Foundation Board Minutes for Tuesday, August 7th 2018, 15:30 UTC
Next meeting date Tuesday, August 14 2018, 15:00 UTC (note adjusted meeting time!)
Attending
Regrets
Missing
Agenda
- Regular hiring update (Nuritzi)
- Transparency between employees and the board/community. i.e. status reports (also read emails from Kat) (Carlos)
- Removing old Board members from board communications (Nuritzi)
- GUADEC 2019 Bid (Nuritzi)
- Foundation hackfest 2018 planning (Nuritzi)
- Designate a TDF (The Document Foundation) Advisory Board member (Nuritzi)
- Conference bidding process (Kat)
- Odds and ends from the community at GUADEC (Philip)
- Publish private meeting minutes issue (Nuritzi)
- Response to emails update (Nuritzi)
Review to-do GitLab issues - https://gitlab.gnome.org/Community/Board/issues?label_name%5B%5D=To-Do (Nuritzi)
Next meeting:
- Privacy and security internships status and possible ideas (Carlos)
- Switch meetings to California time (Allan)
Minutes
- Regular hiring update (Nuritzi)
- Interviews starting soon
- Transparency between employees and the board/community. i.e. status reports (also read emails from Kat) (Carlos)
- Kat: Neil said in a blog post at the start of the year he would start blogging every couple of weeks to keep the community updated. Even on the board we don't have a clear view of what Neil does day to day. Previously on the board we wanted this to be a requirement for executive directors. Members of the community have said that they're not sure what Neil does. This should be communicated better.
- Allan: This has been raised by the previous board.
- Rob: We've been discussing this in our 1:1s, as line manager of the ED. We want to separate the two lines of reporting, where Neil reports to the board (perhaps a slot in the board meeting every other week). I'll share some notes from the 1:1s but in the future this should be for the whole board and minuted. Then, Neil can blog about whatever he's told us. We do have the responsibility to show the Foundation members and donors that we're effective, and that's Neil's responsibility.
- Rob: As soon as Neil gets back from vacation we should initiate a standing agenda item.
- Allan: Note, Neil is not reporting just for himself, but for the whole Foundation staff.
- Rob: We'll have a biweekly standing agenda item starting two weeks from now.
- Nuritzi: The advisory board have said that they would like more regular communication as well.
- Rob: It's easy once we have regular blog posts to marshal them into a quarterly report for the adboard.
- Philip: Can we post the blog posts to the adboard list?
- Kat: Neil might want to add something private for the adboard, better to do it separately.
- Removing old Board members from board communications (Nuritzi)
- Old board members are still on some of the communication channels. We need to compile a list of all the channels and review.
ACTION: Allan - create an issue and coordinate to remove old board members and add Rob, Kat, and Philip to adboard-list and board-only list.
- GUADEC 2019 Bid (Nuritzi)
- Bid arrived! Kat helped review the bid from their side. No-one else has had a chance to look at it from the board side yet.
- Deferred to next week; if we have the meeting 30 minutes earlier Kat and Nuritzi can join from GNOME.Asia.
- Nuritzi: Are there any upcoming deadlines, e.g. for booking the venue, that we need to be aware of?
- Kat: No, but we need to get the dates out as early as possible to avoid double-booking, and from feedback from previous years we know that we need to publish the date as soon as possible.
- Foundation hackfest 2018 planning (Nuritzi)
Everyone add any dates where you're not available in October to the GitLab issue.
- Kat: Alternative proposal, let's take two sets of dates and have people choose between them: 12th-14th or 26th-28th
- Rob, Allan, Kat: More likely to be able to attend if the hackfest is in the UK.
- Federico: Should I continue to research Mexico if people can't attend outside the UK? - No.
- Kat: Collabora can provide soundproof office space for the meeting.
- Allan: Last time we considered hiring a big place and working there in retreat-style, as we've got a small closed group.
- Nuritzi: Any ideas for locations?
- Allan: a few
ACTION: Allan - Research retreat locations
ACTION: Everyone - fill in your preferences for the hackfest date on the GitLab issue (https://gitlab.gnome.org/Community/Board/issues/75)
ACTION: Philip - contact Carlos and remind him to fill in his preferences as well
- Designate a TDF (The Document Foundation) Advisory board member (Nuritzi)
- Nuritzi: Can we nominate a Foundation employee instead of a board member so we don't have so much turnover?
Kat: Turnover is not a big problem, and sometimes board members might be especially enthusiastic to work on making LibreOffice work for us.
- Allan: A board member would be better.
- Rob: How does it work on our own adboard with Debian? Is there turnover?
- Allan: It's always the Debian Project Leader.
- Rob: We could nominate anyone from the community.
Federico: Do we have anyone in the community who closely monitors or contributes to LibreOffice?
- Kat: I do, but I don't have time to be the representative.
- Nuritzi: What about Nick Richards?
- Rob: I'll ask.
