Regular Meeting of the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors, 11 May 2023, 17:00 UTC
Attending
Regrets
Missing
Consent Agenda
- Acknowledge receipt of
- Executive Committee Minutes
Discussion Agenda
Approve travel to GUADEC for all of Foundation staff
- Philip, Martín: Do we need to approve travel for directors as well?
- Rob: Yes; if over USD 1800.
- Rosanna: Normally I wouldn't be asking for this but the policy says we need to approve expenditures over USD 1800. At least one of the flights is going to be above that limit.
- Martín: Should we set an upper limit?
- Rob: In this case the choices are approve a reasonable flight, or the staff member doesn't get to go.
- VOTE: Approve travel to GUADEC for Foundation staff and board, even if travel exceeds USD 1800 per person (the remainder of the policy applies)
- PASSED: nem. con.
Updates on hiring a new Executive Director
- Rob: No updates. Have been trying to convene the search committee, in order to restart the momentum. Rosanna and I discussed applying the updates to the job description, then we'll publicize it. We can ask the Board and search committee to source candidates then.
- Regina: Rosanna has been acting as ED for the time being? I'd like to understand the scope.
- Rob: Chief of staff is an internal-facing role, ED is a marketing and fundraising role, which has been on pause.
Updates on Foundation Staff activities and requests
- Rosanna: Currently gearing up to get together at GUADEC. We are down on sponsorships. You may have seen my request on Discourse about approaching board members' employers for sponsorship. We are working with a bookkeeper now to take some administrative load off. Trying to get the annual report done before the advisory board meeting at GUADEC; not sure whether we want to print copies. Some advisory board members have said in the past that it's helpful to have a printed copy to put on the appropriate person's desk.
- Rob: Can we print on demand? If paper copies help our cause then we should make them available to partners that need.
Catching up with the community requests
GNOME Circle requests a Weblate instance https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Board/-/issues/279
- Rob already responded. Apparently the Damned-lies workflow doesn't work as well for non-core apps because it's very integrated with the GNOME release cycle. If we can get a Weblate instance for free, that's great and stops translators having to hunt in multiple places. Circle can require use of either Damned Lies or Weblate.
Snapshot app developer requests a PinePhone Pro
- Delegate to executive committee
- Michael Downey Digital Public Good suggestion/proposal for GNOME
- Rob: I'm familiar with this, but I'm not sure what the certification entails or what it enables.
- Philip: Where is the proposal? I couldn't find it when going through the agenda.
Rosanna: It was intended to be sent to board@gnome.org but there was some sort of infrastructure issue.
Rob: FYI - I was talking to Bart about if we could have board@gnome.org redirect to GitLab issues instead of Discourse. The Discourse gateway seems lossy/broken.
- Rosanna: The COC address was also affected and people received bounces and had to e-mail directly.
Sponsorship for OSCA FEST and Hackfest in Africa
- Regina: I attended this before Covid, where I spoke about GNOME for the first time. That promoted a GNOME presence in the Africa space. Sponsoring would give more visibility, and having a hackfest could help as well.
- Rob: Are there community members who are local to the event who could help with stands? Or does travel sponsorship need to be included in the cost?
- Regina: We have 250 local community members who are interested in GNOME but need direction. We can co-host a GNOME Africa mini-hackfest. I can bring physical things down there but we need to plan that now.
- Rosanna: June 15-17 is very soon.
- Martín: What is the concrete request?
Regina: I attached a sponsorship deck to the GitLab issue.
- Rosanna: I'm not sure how many people from outside Africa we can send at this late date. Last time Molly couldn't get a visa.
- Regina: The only person from outside Africa who needs to go is me. Two volunteers from Kenya and many others within Nigeria already.
- Rosanna: I think we need a total budget for the request: sponsorship, flights, etc.
- Regina: If we can decide on a sponsorship level then I can put together a budget.
- Rob: Do you have a sponsorship level in mind?
- Regina: The USD 5000 level.
- Rosanna: Have you asked if they have a nonprofit rate?
- Regina: Unlikely, because the event can't be held unless sponsors cover the costs.
- Rosanna: I did hear someone mention this at the event in London and it sounds like a very large event.
Regina: >8000 developers.
- Rob: I'm supportive, I think it'd be good to be represented here. USD 5000 seems a bit much, but maybe it's fine.
- Philip: What are the other options for sponsorship tiers?
- Regina: USD 2000, but then we don't get a booth.
- Rob: Without a booth it's not worth it.
- Rob: Flights from Sweden are ~USD 750 and flights from Kenya ~700. So we're looking at ~8000 USD in total with a bit of extra margin.
- Philip: I don't have a clear idea of whether it would be fiscally responsible to go into the reserves for this, compared with the benefit we get from it.
- Rosanna: Normally we don't sponsor events like this with cash. I think it's fine if we do it once, but if we did it recurrently we'd need to find a way to fund it.
- Rob: It's within the normal variance of the budget, so I don't think it's fiscally irresponsible. It's not going to affect the runway materially. It's up to us to generate the mission impact from our attendance, to make sure it's worth it.
- Martín: Next time I'd prefer for the event budget to be determined farther in advance.
- VOTE: Support OSCA festival at Silver sponsorship level, USD 5k and approve up to USD 3k of additional expenses (travel, logistics, etc) to staff a booth, hackfest, etc as proposed.
- +1 Philip, Rob, Regina. Abstained: Martín.
Proposal for GNOME Asia 2023 from Nepal and their budget request
- Rosanna: I need to leave now, but the main thing is that we need to know whether they have an entity to collect VAT.
