Minutes for Meeting of July 3, 2009

Next Meeting

July 16, 2009

Attendance

  • Behdad Esfahbod
  • Brian Cameron
  • Germán Póo-Caamaño
  • John (J5) Palmieri (arrived at noon)
  • Lucas Rocha
  • Rosanna Yuen
  • Srinivasa Ragavan (arrived at noon)
  • Stormy Peters
  • Vincent Untz

Regrets

  • Luis Villa (Luis apologized profusely - school and other GNOME projects took more time than he thought)
  • Diego Escalante Urrelo (flight was cancelled)

Minutes

Roundtable And Introduction

  • The board members introduced themselves to each other.
  • Some discussion to help new board members understand how the board operates.
  • What new members would like to see:
    • Transparency: things should be more public, and better explained to the wider community.
    • Board should not be a "black hole" and make sure to answer in a timely manner.
    • Should conduct IRC meetings so the community can discuss directly with the board.
    • Making more noise about new things (e.g. aside from minutes)

Areas To Focus

  • Minutes did not go well in the past term, need to improve.
  • Glynn Foster's style of minutes were given as an example of good meeting minutes that we should strive to follow.
  • Ensure that minutes are sent promptly after the meeting.
  • Need to make better use of templates when putting together minutes.
  • Be more aggressive about ensuring that Action Items are handled promptly.
  • Need to do a weekly blog and update email to the foundation-list after each board meeting, in addition to normal minutes.
  • Need to be better about sharing decisions that others outside the board may be waiting upon.
  • Need to send emails about topics that should be visible to the community, and make sure they go unnoticed in meeting minutes.
  • Should do an IRC meeting. Let's do one and see how it goes. If people like it we can keep doing them. Planning for September. August will not be a good time because too many people will not be available.

Process

  • Decided to determine who will be chairperson, vice-chairperson, treasurer, secretary at a follow-up meeting.
  • The chairperson will be responsible for putting together the agenda before each meeting, and the secretary will be responsible for putting together and publishing the meeting minutes.

  • When delegating, give responsibility & authority; have a board member responsible to follow up and make sure everything is going fine.

  • Need a "New Members Guide" and perhaps an "Employee Handbook". Need to find volunteers willing to help.
  • Need a policy for how to deal with board members who become inactive. For example, privately touch base with the person privately when an issue has become visible, and further actions if the person is not responsive. Must be clear that a board member can loose their position if they become inactive.
  • Will discuss if the board members want to be assigned to particular area roles (marketing, legal, etc.). This has been done in the past, but has not seemed particularly effective.
  • At GUADEC, make sure the leaders of each team (marketing, release, travel, mobile, membership, a11y, usability, localization, gugmeisters, legal, bugsquad, etc.) give an update (ala the Lightning Talks).
  • Considered creating a "rookie of the year" award.

Finances & Marketing

Summary:

  • Overview of finances, the Foundation GnuCash accounting data, and our current budget.

  • Expenses:

    • Wages & Travel - $73,584.64

    • Programs: - $12,000.00
    • Community Development - $10.896.83
    • Marketing: - $1,775.15
    • Bank Service Charge - $1,365.91
    • Administrative Expenses - $894.52
  • Suggestion that the budget needs to have more clear goals to measure our progress against.
  • Friends of GNOME (FoG) has been very successful. Amount contributed has been growing this year. About $1,000 in renewable subscribers per month.
  • Status of FoG donation ruler should show different colors for money from Friends of GNOME versus from companies.
  • Hackfests got cut in the past year, and the Foundation wants to make sure that they are resources for the next year.
  • Perhaps the Foundation budget should be used to have a certain number of hackfests per year (perhaps 1-2), for example. For additional hackfests, look for sponsors.

  • Discussion about raising AdBoard fees. They have been the same for 10 years and the GNOME Foundation has grown quite a bit. Also, even planning ahead, we see that depending on sponsors to cover all hackfests means they can be cancelled.

  • Make sure to delegate to the marketing team.
  • Should the marketing team handle the marketing of the GNOME Foundation? Finding new sponsors, for example.
  • For October, have next budget ready.
    • Next year should not be worse than this year, fundraising-wise
    • Perhaps do a budget with the same amount of money, and another one that is a bit more optimistic.

Travel Committee

  • Make sure that people who receive Travel subsidies know what is expected that they do to promote the fact they were sponsored, and how they can help. Examples: help share in costs by paying a certain percentage of travel costs if possible, do write-ups, etc. Should also do things like publish lists and photos of people who received subsidies and to more clearly advertise the benefits of how the Foundation spends money.
  • 36 people were sponsored for travel last year, over 40 this year.

Mobile

  • Mobile team: Nils is doing a good job => add him to the team lead.

  • Lots of interest, but lack of agreement on the vision. The only thing the whole group agrees to is a "set of components", which is not exciting).
  • High expectations from mobile companies, but no strong agreement on the direction to take.
  • Move closer to Moblin, try to convince intel that the UI parts should be hosted by GNOME (technologies are the same, they would gain developers, etc.)

