNOME.
• Stormy - Will send an email to the Advisory Board asking for sponsors for the Usability hackfest.
• Stormy - Will send a draft of of the Free Software statement to Bradley for review, with Vincent cc'ed.

Discussed on the mailing list

• Preparing the 2009 Q4 GNOME Quarterly Report.
• All GCDS sponsors have now paid and KDE is transferring a small amount to the GNOME Foundation to balance the books. (We collected a lot of the sponsorship fees directly so we already have most of our money.)
• The GNOME Foundation Google Grants application was approved on January 13th.
• An Advisory Board meeting was held on Tuesday, January 12th. Topics included discussing whether to have another co-located Desktop conference with the KDE Akademy community in 2011 and a review of the GNOME Foundation and CEO Goals document that Stormy prepared.
• Final review of the GNOME Foundation and CEO Goals document before it was sent to foundation-list for public discussion of January 20th.

• The http://live.gnome.org/AdvisoryBoard/FutureTopics Wiki page has been set up so that people in the GNOME community can propose ideas for upcoming Advisory Board meetings.

• Vincent is organizing a "Co-location survey" to get more feedback from the GNOME community about the idea.
• Final planning for the a11y hackfest travel budget.

• Dave Neary sent a proposal to the GNOME Foundation board that he will organise and co-ordinate a 2 day professional training session before GUADEC - in the same location as the conference, ideally. This will include defining the syllabus, finding & paying trainers from within the GNOME community & also giving part of the training.

• The GNOME Foundation received a request from Alexandre Prokoudine for assistance with the Libre Graphics Meeting 2010 Pledgie campaign.

  • http://pledgie.com/campaigns/2926

• Discussion about having the board use the GNOME Foundation CRM.
• Mustapha Abubakar, the organiser of FOSS Nigeria 2010 asked the GNOME Foundation to participate. Luis de Bethencourt will represent GNOME at this event.

  • http://fossnigeria.org/

  • If others have an interest in also participating, please let the GNOME Foundation know.
• Juan José Sánchez Penas contacted the GNOME Foundation with the final WebKitGTK+ hackfest travel costs to start the invoice process.
• Arun Raghavan from FOSS.IN submitted a request for the GNOME Foundation to provide USD 254.00 to cover the costs associated with "GNOME Day" at the FOSS.IN event.
• Ongoing discussion about how to improve planning for hackfests.
• Ongoing review of the draft GNOME Foundation "Employee Handbook".

• Discussed contacting the startup company "AlwaysInnovating" since it was recently highlighted that they use some GNOME technologies in their products. Stormy contacted them, had an IRC meeting and set up an in person meeting at a conference they will both be attending.

• Planning for having an upcoming GNOME Foundation with the board meeting via IRC.
• Vincent suggested that people who receive sponsorship from GNOME should be asked to help promote free software.
• Planning for the 2009 Annual Report.
• Discussion about the "free software" vs "open source" thread on the GNOME foundation-list.