Foundation Board Minutes for Monday 13th May 2019, 15:30 UTC

Attending

Regrets

RobMcQueen

Agenda

New travel committee members
Travel sponsorship policy updates
Mail from Zeeshan Ali about Mozilla Location Service
GNOME software definition proposal

Minutes

New travel committee members
- We now have three new volunteers for the travel committee. We propose to appoint Guillaume Gomez, Umang Jain, and Meg Ford to the travel committee. We have written a short Discourse topic about the new volunteers, it's still missing info about Guillaume. Philip has notified the current travel committee members of the new volunteers, and received positive feedback from Adelia Rahim.
- Nuritzi: I had a chance to talk to Adelia and she is enthuiastic about the chance to have discussions about the more nuanced points.
- Federico: Guillaume Gomez is one of the maintainers of gtk-rs, the Rust bindings for GTK, and also is part of the Rust developer tools and documentation teams. He’s a GNOME Foundation member and has attended all the past Rust/GNOME hackfests. Guillaume is one of those super helpful people generally, and I’d be happy for him to be a part of the travel committee.
- Carlos: We discussed in the past that travel committee members would have to sign a confidentiality agreement.
  - Neil: Yes. It will be similar to the confdentiality agreement that board members must sign.
- VOTE: Appoint Guillaume Gomez, Meg Ford, and Umang Jain to the travel committee.
  - +1 unanimous
- ACTION: Philip to notify new members and current committee that they have been appointed, send their email addresses to Neil, and add them to the mailing list and wiki.
- ACTION: Neil to send confidentiality agreement to new members and add them to RT.

[NB. Instead of "completed" below please read "made the final modifications to". See https://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2019-June/msg00044.html]

Travel sponsorship policy updates
- Philip has completed a draft of the revised travel sponsorship policy. The goals of this revision are to fix some problems with the old policy:
  - It doesn't work well for people who cannot carry the cost of a trip until reimbursement after the trip is over.
  - The wording is very stern and seems to demand that people justify themselves.
  - Some policies are not written down (e.g. that we sponsor travel to and from an airport.)
  - Verifying costs takes a lot of effort from the travel committee.
- Carlos: You mentioned at one time that pre-imbursements would be part of the policy, but I don't see it?
  - Philip: It's listed under "What to do in unusual cases". Pre-imbursements are agreed on a case-by-case basis.
- Allan: Are we meant to vote on this? Isn't it the responsibility of the travel committee to spend their budget as they see fit?
  - Philip: I disagree. As the board of directors, we want to use this policy to achieve certain goals.
  - General consensus is that we don't need to vote on it.
- Allan: I don't think we need to review the policy line by line right now. We can agree with the general idea that this proposal is a good way forward.
  - Neil: At this point, the travel committee should be able to change things to work better on their own initiative.
- Philip: Practially speaking, should I put this on the wiki now that the board has given feedback?
  - Nuritzi: Yes, but we should give the new travel committee members a chance to discuss it first.
Mail from Zeeshan Ali about Mozilla Location Service
- Zeeshan Ali has sent an email about Mozilla Location Service. Geoclue, and with it functionality in GNOME, depends on Mozilla Location Service for resolving the location of Wifi networks. Mozilla is not maintaining this service any longer, but it is still running. Recently it has been blocking users of the Geoclue API key, but even if that gets resolved there are still problems depending on an unmaintained service. Zeeshan proposes investigating whether we can maintain the service.
- We would like to discuss this in the community to see if any solutions present themselves.
- ACTION: Federico to open an issue about online services which we can't maintain - https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Board/issues/97

[ Note: In the meantime since the above discussion, the issue with the API key has been resolved with Mozilla. ]

GNOME software definition proposal
- Allan: Board members have had another week to look at it now.
- Philip: It's short and general. Short and general is good, but have you considered any cases where some software meets all the requirements but we wouldn't want them as a GNOME Affiliate?
  - Allan: That was not really the goal of this.
  - Carlos: It's meant more as a guideline for a committee to decide what's a GNOME Affiliate.
- Allan: GNOME Affiliates is the name we've been using. We had a thread on Discourse asking for suggestions for the name, but we haven't announced the result. The shortlist was GNOME Associates, GNOME Fellowship, GNOME Affiliates, GNOME Application Community, and GNOME Realm. So if any board members want to weigh in on the name, then now is the time.
- Nuritzi: Do you see overlap between the release team committee and the GNOME Affiliates committee?
  - Allan: The GNOME Affiliates commitee does not necessarily need to be a committee of the board. They don't need to authorize the use of the GNOME trademark, for example.
  - Carlos: The release team committee is doing a more technical job. The GNOME Affiliates committee is more of a community effort.
- Nuritzi: Is there anything that the board needs to unblock for you?
  - Allan: All we need right now is to hear feedback and concerns from the board so that we can move forward with this in the community.
- Federico: I still had the question about whether affiliates were allowed to enter Google Summer of Code under the GNOME umbrella.
  - Carlos: Practially speaking, they already do. For example, Fractal has three students this year.
Nuritzi: We will move back to weekly meetings from now until the election.
Nuritzi: Next week's meeting will end half an hour early so that we can have a board-only discussion session afterwards.

Actions

Philip - Notify the newly appointed travel committee members and the current committee, send the email addresses of the new members to Neil, and add them to the travel committee mailing list and wiki.
Neil - Send the confidentiality agreement to the newly appointed travel committee members to sign.
Federico - Open an issue on GitLab about online services which we can't maintain - https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Board/issues/97