Events

  • Time spent preparing for the AGM (Annual General Meeting) at GUADEC. Germán & Lucas will be preparing slides.

  • Time spent preparing for the advisory board meeting.
  • J5 will organize the Boston Summit again.
  • Where will GUADEC be next year? Should be more near a major airport. Perhaps Frankfurt, London, Paris, or Amsterdam? Perhaps the Foundation should do more to seek out organizers in such a city?
  • Nice to see "Sponsored by GNOME Foundation" badges for GUADEC and other events and the Foundation should expand on this.

Miscellaneous

  • Need to make sure legal, trademark, etc. issues get addressed while Luis is busy getting married and passing the bar, now that he is no longer on the board.
  • Work closer with Moblin and see if certain Moblin UI components could be hosted via GNOME.
  • Thank you to Sun for the use of the conference phone #.

Recurring Items

  • Review past action items
  • Approve and make sure that minutes of last meeting were sent
  • Sysadmin hiring - waiting for funding
  • Update foundation.gnome.org website.

Action Items

Completed Actions

  • Brian & Lucas - Represent the board at the marketing BOF. Make sure the marketing team feels empowered.

  • Diego & Vincent - Contact committee about scheduling/mechanics of election

  • Germán & Lucas - Prepare AGM slides.

  • J5 - Put out an announcement about postponement of call for 2010 GUADEC locations.
  • Stormy - Adjust budget to current fiscal year.

Old items

  • Behdad & J5 - Figure out how to scrub the GnuCash file so it can be made public.

  • Brian - GNOME.Asia
  • Brian - Send out information about international general liability and accident insurance to the foundation-list to see if there is any interest or thoughts from the community. The email was sent, but no response, so seems like there is not much interest.
  • Diego - Contact the sysadmin team about account creation. Talk with Bruno about who needs accounts.

  • J5 - Figure out how to import Paypal data into GnuCash.

  • J5 - Announce Boston Summit details.
  • Luis - Review of charter and bylaws and work towards a new draft.
  • Luis - Address GNOME logo trademark issues.

  • Luis - Should the Foundation endorse the Franklin Statement on Freedom and Network Services: http://autonomo.us/2008/07/franklin-street-statement/

  • Rosanna - Send current process, GnuCash file and download spreadsheet from Paypal to J5.

  • Rosanna - Update GNOME Guidestar website.
  • Stormy - GNOME Foundation needs a CRM.
  • Stormy - Set up 401k program for Foundation employees.
  • Stormy - Setup Google Adwords.
  • Stormy - Should the GNOME Foundation buy a blanket LWN membership.
  • Vincent - Ping Hackerthreads to add new products.
  • Whoever becomes treasurer - Craft next year's budget and annual report.

  • Whoever becomes treasurer & Alberto - Set up a Euro bank account.

New items

  • Brian - Get information about what should be in an "Employee Handbook".
  • Brian - Collect information about more concrete benefits to the advisory board from sponsoring travel.
  • Diego - Write new employee guide on the Wiki.
  • Germán - Put together a proposal for how to address board members who become inactive.
  • J5 - Propose new obligations that people who receive travel subsidies should be asked to do in return.

  • Lucas - Work with Andreas for the donation ruler. Try to put $15k in the ruler in "yellow" ($10k for Canonical, $5k for Google) to indicate that these funds are matching. http://www.gnome.org/friends/drive/

  • Vincent - Implement an automatic reminder email for meetings.
  • Vincent - Check to make sure that gnome-legal is still alive since Luis is not going to be able to focus so much energy on this.
  • Vincent - Find people to help organize the next GUADEC.

Blocking On

  • N/A

Discussed on board-list

  • Setting up Amazon Associates account.
  • Need a better code-of-conduct policy - relating to the issues raised by Dave Neary on the foundation-list.
  • Should the GNOME Foundation buy a blanket LWN membership?

  • Stormy wrote an article about GNOME in OSBR: http://www.osbr.ca/ojs/index.php/osbr/article/view/883/853

  • Should the GNOME Foundation do something to endorse the Franklin Street Statement on Freedom and Network Services http://autonomo.us/2008/07/franklin-street-statement/

  • Discussion about organizing a hackfest at SFScon.
  • Should Rosanna report to Stormy or Vincent?
  • Set up a Euro bank account.

  • Changed the admin address of the Foundation blog to board@gnome.org to better process requests.

  • Stormy has a speaking opportunity at Openmind 2009, they will pay travel expenses.
  • Worked on an agreement to award Joanmarie Diggs $6k for Webkit accessibility work.
  • Putting together release announcement for Boston Summit.

Private Items

  • None

FoundationBoard/Minutes/20090703 (last edited 2010-01-31 00:49:54 by LucasRocha)