- Rob: We should ask for volunteers and choose from the interested people
- Kat: If we do that there should be a process for them to report.
- Rob: they should mail to foundation-list after every meeting they attend.
ACTION: Rob - write an email to foundation-list recruiting volunteers for this position
- Conference bidding process (Kat)
Kat: I've been working with the conference organizers, Allan, and Carlos, on a process, which is shared in the GitLab task. Comments please, within a short time because GNOME.Asia wants to open the call for bids for next year.
- Kat: (summary of proposal from the link below:) A bidding team nominates itself on foundation-list, is approved by the board, and runs the bidding process. The bidding team then selects a bid to recommend to the board, which discusses it in the next meeting and approves it or asks follow-up questions. The bidding team then communicates the results.
https://gitlab.gnome.org/Community/Board/issues/39#note_289196
- Allan: Once a bid has been approved, it sounds like the bidding team becomes a Foundation liaison?
- Kat: Not necessarily, the board will liaise after the bid is selected.
- Allan: We should have a handover in that case.
Kat: We have guidelines for organizational best practices, e.g. use GitLab, template for bid documents. We could also get members to join board meetings and give a short update regularly. Does that satisfy the point?
- Allan: I was more concerned about losing contact with what's happening on the ground.
- Kat: If no comments on the process, then I'll spend the next week refining it and getting ready to present a formalized document to GNOME.Asia organizers
- Kat: We'll have discussions at GNOME.Asia.
- Nuritzi: There has been some confusion in the past about who the GNOME.Asia team is, should we take the opportunity to formalize who the team leads are?
- Kat: For GUADEC we don't have a well-defined team though.
- Allan: I think this document addresses this concern, by having a well-defined team apply every year to put the bid together.
- Kat: Before the bidding process starts, they email the board to say who is on the bidding team.
- Nuritzi: Okay.
ACTION - Everyone - read the document at https://gitlab.gnome.org/Community/Board/issues/39#note_289196 and send any comments or concerns to Kat
- Privacy and security internships status and possible ideas (Carlos)
- deferred
- Switch meetings to California time (Allan)
- deferred
- Odds and ends from the community at GUADEC (Philip)
- Philip: would like to raise some points from GUADEC:
- There was a speaker external to the GNOME community who used an Apple laptop to present, and the session chair was giving them a hard time for the video not working correctly because of using proprietary hardware. The speaker initially felt hurt.
- Kat: Please submit feedback to be given to volunteers.
- Nuritzi: COC committee is thinking about how to make conferences more welcoming, so we can talk about issues like this with them informally so they can think about it.
- Philip: In any case the issue was resolved, so no formal COC report is needed.
- Some people were unhappy about the design discussion around removing support for GNOME theming. Theme writers are a community from which we get an influx of contributors and we could lose contributors as a result. Themes are also important for accessibility. No action needed, but we should monitor this.
- Allan: I can have a discussion with some people.
- There was a speaker external to the GNOME community who used an Apple laptop to present, and the session chair was giving them a hard time for the video not working correctly because of using proprietary hardware. The speaker initially felt hurt.
- Philip: would like to raise some points from GUADEC:
- Publish private meeting minutes issue (Nuritzi)
- Running out of time, deferred, prioritize for next week.
- Response to emails update (Nuritzi)
Nuritzi: (summary of proposal from link below:) Any board member can send a quick response letting the person know we received their email. That person should then create a new private GitLab issue and assign it to the person who can respond or CC people who might be able to respond, setting a due date of max 1 week. The person assigned is responsible for putting the issue on the meeting agenda if necessary, labeling the issue as "meeting". The issue will then either get resolved and the person receive a reply, or in the next meeting.
- Kat: We get emails whenever a voice mail comes in. Can Rosanna send an email to let us know when a voice mail is resolved?
- Rosanna: They've all been spam recently.
- Kat: Can we just get a message saying "spam" in that case?
- Rob: We can delegate the task of being contactable by phone to the Foundation staff as they see fit, and just not get the emails.
- General agreement
ACTION: Rosanna - take the board list off the voicemail list
Review to-do GitLab issues - https://gitlab.gnome.org/Community/Board/issues?label_name%5B%5D=To-Do (Nuritzi)
- There's been movement, thank you everyone. Please review your issues before next week.
Actions
- Allan - create an issue and coordinate to remove old board members and add Rob, Kat, and Philip to adboard-list and board-only list.
- Allan - Research retreat locations
Everyone - fill in your preferences for the hackfest date on the GitLab issue (https://gitlab.gnome.org/Community/Board/issues/75)
- Philip - contact Carlos and remind him to fill in his preferences as well
- Rob - write an email to foundation-list recruiting volunteers for the position of TDF adboard member
Everyone - read the document at https://gitlab.gnome.org/Community/Board/issues/39#note_289196 and send any comments or concerns to Kat
- Rosanna - take the board list off the voicemail list