Minutes for Tuesday, May 6th, 2014, 16:00 UTC

Next meeting

Tuesday, May 20th, 2014, 16:00 UTC

Attending

Andreas Nilsson
Marina Zhurakhinskaya
Tobias Mueller
Joanmarie Diggs
Ekaterina Gerasimova
Emmanuele Bassi
Rosanna Yuen
Sriram Ramkrishna

Board Meeting Agenda

Conference sponsorship
- Marina, Tobi, and the GNOME.Asia local team have been hard at work to find sponsors
- Kat proposes that GUADEC and GNOME.Asia discounted sponsorship is by default split proportionately and that it's officially recorded for future reference
  - For instance: GUADEC sponsorship is 10k, GNOME.Asia is 5k; if the combined donation is 12k, we split at 8k/4k, maintaining the same proportion
  - The proportion depends on the sponsorship levels between the two conferences
- Improve ability to plan a conference budget
- The board can still override this on a case by case basis
- Can this be left to the board discretion?
  - Better to document this as part of the process for organising our conferences
- ACTION: Kat to document the GUADEC/GNOME.Asia combined sponsorship on the wiki
Finances
- Kat sent a to-date budget/account summary to review on board-list
- USD ~160k reserves
  - Removing the funds that are earmarked for reimbursements, GNOME.Asia, expected invoices and OPW we have around USD 30k to spend on operational costs
- GUADEC is also coming up and required a travel budget
- Publish up-to-date projected budget on the wiki
  - We usually publish only the account summary as part of the annual report
  - We don't publish the operating budget for the current year
    - We used to do that with a fairly complicated spreadsheet
  - It could lead to more PR issue because people will not take the time to properly understand it
  - Once we unfreeze the expenses we could summarise our budget
  - We should revisit publishing a summarised budget monthly, quarterly, or yearly
  - The board should have access to more financial updates
  - Increase accountability of the financials for board, advisory board, and membership
  - Consider doing from the new financial year so that there's a clean break
Receiving Donations in the EU via the Wau Holland Stiftung (WHS)
- Went through various rounds of reviews
- Comments on the board mailing list
- Tobi, Karen had a meeting with WHS last year
- Advantages for the foundation
  - Allow bank transfer in the EU
- Disadvantages
  - Administrative fees
- Does it impact GUADEC?
  - Not really
  - We have local organizations that handle the money closer to the local team
- ACTION: Tobi to draft a new agreement after the feedback from the board
- We will vote as soon as we have a reply
Travel sponsorship processing and reimbursements
- New process has been in place for 9 to 10 months
- Has not been very successful
- Burden imposed on the event organisers and the board
- Vetting by the board has not been up to par
- Board assigned more funds than the travel committee used to, and to fewer people
- Re-evaluate the travel sponsorship process
- The travel committee is now four people strong (soon to be five)
- Options
  - Allocate a fixed budget every year/quarter
  - Have the travel committee ask for a budget for each event
  - Mix between the two
    - Allocate a fixed budget and allow for extensions on a case by case basis
  - We need to properly document the whole process
- ACTION: Kat to draft a new policy for the travel committee and send it to the board for review
Handling Friends of GNOME gifts
- We should investigate having gift vouchers or print-on-demand from online printing web services
- ACTION: Andreas to investigate the GNOME gifts situation
Visa fees reimbursements
- We usually did not reimburse visa costs
- We want to reassess this situation
- Visa costs can be fairly expensive, especially for students
- If we're willing to expense travel we should probably expense the visa cost in case it was rejected
- The Foundation does not benefit directly from reimbursing visa costs, so they cannot be treated the same as travel
- In some cases, we invited attendees
- Travel committee guidance rules say that the visa will not be reimbursed after the fact
- [Discussion of this item was not finished in this meeting, will be continued at a later time…]
Upcoming events
- GUADEC 2014
  - We will need to decide how much resources should be allocated for the travel expenses
    - EUR 30k (42K USD) is the usual budget
  - We should wait until we receive more payments

Discussed on the mailing list

Completed Actions

Kat and board to review the tax return form
Tobi to follow up the GNOME.Asia budget issue with the local organisers
Board will review the agreement for collecting funds in Europe

Pending action items

Andreas to put together a GNOME supporter card for our donors
Andreas, Joanie to draft thank you letters to our donors
Andreas to investigate the GNOME gifts situation
Emmanuele to send Zana and Tobi an update on FoG donors gifts
Emmanuele to send hackers up for "adoption" the list of donors that want a postcard
Emmanuele to draft a date and time for the post-release meeting
Emmanuele to send a proposal to foundation-list about possible IRC meetings
Emmanuele to ask the adboard members for help with Bugzilla update
Joanie to draft a proposal for the photography policy at GNOME conferences to discuss on foundation-list
Joanie and Karen to meet and discuss about the photography policy for GNOME events
Joanie to go over Michael Schumacher ideas on the Gimp funding processes and merge them with her ideas on the wiki
Kat to create a private wiki page on the web services accounts holders and passwords
- Allan and Kat decided to go for a private git account instead for security reasons
Kat to draft a proposal for a privacy policy for review
Kat to document the GUADEC/GNOME.Asia combined sponsorship on the wiki
Kat to draft a new policy for the travel committee and send it to the board for review
Karen to write the Privacy policy for GNOME services
Karen will look at gnome-software privacy issues from a legal standpoint
Tobi to continue pursuing the fund collection in Europe
Tobi to talk to Andrea to move the PayPal data extraction scripts over to the GNOME infrastructure
Tobi to follow up with Alexandre and Karen about the contract for the GUADEC local organisation
Tobi to draft a new agreement after the feedback from the board
Sri to investigate better uses of adsense/adwords on the GNOME websites
Sri to communicate to Rosanna and work on the donation for the West Coast hackfest
Zana to check the inventory of merch she has in storage (low priority)