Decide whether to proceed with proposed plan for Flathub LLC
- Rob: I would prefer not to vote on this with several board members absent. I'd like to set up a written motion.
- Martín: What's the benefit of the LLC?
- Rob: The LLC is tax-exempt. If the LLC is generating enough money to pay for itself, then we can make it into a corporation, but we can't use our money to fund a corporation. The corporation is a contingency plan for if Flathub generates too much non-mission revenue compared to the rest of the Foundation.
Approve the minutes of the April meeting
- Deferred.
Committee minutes
Executive committee meeting of May 10, 2023
- Travel policy
- Corrected error with Wiki page so that the budget for international flights is USD 1800 in both places
- Remaining staff approvals will add to consent agenda for tomorrow’s board call
- Bookkeepers
- Met last week, already input the budget into Quickbooks
- Hoping to close out last year’s finances for annual report and 990 filing
- Need to talk about Flathub – we’re opening up a new single member LLC which will be disregarded for federal tax purposes but needs its own books for tracking assets and liabilities, will process stripe payments, some grants and expenses mostly via a shared services agreement. What do they need to know to set it up? Call with Rob?
- Annual report
- Letter from President still outstanding
OpenCollective
- No movement; try and set up conversation with Karen
- Put the A-team folks on a holding pattern
- ED hiring
- Struggling to find time slot with search committee; let’s try and proceed anyway
- Send out a Rallly thing to get a slot in for next week
- Zana to apply Karen’s feedback to the job description
- Re-advertise on the list of places from Deb
Executive committee meeting of April 26, 2023
- Staff updates
- LAS happened! Hooray
- Annual report is in progress; president and finance reports needed
- Bart’s laptop being repaired one more time
- Caroline supporting Flathub Focus Group
- Thank you Caroline!
- GUADEC fundraising, $47k committed, still down on previous year
- GUADEC 2024 proposal
- Flights are two hops from LA
- Brazil is extremely hard to remit funds to
- A prospective 2nd bid is being considered
- Still waiting on budget sanity check
- Bookkeepers
- Very promising meeting with nonprofit experienced bookkeepers
- Good to get books in order before adding complexity of Flathub
- Approved!
OpenCollective
- Automated platform for fiscal hosting – we can keep different pots of money for collectives who can submit/approve their own expense reimbursements
Does it help people access funds in ways we can’t currently handle? Wise, PayPal, Stripe
- Potentially yes via virtual cards
Virtual cards currently suspended https://docs.opencollective.foundation/what-we-offer/virtual-cards-policy
- This is for OCF (one Fiscal Host) – maybe the app still supports it for our own fiscal host. It uses Stripe Issuing which appears to be a thing
- Let’s hold on the proposal from A-team for now and we can ask the Bookkeepers about it
Karen mentioned we could talk to her about Fiscal hosting & another NP’s experience with OC
- Let’s follow up there
- ED recruitment
- Not much has happened. Will ping Deb and the search committee again.
- Outstanding emails
Martin to reply re: GNOME LatAm
Executive committee meeting of April 12, 2023
- Foundation updates
- Struggling with GUADEC sponsors coming in lower than previously
- Does the board have any potential contacts?
- Board needs to respond to GUADEC Brazil proposal
- On the agenda!
- Issues with Discourse e-mail integration
- Bart struggling with hardware issues
- Staff working on diversity document to summarise what we’ve been working on previously
Caroline & Kristi working on CHAOSS Gold badge for GUADEC
- Travel committee needs to start working on GUADEC submissions
- Struggling with GUADEC sponsors coming in lower than previously
- Bookkeeper
- Appointment with local nonprofit bookkeepers tomorrow
- GSoC / Outreachy
- Felipe / Martin chasing about GSoC mentor payments and Outreachy payments
- GSoC mentor payments are a real pain administratively – need to set up every mentor as a contractor so they can invoice
Is there any way we can not do this? E.g. provide reimbursable funds instead? (OpenCollective!!!)
- Outreachy invoice got lost in the lost payment debacle – paid now
OpenCollective
- Zana received invitation – Rob has set up an empty org
- Three parallel tracks:
- Can we use it internally? Eg set up a travel or reimbursement pot and give it a try?
- Speak with Karen about fiscal hosting / sponsorship terms
Bookkeeping integration and how to reconcile OpenCollective transactions w/ Quickbooks – following up w/ accountants that OC recommended
Executive committee meeting of March 1, 2023
- Foundation updates
- Staff is continuing to do what they need to do
- Melissa is working on putting together a volunteer plan
- Kristi working on GUADEC, LAS and annual report
Manuel Haro has been in touch about GNOME LatAm
—> Board agenda for March
- Caroline working on SCALE merch
- Working w/ Melissa for Flathub focus group stuff
- Updating GNOME.org content, looking for refreshed Wordpress theme
- Bart
Blocking GitLab spammers
- Flathub verification and getting Beta site online
- Zana
- Health insurance paperwork
- Adboard invoicing
- Staff concerns with initiatives
- Transparency, Diversity, Volunteers / Newcomers
- How to prioritise vs fundraising?
- How to start with diversity initiatives?
- Bookkeeper
- Krissa not available but had a suggestion
- Staff is continuing to do what they need to do
- ED search
- One candidate left hanging, Rob to phone screen
- Re-ping the committee, next action is probably to re-advertise the role with the new JD
OpenCollective
- We’ll sign up!
- And set up a call with A-team accountants about how to integrate with Quickbooks
- Other stuff
Appointing Martin as chair: Rob to set up written motion on GitLab
- Also Anisa to COC committee and Sonny to Circle committee
- Ping Luis for software/Circle legal query