Foundation Board Minutes for Tuesday, July 24th 2018, 15:30 UTC

Next meeting date Tuesday, July 31, 2018, 15:30 UTC

Attending

Regrets

Missing

Agenda

Hiring update (Neil)
Trip approval - GNOME.Asia and LAS (Neil)
Travel committee status (Carlos)
Confidentiality agreements (Neil)
GUADEC 2019 call for bids (Allan)
Standardising bidding and budgetting processes for conferences (Kat)

Deferred:

Review to-do GitLab issues - https://gitlab.gnome.org/Community/Board/issues?label_name%5B%5D=To-Do (Allan)
Adding Christel to the code of conduct committee (Federico)
Switch meetings to California time (Allan)
Transparency between employees and the board/community. i.e. status reports (also read emails from Kat) (Carlos)
Sponsorship committee status (Carlos)
Internships status and possible ideas (Carlos)
Odds and ends from the community at GUADEC (Philip)

Minutes

Hiring update
- Sysadmin applications reviewed with Andrea.
- Looking for volunteers for helping with CV review and interviewing:
  - Carlos: will help with GTK developer applications.
  - Rob: will help with sysadmin applications.
  - Kat: available to help with whatever needs help the most.
  - Allan: available if need be.
- Intend to get initial review of all applications done by end of this week.
- Nuritzi: feedback from community members at GUADEC who would like to help revise the job descriptions so that we make sure we're attracting the right people
  - Neil: job descriptions were done in a hurry, could be better; we wanted to announce them during Rosanna's talk. However, specifically for the sysadmin and GTK developer positions, we seem to have a number of quite good applicants already, so revisions are maybe not necessary.
- Nuritzi: Is there a hiring system or any other resources in place, to refer back to later?
  - Neil: Ask me if you want an Odoo account
- Kat: consider quick/rough documentation in the wiki for future generations
- Allan: what's the strategy going to be for informing the community?
Trip approval
- GNOME.Asia
  - Neil would like to go to GNOME.Asia, can we approve the trip? Rationale: It's generally self-evident that the ED should go to GNOME conferences.
  - Rob: Are there any advisory board members attending that Neil should reach out to, in order to get the most benefit from the trip?
    - Possibly Christel (PIA) and Chris (Debian). Neil always reaches out to people in case they are going. We should use the advisory board mailing list to announce this as well.
  - Kat: Any potential new advisory board members? It might make sense to talk to all the sponsors of GNOME.Asia about how they and GNOME can mutually benefit, and whether they would like a seat on the advisory board.
    - OK
  - Nuritzi: Let's vote on GNOME.Asia and LAS in this item as well.
  - Rosanna: Let's vote on approving my trip to LAS as well.
    - Neil can approve this, we don't need to vote.
  - VOTE: Approve Neil's GNOME.Asia trip: unanimous
- LAS GNOME Travel
  - VOTE: approve Neil's LAS GNOME trip: unanimous
- ACTION: Neil - announce travel to these conferences on the advisory board mailing list.
Confidentiality agreements
- Please remember to sign yours if you haven't already.
- Philip: is the physical copy important?
  - No
Travel committee status
- Carlos: Status from GNOME.Asia requests?
  - Philip: they intended to process at least the speakers' requests by end of last week
- Philip: General status:
  - Private travel committee mailing list is created, this has unblocked the processing of requests.
  - There are issues with people sending in their receipts from GUADEC, the attachments are being bounced by RT.
  - Bounces are only notified after 5 days or so.
  - Workaround: people are putting their receipts on ownCloud or Google Drive and sending links.
- Allan: any issues with infrastructure should be reported so that Andrea can fix them.
- Kat: Concerned about these problems because attendees dropped out or spent more money than they needed to.
- Allan: The committee are concerned about whether they have enough funds to cover the rest of the year.
  - Philip/Carlos: We communicated the budget to them last week.
- ACTION: Philip - encourage travel committee to reach out to the board with any concerns about the budget, reiterate that there is enough budget.
- ACTION: Philip - encourage travel committee to report infrastructure issues to Andrea.
- ACTION: Philip - check in with travel committee to see about status of GNOME.Asia speakers.
- ACTION: Philip / Neil - give Philip access to RT.
GUADEC 2019 call for bids
- Allan: we've had two intentions to bid, but no concrete proposals yet. It's getting late in the year to confirm GUADEC (although we still have a 6th August deadline for bids).
- Kat:
  - Greece bid
    - Two venues, one they consider expensive (but it's not expensive).
    - They are currently waiting for an offer from the university for the cheaper venue.
    - They intend to get their bid in by 6 August. Feeling confident about this.
  - Tried pinging the Turkey bid a few times, no response
  - Three groups currently interested in 2020
- Nuritzi: Is Kat continuing to organize the bidding? We spoke about involving the community more.
  - Kat: the issue was that the board didn't approach me, it seemed like the board wanted to assume that responsibility. Happy to keep acting as a liaison for bidders in the future.
- Federico: is there a procedure for when bids fall through?
  - Kat: panicking and begging is the current procedure.
  - Allan: there are other options, e.g. have a "GUADEC lite."
- ACTION: Nuritzi - contact Muhammet to check on the Turkey bid.
Standardising bidding and budgetting processes for conferences
- Kat: the previous board put together some requirements for conference organizers. GUADEC and GNOME.Asia organizers didn't feel like these were communicated very well.
- Kat: Conference requirements cover spending policy, but that doesn't seem to be standardized. e.g., LAS doesn't have travel in the budget, so they are running into problems with getting speakers and press to LAS.
- Kat: Ties in with #39: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Community/Board/issues/39
- Carlos: one problem with GNOME.Asia is that the board was not involved in the bidding process. - Kat: how important is it for the board to be involved? the GNOME.Asia team have done well here.
- Neil: providing examples to conference organizing teams would be good.
- Let's reschedule this topic for another time, as we're running out, and many people have opinions about this.
- Kat: volunteers for working on improvements?
  - Allan, Carlos
Review to-do GitLab issues
- Deferred.
- Everyone please take a look themselves.
Adding Christel to the code of conduct committee
- Deferred.
Low-priority agenda items
- All deferred.

Actions

Neil - announce travel to these conferences on the advisory board mailing list.
Philip - encourage travel committee to reach out to the board with any concerns about the budget, reiterate that there is enough budget.
Philip - encourage travel committee to report infrastructure issues to Andrea.
Philip - check in with travel committee to see about status of GNOME.Asia speakers.
Philip / Neil - give Philip access to RT.
Nuritzi - contact Muhammet to check on the Turkey bid.