Minutes for Meeting of July 23, 2009

Next Meeting

August 6, 2009

Attendance

• Brian Cameron
• Germán Póo-Caamaño
• Lucas Rocha
• Rosanna Yuen
• Srinivasa Ragavan
• Stormy Peters (first 28 minutes)
• Vincent Untz

Regrets

• Behdad Esfahbod
• Diego Escalante Urrelo

Minutes

Recurring Items

• Review past action items
• Approve and make sure that minutes of last meeting were sent
• Make sure to start up the gobby server for better note taking.
• Sysadmin hiring - waiting for funding
• Update foundation.gnome.org website.

Old items

• None

New items

• Proposing to do a joint press with the FSF Foundation about supporting diversity.
• GNOME.Asia
  • Call for bids ended on July 10th.
  • Stormy talked to Emily at OSCON. Stormy will forward details to Brian, and Brian will follow up.
• Officers For Next Term:
  • Chairman: Vincent.
  • Vice-chairman: Srini.
  • Secretary: Brian.
  • Treasurer: Germán (with some problems to work during the first two months).
  • Vice-Treasurer: Lucas (will take the work during the first two months).
• City of Largo, Florida 2009 Hackfest

  • Lucas contacted Federico - have some ideas for content and goals. There is a Wiki page: http://live.gnome.org/HackFest/Largo2009

  • Will schedule a meeting on IRC next week. Will send out an email to the board list so people from the board can attend.

• Raising AdBoard fees:

  • Stormy working on this.

  • Stormy should send a proposal to the AdBoard or to each AdBoard member.

  • Should also involve gnome-marketing.
• Should we create a new mailing list for old board members when the new board needs to ask questions about things that happened a long time ago?
  • The board members, in general, did not think this sounded very useful.
• Annual Reports
  • Lucas is working on printing and sending out the report.
  • Will have it uploaded to lulu.com by next Monday (July 27). After that, we need to decide how many copies we want to print.

Action Items

Completed Actions

• Everyone - Fill out online survey to determine best time for the bi-weekly board meeting.
• Diego - Write new employee guide on the Wiki.
• Vincent - Compose a letter to the KDE board explaining that we will not be co-locating next year, and that there is an interest in doing it again in the future.

Old Actions

• Behdad - Tasked with scrubbing the GnuCash file so it can be made public. Still pending.

• Brian - Get information about what should be in an "Employee Handbook". Still pending.
• Brian - Find out status about GNOME.Asia Summit this year.
• Brian - Since there was little interest on the foundation-list about getting international general liability and accident insurance, the board decided to not pursue getting such coverage at this time. Brian agreed to follow-up with the lawyers to find out what sort of text we should include in the travel subsidy agreement to ensure that people who receive subsidy understand that the Foundation is not providing coverage.

• Brian - Follow-up on legal-private@gnome.org to ensure that Luis' old items are being managed:

  • Review of charter and bylaws and work towards a new draft.
  • Address GNOME logo trademark issues.

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

• Diego - Contact the sysadmin team about account creation. Talk with Bruno about who needs accounts. Still pending, and Diego expects this task to be done by next meeting.
• Germán - Put together a proposal for how to address board members who become inactive. This will be done by the end of July 23rd.
• Germán - Take over J5's previous task to 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/

• Rosanna - Research the GNOME Guidestar website and update if necessary.

• Srini - Will take over Rosanna's task to ping J5 for status about importing Paypal data into GnuCash.

• Stormy - Putting the 401k program for Foundation employees is still in process. Updated document is in legal review.
• Stormy - GNOME Foundation needs a CRM. Meeting with John Carr on Friday.
• Stormy - Setup Google Adwords. Plan to do this next week.
• Stormy - Should the GNOME Foundation buy a blanket LWN membership. Very low priority. Will bring it up with Jonathan Corbet when they next meet.
• Stormy - Compose the GCDS press release. Draft done and being discussed on GCDS forums.
• Vincent - Implement an automatic reminder email for meetings. Waiting for the time of the bi-weekly meetings to be settled before doing this.
• 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.
• Whoever becomes treasurer - Craft next year's budget and annual report.

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

New Action Items

• Brian - Publish board minutes.
• Germán - To send an apology email to the journalists that we didn't end up flying to GUADEC.
• Lucas - City of Largo, Florida hackfest organization. Planning an IRC meeting next week and will let the board know when the IRC meeting will happen.

• Lucas - Send KDE & GNOME board minutes to the KDE board to be reviewed before they are made public.

• Srini - Put out call for GUADEC hosts. First check with Stormy what questions the bidders should answer so that we can take an informed choice.
• Stormy - Start discussion on marketing list for our plan for activities for next year, including raising fees.

• Stormy - Contact AdBoard members about raising fees.

• Stormy - Get information about activities for the next year (teams, local groups)
• Vincent - Check with Luis about Franklin St.

Discussed on board-list

• Further ongoing discussion about the best way to respond about the fact that some people at the GCDS were offended by Richard Stallman's keynote. The board is seeking advice from appropriate persons and waiting response.
• The GNOME a11y team is going to use $2,000 of the money earmarked for a11y to host a GNOME booth at CSUN, an accessibility conference.
• Discussion about sending an email to the KDE board about not co-locating next year.
• Discussion about sending out the GCDS release notes.
• Two journalists, Ryan Paul and Jake from LWN were going to have their travel arrangements paid to attend the GCDS summit, but last minute confusion caused them to not be able to come. So there was discussion about how to best address this, and the board decided to send an apology and to consider making plans to invite them to a future event.
• Suggestion that we should also provide an annual Friends of GNOME subscription since that would involve fewer credit card fees.
• The board agreed by vote to consider paying travel expenses for people to attend the Boston Summit, but only if there are concrete goals that will be achieved by doing so.

• Rosanna provided the GnuCash file containing Foundation financials for the board members to review.

Private Items

• N/A