Minutes for Meeting of August 9, 2011 at Desktop Summit

Next Meeting

• August 23, 2011

Attending

• Andreas Nilsson
• Bastien Nocera
• Brian Cameron
• Emily Chen
• Emmanuele Bassi
• Karen Sandler
• Rosanna Yuen
• Ryan Lortie

• Shaun McCance

• Stormy Peters

Regrets

• Og Maciel

New Items

• GNOME Foundation Officer and other positions

  • Shaun McCance appointed to be Treasurer

  • Emmanuele Bassi to be Secretary
  • Bastien Nocera to be Vice-president
  • Brian Cameron to be President
  • Brian Cameron to be Karen's manager
  • Karen Sandler to be Rosanna's manager
  • Diego appointed head of GNOME ambassador program
• Discussion about whether to continue doing Desktop Summit
  • Reasons for:
    • To continue the relationships that we have been building
    • Avoid negative message that it will send if we stop.
  • Reasons against:
    • There seems to be less collaboration than we thought there would be (or the collaboration could happen in different venues, such as hackfest or Linux Plumbers).
  • If it is decided to do the Desktop Summit again:
    • This year did a great job of addressing all the issues of the last Desktop Summit, need to thank those that helped to fix these issues.
    • Should pay more attention to branding.
    • Have more GNOME community events.
  • Voting on Desktop Summit 2013
    • Positive to the idea, but not ready to vote.
    • Need to figure out how the venue selection would happen with the GNOME and KDE processes being different.
• GUADEC 2012 bids
  • Thank you to those who have sent bids for GUADEC 2012. It was hard to choose between such excellent bids.
  • The board will have separate meetings with the teams who have submitted at bid.
    • Make sure to ask each the following questions:
      • What kind of open social spaces do you have?
      • Would you reapply next year?
  • After the meetings, the board voted for A Coruña as the location for GUADEC 2012.
    • Will meet each bidding team before the AGM and explain why we chose or did not choose them.

    • ACTION: Ryan is going to talk with all of the teams who submitted GUADEC 2012 bids.

    • Be sure the A Coruña bid will provide a good network access for both accommodation(Residence) and venue.
• AGM Agenda
  • Karen is putting together the AGM agenda.

  • ACTION: Karen to send AGM schedule to foundation and advisory board.

• Advisory Board Meeting Agenda

  • ACTION: Karen will send the advisory board agenda to the members of the advisory board.

  • Ask advisory board for advice regarding KDE invitation.
  • Igalia will be presenting at the advisory board meeting.
• Boston Summit
  • Colin Walters is taking charge of organizing the Boston Summit.
  • Marina might be able to help.
  • Karen is in discussion about having the same venue as in past years (MIT).
  • Travel assistance is possible; usually, because of hackfests attached to the summit.
• GTK+ hackfest
  • Proposed co-locating with Boston Summit. People have concerns about having a hackfest at US as opposed to Europe/Canada.
  • GTK+ team thinks the Boston Summit is their best option.

  • ACTION: Ryan and Emmanuele will talk to the other members of the GTK team about the co-location.

• GNOME Thank You Pants Award

  • DONE: Will be given to Matthias Clasen

• Web based IRC client
  • Ryan is going to talk with sysadmins to enable to our infrastructure to allow people to use web clients for IRC.
• Foundation Membership Renewal Process
  • Lots of complaints about the renewal process during the past election.
  • The board should talk to the membership committee.
  • Possibly a member of the board should join the membership committee.
  • Questions came up "why aren't people interested in starting/renewing membership?"
  • Potential streamlining of the membership renewal process:
    • Adding in the membership list the month/year when each person should renew.
    • Sending an email to foundation-list the list of memberships that are about ot expire (in the same way the list with new contributors is sent there).
    • Adding the membership-committee in the Cc when a renewal notification has been sent. If somebody claims he or she did not receive the email, we can check the email was sent and if there was not problem (bounce).
    • Use GUADEC as an opportunity for renewing the membership.
    • Drop vouchers for renewals, just new memberships.

  • ACTION: Germán and Ryan will relay the board's recommendations to the membership committee about renewal and expiration of membership.

• Value of GNOME Foundation membership
  • The value of being a foundation member should be increased.
  • Electing and being elected to the board are pretty big deals, but they do not attract membership as much as we would like.
  • Some contributors to various key projects (e.g. documentation) see no value in being foundation members.
  • Participants to hackfests that are getting travel sponsorship should be expected to be members OR join the foundation within a year/before the second application.
  • Attach "goodies" to the membership renewal:
    • Business cards
      • Only for GNOME Ambassadors
    • Live badges for GNOME Foundation membership and Friends of GNOME that expire when your membership expires
    • LWN for GNOME Foundation members

    • ACTION: Stormy to ask LWN if they can automate LWN accounts for users with gnome.org addresses and what it would cost

    • Make sure gnome.org addresses expire when membership expires
    • Planet GNOME inclusion should depend on being a foundation member.
  • Summer of Code/Women Outreach Program members should get a 6 months probationary period on PGO after the end of the program.

