Foundation Board Minutes for Monday 24th June 2019, 15:30 UTC

Attending

Regrets

KatGerasimova

Agenda

Guidelines for meeting minutes and confidentiality
LAS 2019 Bid
Further define GNOME Foundation Staff's role
Board transition
Note of thanks to outgoing board members

Minutes

Guidelines for meeting minutes and confidentiality
- Philip: https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/Guidelines is finished now. Federico and I have split the previous version of the document, into two parts, one with information for the Foundation at large, and one with internal procedures for the Board. The idea is to have minutes ready for publication two weeks after the meeting date. The board would approve the minutes for the previous meeting in each new meeting. There are explicit guidelines on how to deal with confidential topics which should provide a better understanding about why.
- Rosanna: We need more lead time to be able to read modified minutes before approving them in the next meeting.
  - Philip: The timeline of meeting plus 13 days was intended to give at least 24 hours before the next biweekly board meeting for reading the minutes.
  - Rob: typo: "no more than 13 days" should be "no less than 13 days".
- Allan: The usual procedure is to present draft minutes along with the new meeting's agenda.
- Allan: I'm concerned that the wording "the board must approve minutes..." is too strong. Change "must" to "should" throughout.
  - Neil: The board must approve the minutes, but should approve them at the next meeting. Split the sentence into two: "The minutes of the board meeting must be approved by the board. Normally this should happen ..."
- Rob: These seem reasonable to me with the slightly reduced commitment level suggested by Allan and Neil. Happy to vote on this.
  - Neil: It doesn't seem necessary. I don't see an advantage other than making them harder to update, which may be an advantage or a disadvantage.
  - Philip: I was originally hesitant to vote on the guidelines because I would like them to stay adaptable at least until they are tested out. Maybe these guidelines will end up not working well.
  - Nuritzi: We can start following the guidelines and vote later if necessary.
- The board formally acknowledges the guidelines and urges the incoming board to adopt them.
LAS 2019 Bid
- Nuritzi: We have received a bid for Barcelona; from a team that has held conferences before. We don't have a set budget yet, so there's nothing for the board to vote on yet. They have a space in Barcelona with all the requirements for a 200-person conference with BoF days. Suggested dates are November 19–21; this doesn't conflict with GNOME Asia, which is the second weekend of October. The initial budget is USD 9000 for the conference and venue. We are still getting info on the deadline for confirming.
- Nuritzi: We'll need info on how much travel sponsorship we will require, if people don't naturally belong to KDE or GNOME travel sponsorship target groups — e.g. speakers or wider community participants.
  - Federico: Didn't one of the recently discussed initiatives suggest being able to sponsor people who are not Foundation members?
  - Nuritzi: That's from the travel committee, for newcomers, etc. The proposal is to split the travel funding between GNOME and KDE.
  - Philip: GUADEC and GNOME.Asia supply the money for travel sponsorships to their conferences, separately from the travel committee's budget.
  - Nuritzi: We can have a separate travel "bucket" in the conference budget, out of which both GNOME and KDE can sponsor people outside the GNOME and KDE projects.
  - Allan: Does this affect the amount to be raised from the original proposal? Will the money be raised by LAS itself, or GNOME and KDE?
    - Nuritzi: The responsibility lies on GNOME and KDE to both raise money for the operating budget, as in the shared sponsorship scheme in the original proposal. The LAS organization would allocate it.
  - Rob: I propose that instead of a separate bucket for people outside either community, we split the extra travel money between the GNOME and KDE travel sponsorship committees.
    - Carlos: Wouldn't sponsorships for people outside either project need to be handled by someone else?
    - Rob: The idea is to avoid a third team just by allocating people outside of either project to either of the existing travel committees.
    - Nuritzi: GNOME decides how many people to send from the GNOME Foundation, so that shouldn't be affected by the extra travel budget for people outside of either project.
    - Rob: This is not how GNOME currently accounts for conference travel budgets — I think we include the travel sponsorship within the conference budget and then hand it to the travel committee to administrate. So potentially this is something for LAS to consider, otherwise we'd need to approve essentially a portion of the LAS budget together with an extra chunk for the GNOME travel committee.
Further define GNOME Foundation Staff's role
- https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Board/issues/100
- Nuritzi: This has already started in conversations with Neil. Neil has started on a public-facing page explaining who is to be contacted when and their responsibilities. Another important thing is the process for escalation, if community members have issues with staff or vice versa.
Board transition
- Nuritzi: We sent a welcome email to the incoming board members. They should be added to the board materials on Friday when the election results are finalized, providing they sign the confidentiality agreement. We'll invite them to the next meeting, and have an onboarding section.
- Neil: The next Monday is the first of the month, so instead of a meeting we're having the presentation of the executive director's report.
- Allan: Not necessarily the whole board would need to be present at the onboarding session.
  - Nuritzi: Even if we have a separate onboarding session I think it's still worth spending 10 minutes at the beginning so they can hear from everyone.
- Allan: The handover action list from last time is in a GitLab issue: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Board/issues/76
- Rob: I think the ED report would be a good context for them to start in. We can do the onboarding during the post-ED-report discussion.
- Allan: We should consider having our annual board meeting on a call, since we would otherwise have to wait two months until GUADEC to distribute the officer positions and vote to appoint the committees. It would be nice to be able to save some time from the epic day-long board day at GUADEC for other discussions.
- Philip: Alternatively, officers don't have to be board members; current ones could keep their post until the in-person meeting at GUADEC.
- Neil: The annual meeting must be held no longer than 12 months after the previous one, although there may be more than one per year. So it would need to be held before GUADEC anyway.
  - Rosanna: What's the difference between the annual board meeting and the biweekly board meeting?
  - Neil: Officers are elected, otherwise nothing.
- Nuritzi: We will pick a date later after everyone has checked their vacation dates.
Note of thanks to outgoing board members
- Deferred