Minutes of the Foundation Board meeting for Friday, October 19, 2018, 12:30 UTC

In-person meeting at the Foundation Board Hackfest, Cambridge UK

Next meeting Tuesday, October 30, 2018, 15:30 UTC

Attending

• AllanDay

• CarlosSoriano

• NuritziSanchez

• KatGerasimova

• PhilipChimento

• NeilMcGovern

• RosannaYuen

• FedericoMenaQuintero

• RobMcQueen

Agenda

• Travel committee spending allowances (Nuritzi)
• Approve 2018-19 budget (Nuritzi)
• Cancel next week's meeting
• Compensation committee (Rob)
• Board term lengths (Nuritzi)

Minutes

All board members were present in person and notified the Secretary that they waived their 48-hour notice for this meeting.

• Travel committee spending allowances
  • Background: the travel committee seldom pays out the full amount budgeted for travel, since people cancel their requests, or don't submit reimbursement requests. The Board feels travel sponsorship is an important part of the Foundation's activities, for community cohesiveness and inclusion, and would like to see the full budgeted amounts spent more reliably.
  • To account for this slack, we will communicate to the committee that they can exceed the budgeted amount with the total of the requests that they approve (accepting that this may sometimes result in more expenditure than anticipated.) It needs to be a percentage rather than a fixed amount, since we also want the same thing to apply to the travel sponsorship parts of the conference budgets. We also want to have a time limit on when people can submit reimbursements (e.g. 6 months after travel) so that we can accurately determine when funds are not needed to be spent.
  • VOTE: Allow the travel committee to allocate 20% over the figure specified in the budget, for conferences and other events.
    • +1 unanimous, vote passed.
• Approve 2018–19 budget
  • Neil presented a draft 2018–2019 forecast to the board which was reviewed and agreed in principle.
  • Kat: Can we attach the budget to the minutes?

    • Neil: It will be published in the usual place for budgets (https://wiki.gnome.org/Foundation/BudgetAndSpending) and we'll include a link in the minutes.

    • The link is: https://wiki.gnome.org/Foundation/BudgetAndSpending/2018-19%20Budget

  • We plan on amending the budget later, based on the conversations we've had during the Foundation hackfest, but we want to approve it so that the Foundation staff can proceed with spending money in the meantime.
  • VOTE: Approve the 2018–19 budget as presented during the Foundation hackfest.
    • +1 unanimous, vote passed.
• Cancel next week's meeting
  • All in agreement.
• Compensation committee
  • Rob: There was some concern that the compensation committee seemed to include positions that don't exist, such as the financial director. However, for legal reasons the committee needs to set the compensation for any role that gets paid a sufficiently high salary, so we want the committee charter to include any future situations that might come up.
  • Rob: The other concern was whether the executive director should be a part of the committee.
  • Proposed committee membership is Carlos as the treasurer, Rob as the ED's line manager, and Nuritzi as the president.
  • This needs some final revisions and we should hopefully be able to vote on it next meeting.
• Board term lengths
  • We intend to change the board terms to two or three years in order to ensure continuity, following the goal-setting exercises we did in the Foundation hackfest.
  • This may or may not involve a change to the by-laws. Currently, the by-laws allow for a term of up to 2 years.
  • This needs some research.