  • ACTION: Emmanuele will talk to Alberto Ruiz about the board's position on PGO policy changes.

  • Foundation membership should be tied to email and Git access, with expiration of the membership reflected in revoking Git and email privileges.
• Conferences/Hackfests
  • Portland Summit.
  • GNOME App Store hackfest.
  • GUADEC planning committee.
  • Reimbursements for sponsored attendees with visa troubles
• Pending Tasks With Contract Work
  • GTK+/Hildon
    • Update from Bastien
    • Various patches have been filed into Bugzilla.
    • Various state of blockage: review, technical, design; the GTK team is involved and the bugs are being heavily discussed.
    • In general, the project is in much better state than when it started.
    • Good use of the grant.
  • a11y contract - Mozilla/F123.org
    • Emergya (Alejandro Leiva) gave us an update.
    • They expect to finish by November, 2011.
    • They are going to start sending high levels reports.

Completed Actions

• Andreas - Will help Emily publish the quarterly report.
• Emily - Get the Q1 reports published.

Status of action items

• Andreas - Will look into the possibility of a Desktop Summit design where the facade is more neutral.
• Andreas - Will blog a Desktop Summit status report.
• Andreas - Will discuss with Ryan Lortie providing support contracts for GTK+.
• Andreas - To verify meeting times for the Desktop Summit. That August 9th is a good date for the board and AGM meetings and August 10th for the Advisory Board meeting. Will confirm on board list, then the advisory board list.
• Andreas - To start work on next 2011 Annual Report ASAP (due start FY2012). Taken over from Paul.
• Bastien - To discuss the use of badges (a-la Creative Commons, last.fm page colors, or PSN badges).
• Bastien - To talk to Olav Vitters about using bugzilla to track Friends of GNOME post card sending.
• Bastien - To get _a_ WebOS/Palm contact from Lennart Poettering.
• Bastien - To contact the BBC to discuss about possible collaboration in working directly with GNOME.
• Bastien - Will reach out to Dave Richards from the City of Largo to plan for a hackfest there.
• Bastien - Reach out to the GNOME Advisory Board via email to see if they can help out with providing contacts at Yahoo.

• Bastien - To make sure that the "IM, Contacts & Social Hackfest" gets added to http://live.gnome.org/Hackfests.

• Bastien - To put together a proposal for how technical issues could be mediated within the community.
• Bastien - Will touch base with the appropriate people in Red Hat to see if the RHN entitlements can be approved.
• Brian - Develop trademark usage forms for common use cases. James Vasile from legal is working with Brian on this.
• Brian - Check records of organizations with existing contracts to use the GNOME trademark. Taken over from Vincent Untz. Look at the archives in 2005 and try to determine which companies can use the GNOME trademark. Know what kind of contracts we had with them. Taken over from Jorge.
• Brian - Will touch base with the GIMP organizers to find out their plans for the GIMP money.

• Brian & Og - To coordinate a fund raising meeting with the GStreamer, a11y, GIMP, and Banshee teams. Will draft an agenda.

• Brian - Follow up with getting Alan Day and Sumana Harihareswara to sign the Copyright Assessment from SFLC.
• Emily - Get the 2011 Q2 report started.
• Emmanuele - Will take over Friends of GNOME tasks.
• Germán - To discuss with GNOME Hispano about them handling GNOME Foundation money in Euros (€).
• Germán - To track if the new method of boletos generates more or less money from Brazil.
• Germán - Will assist with the GNOME 3 as a Foundation goal task and to help in getting the GNOME 3 as a Foundation Goal survey topics together. (Handing over to someone else).
• Germán - Will finish the Financial section of the quarterly report.
• Germán - Will talk to membership committee to see if we can do something to help remind people to renew memberships to avoid people losing the ability to vote.
• Germán - To send link to previous year's GUADEC's budgets to guadec-list.
• Germán - Will touch base with the GObject-Introspection Hackfest and make sure that people attending also attend the Desktop Summit if possible.
• Karen - Will compose a press release by the end of the week.
• Karen - Will take over discussions to take over ownership of some GNOME related domains.

• Karen - Will follow up with LojaGeek.

• Karen - Will contact people to try and push forward the organization of Boston Summit.
  • Emailed boston-social, talked to Walter Bender, emailed Jonathan Blandford.
• Karen - Will follow up with Debian about their usage of the GNOME logo.
  • Emailed with Stefano Zacchiroli, left it that GNOME needs to decide whether it wants to permit this new combined logo use.
• Karen - Will follow up with cedwards regarding CiviCRM contract.
  • After some tracking down of the status of the communications, cedwards sent email to get discussions with Claudian moving again.
• Karen - Will email Marina to let her know that the board has approved funds for the next year of the Women's Outreach fund, ccing Board.
  • emailed on 7/13

• Karen - Will follow up with LojaGeek again.

