Minutes for Tuesday, May 6th, 2014, 16:00 UTC

Next meeting

  • Tuesday, May 20th, 2014, 16:00 UTC

Attending

  • Andreas Nilsson
  • Marina Zhurakhinskaya
  • Tobias Mueller
  • Joanmarie Diggs
  • Ekaterina Gerasimova
  • Emmanuele Bassi
  • Rosanna Yuen
  • Sriram Ramkrishna

Board Meeting Agenda

  • Conference sponsorship
    • Marina, Tobi, and the GNOME.Asia local team have been hard at work to find sponsors
    • Kat proposes that GUADEC and GNOME.Asia discounted sponsorship is by default split proportionately and that it's officially recorded for future reference
      • For instance: GUADEC sponsorship is 10k, GNOME.Asia is 5k; if the combined donation is 12k, we split at 8k/4k, maintaining the same proportion
      • The proportion depends on the sponsorship levels between the two conferences
    • Improve ability to plan a conference budget
    • The board can still override this on a case by case basis
    • Can this be left to the board discretion?
      • Better to document this as part of the process for organising our conferences

    • ACTION: Kat to document the GUADEC/GNOME.Asia combined sponsorship on the wiki

  • Finances
    • Kat sent a to-date budget/account summary to review on board-list
    • USD ~160k reserves
      • Removing the funds that are earmarked for reimbursements, GNOME.Asia, expected invoices and OPW we have around USD 30k to spend on operational costs
    • GUADEC is also coming up and required a travel budget
    • Publish up-to-date projected budget on the wiki
      • We usually publish only the account summary as part of the annual report
      • We don't publish the operating budget for the current year
        • We used to do that with a fairly complicated spreadsheet
      • It could lead to more PR issue because people will not take the time to properly understand it
      • Once we unfreeze the expenses we could summarise our budget
      • We should revisit publishing a summarised budget monthly, quarterly, or yearly
      • The board should have access to more financial updates
      • Increase accountability of the financials for board, advisory board, and membership
      • Consider doing from the new financial year so that there's a clean break
  • Receiving Donations in the EU via the Wau Holland Stiftung (WHS)
    • Went through various rounds of reviews
    • Comments on the board mailing list
    • Tobi, Karen had a meeting with WHS last year
    • Advantages for the foundation
      • Allow bank transfer in the EU
    • Disadvantages
      • Administrative fees
    • Does it impact GUADEC?
      • Not really
      • We have local organizations that handle the money closer to the local team

    • ACTION: Tobi to draft a new agreement after the feedback from the board

    • We will vote as soon as we have a reply
  • Travel sponsorship processing and reimbursements
    • New process has been in place for 9 to 10 months
    • Has not been very successful
    • Burden imposed on the event organisers and the board
    • Vetting by the board has not been up to par
    • Board assigned more funds than the travel committee used to, and to fewer people
    • Re-evaluate the travel sponsorship process
    • The travel committee is now four people strong (soon to be five)
    • Options
      • Allocate a fixed budget every year/quarter
      • Have the travel committee ask for a budget for each event
      • Mix between the two
        • Allocate a fixed budget and allow for extensions on a case by case basis
      • We need to properly document the whole process

    • ACTION: Kat to draft a new policy for the travel committee and send it to the board for review

  • Handling Friends of GNOME gifts
    • We should investigate having gift vouchers or print-on-demand from online printing web services

    • ACTION: Andreas to investigate the GNOME gifts situation

  • Visa fees reimbursements
    • We usually did not reimburse visa costs
    • We want to reassess this situation
    • Visa costs can be fairly expensive, especially for students
    • If we're willing to expense travel we should probably expense the visa cost in case it was rejected
    • The Foundation does not benefit directly from reimbursing visa costs, so they cannot be treated the same as travel
    • In some cases, we invited attendees
    • Travel committee guidance rules say that the visa will not be reimbursed after the fact
    • [Discussion of this item was not finished in this meeting, will be continued at a later time…]
  • Upcoming events
    • GUADEC 2014
      • We will need to decide how much resources should be allocated for the travel expenses
        • EUR 30k (42K USD) is the usual budget
      • We should wait until we receive more payments

Discussed on the mailing list

Completed Actions

  • Kat and board to review the tax return form
  • Tobi to follow up the GNOME.Asia budget issue with the local organisers
  • Board will review the agreement for collecting funds in Europe

Pending action items

  • Andreas to put together a GNOME supporter card for our donors
  • Andreas, Joanie to draft thank you letters to our donors
  • Andreas to investigate the GNOME gifts situation
  • Emmanuele to send Zana and Tobi an update on FoG donors gifts
  • Emmanuele to send hackers up for "adoption" the list of donors that want a postcard
  • Emmanuele to draft a date and time for the post-release meeting
  • Emmanuele to send a proposal to foundation-list about possible IRC meetings
  • Emmanuele to ask the adboard members for help with Bugzilla update
  • Joanie to draft a proposal for the photography policy at GNOME conferences to discuss on foundation-list
  • Joanie and Karen to meet and discuss about the photography policy for GNOME events
  • Joanie to go over Michael Schumacher ideas on the Gimp funding processes and merge them with her ideas on the wiki
  • Kat to create a private wiki page on the web services accounts holders and passwords
    • Allan and Kat decided to go for a private git account instead for security reasons
  • Kat to draft a proposal for a privacy policy for review
  • Kat to document the GUADEC/GNOME.Asia combined sponsorship on the wiki
  • Kat to draft a new policy for the travel committee and send it to the board for review
  • Karen to write the Privacy policy for GNOME services
  • Karen will look at gnome-software privacy issues from a legal standpoint
  • Tobi to continue pursuing the fund collection in Europe

  • Tobi to talk to Andrea to move the PayPal data extraction scripts over to the GNOME infrastructure

  • Tobi to follow up with Alexandre and Karen about the contract for the GUADEC local organisation
  • Tobi to draft a new agreement after the feedback from the board
  • Sri to investigate better uses of adsense/adwords on the GNOME websites
  • Sri to communicate to Rosanna and work on the donation for the West Coast hackfest
  • Zana to check the inventory of merch she has in storage (low priority)

FoundationBoard/Minutes/20140506 (last edited 2014-05-19 10:36:42 by EkaterinaGerasimova)