• Karen - Will follow up with Stefano to discuss use of combined Debian/GNOME mark and caution stopping further use until agreement is settled on.
  • emailed and talked on phone
• Karen - Will update the contact information in the webpage to add information with respect to fraudulent checks.
  • contacts page edited.
• Karen - Will follow up with the lawyers to discuss what would be involved to provide liability protection like what the Conservancy provides and to see if they have any perspective about whether the GNOME Foundation should allow GNOME projects to join Conservancy. Transferred from Brian.
• Og - Update the blog and planet to highlight that people are expected to sign and follow the GNOME Code of Conduct.
  • As per Paul's recommendation, I have emailed Vincent to ask him what his idea is for doing this.
  • Still have not heard back from Vincent Untz.

  • Still on ToDo.

• Og - To look into Google Checkout as an annual payment option for FoG.

  • Still on ToDo.

• Paul - 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 Urrelo will draft something more concrete for gnome-marketing to determine the best name and process for managing this. There was a discussion on the mailing list and a few good ideas, Diego will wrap them up and send them again for further comments.
• Paul - Will follow-up with Board to read the Advisory Board fees for small businesses proposal, ask for feedback and set a date to vote by.
• Paul - To finish the Privacy Policy, get review from James Vasile, etc.
• Paul - To review Justin's email about updating trademark agreements and email the marketing team for feedback.
• Rosanna - Will apply for the GNOME credit card.

• Rosanna - Automate the process of entering PayPal information into GnuCash.

• Shaun - Will lead the GNOME Foundation IRC meetings.

• Stormy - Take care of GnuCash automation. Taken over from Paul & Behdad.

• All board members - To review and comment Brian's April 14th proposal regarding better organizing earmarked fundraising.
• All board members - Review the received bids for GUADEC 2012.
• Unowned - To find a way to automate the process of exporting results from internal review process and email it to the board.

New Action Items

• Karen - To send AGM schedule to foundation and advisory board.
• Karen - Will send the advisory board agenda to the members of the advisory board.
• Ryan and Emmanuele - Will talk to the other members of the GTK+ team about the co-location.
• Germán and Ryan - Will relay the board's recommendations to the membership committee about renewal and expiration of membership.
• Emmanuele - Will talk to Alberto Ruiz about the board's position on PGO policy changes.
• Stormy - To ask LWN if they can automate LWN accounts for users with gnome.org addresses

Discussed on the mailing list

• Meetings
  • Planning for the GUADEC Planning Committee IRC meeting on August 1st.

    • https://live.gnome.org/GUADEC/GUADEC-2011-0801

  • Planning for meetings with those teams who submitted GUADEC 2012 bids at the Desktop Summit.
  • Planning for the board, advisory board, and AGM meetings at the Desktop Summit.
• Events
  • Desktop Summit (Berlin, Germany, August 6-12)

    • https://www.desktopsummit.org/

    • Planning for the Desktop Summit, including coordination with the KDE board.
    • Helped to put together the Desktop Summit Press Kit,
    • The board voted and approved reimbursing visa costs for a couple of people who lost money trying to get visas to attend the Desktop Summit but failed to get them.
  • Planning for the GObject-Introspection hackfest (Berlin, Germany, August 10-15).

    • https://live.gnome.org/Hackfests/Introspection2011

  • Brian Cameron requested reimbursement of $39.22 (USD) to cover shipping costs for prizes for the GNOME photo contest.
  • Portland Summit
    • Sriram Ramkrishna sent an email to the board proposing a Portland, USA Summit next May for 3 days.
• Finance
  • Germán provided finance updates.

    • https://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2011-July/msg00029.html

  • Vincent Untz sent an email to the board requesting action on handling Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit Travel Payments.

  • FreeWear provided a July Royalty report. 7 items of merchandise were sold with royalties of 20.40 €.

  • Germán coordinated getting additional GNOME hackers involved with the Adopt a GNOME hacker program, giving them postcards.
• Legal
  • Discussion about updating trademark guidelines

  • https://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2011-July/msg00027.html

• Joanmarie Diggs provided the board with the A11y Team FY2012 Proposed Budget with Projections for FY2013.
  • Proposed one a11y hackfest sometime in FY2012 and FY2013.

  • Anticipate travel costs in FY2012 to be $15,650 (USD) in 2012 and $19,150 (USD) in 2013 to cover travel costs to The Boston Summit, a WebKitGtk Hackfest, CSUN and an a11y hackfest.

  • Costs are slightly higher in 2013 because a booth is planned in 2013 when the GNOME a11y story should be stronger, but do not plan a booth in 2012.
  • Would like the board to consider a budget of $25,000 for both years for a11y focused contract work.