Minutes for Friday, December 05th, 2014, 17:00 UTC

Next meeting due on December 19th, 2014 at 17:00 UTC

Attending

  • Ekaterina Gerasimova
  • Rosanna Yuen
  • Marina Zhurakhinskaya
  • Jeff Fortin
  • Andrea Veri
  • Sriram Ramkrishna
  • Karen Sandler

Regrets

Missing

  • Tobias Mueller

Board meeting

  • Sysadmin contract renewal: $4.6K remaining. Fundraise, till-the-funds-end contract renewal, or assign new general funds?
    • Andrea: we have a lot of infrastructure needs; before I joined the infrastructure was in a lot of need
    • current contract 80 hours a month; there were many times when Andrea worked more hours, but coul not bill for them
    • logs (from rdiff-backup) together with logwatch excerpts are being checked every day to keep consistency between machines
    • if there are no new projects 80 hours a month is generally sufficient
    • maintain relationship with other projects, such as Fedora that hosts our backups, GTK and GIMP that now rely on our infrastructure for all their needs/services
    • Rosanna: 80 hours a month was added as a limit to stretch the money that were fundraised
    • Andrea is graduating in April
    • Finding new people for the team has always been a problem; we need to be selective about who we give access to private information
    • Fedora has a program that gives limited access to new sysadmins (Fedora Infrastructure Apprentices). Plan to create a similar system on the GNOME Infrastructure is planned already (making Puppet public and introducing a more fine-grained authentication system like FreeIPA)

    • The only person who is the other major current contributor is Patrick, working on OpenID authentication for GNOME infrastructure project - https://github.com/FedOAuth/FedOAuth ; he is a full-time sys admin for Fedora, and brings a lot of his experience across; he can be a backup when Andrea is on vacation

    • There is a lot of documentation at https://wiki.gnome.org/Sysadmin/SOP (Standard Operation Procedures, includes a list of documentation new sysadmins can follow to interact with GNOME services)

    • Proccess for getting and manging new GNOME accounts is now a lot simpler: https://wiki.gnome.org/NewAccounts

    • Bugzilla needs more documentation and attention
    • Machines that were out of warranty were upgraded/replaced by new machines
    • [Andrea left the call for the board to discuss his work freely] The board is very happy with his work and everyone thinks he is doing awesome work, with many examples of the critical work he completed and new helpful infrastructure he introduced
    • Average amount we spend is $1K USD a month; the hourly rate is fixed in Euros at 14 Euro / currently $17.45 USD; he averages in billing us about 50 hours a month
    • Conclusion/note: we need to have more discussion about the terms of the contract
  • Alexandre Franke's GUADEC 2014 expenses reimbursement
    • EUR 15258.17 TOTAL
      • EUR 13549.80 for GUADEC expenses
      • EUR 727.17 for Mentor Summit 2013 travel
      • EUR 981.20 for Mentor Summit 2014 travel
    • VOTE: send EUR 15258.17 in reimbursement: +1 Kat, Marina, Jeff, Andrea
  • GUADEC 2015 Sponsor Brochure Draft (vote moved to the mailing list)
  • Decide when the next board meeting will be: 12 or 19 December, or in January?
    • 19 December seems to be fine for everyone
  • DEFERRED - Review pending action items/varia
    • DEFERRED to the mailing list: Request for contract terms change from one OPW mentor
  • DEFERRED - Karen's GUADEC 2014 travel expenses reimbursement
  • DEFERRED - Groupon
  • Deferred until further mailing list discussion occurs from other board members (or missing info):
    • Emma Stamm's proposal for a research project around nonprofit management
    • GNOME Privacy project (what to do with the remaining funds): hackfest? internships?
    • NDA for sysadmins (for the privacy policy)

Discussed on the mailing list

  • Potential DX hackfest in early 2015
  • GUADEC 2015's Sponsor Brochure Draft
  • Flexible dates for Outreach Program internships and payments
    • Shifting the internship dates and payment for participants having additional commitments
    • This exception should not become the rule and ideally restricted to side cases
    • Rosanna to keep track of the delayed payments and transactions on the wiki - flexibility comes with the cost of more documentation
    • Rosanna should report the Board if the workload will become too high for her to track the separate payments efficiently
    • VOTE: +1 Marina, Karen, Andrea, Kat, Sri, Jeff
  • Waived/reduced admin fees for the Outreach Program
    • Waive or reduce the admin fee for organizations for whom the fee is a hardship (like for non-profit orgs)
    • Vote dropped because this is not an issue to any organisations this round
  • Revised contracts for Outreach Program
    • Project Ascend is now part of the Outreach Program
    • The program has changed from OPW to OP, reflect the change on the contracts
    • Payments to interns are subject to the GNOME Foundation having received a signed contract from the mentor
    • Potential mentors have to waive rights under the contract
    • The contracts discourage some Foundation members from mentoring
    • VOTE: +1 Karen, Marina, Jeff, Tobi, Sri; Kat did not vote on the grounds that the contracts are not in the interest of the Foundation members

Completed actions

Pending action items

  • GNOME's CoC: Board to follow up in the upcoming meetings and prepare a version of the CoC to be finally considered final over all the GNOME yearly events
  • Edward Swartz's "philantropist donation": Sri to email him to thank, say we're getting a gift together, ask about reasons motivating his great donation, maybe offer an interview? And verify his mailing address.
  • 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 draft a contract template for future use organizations for which we handle money
  • Karen to write the Privacy policy for GNOME services
  • Karen will look at gnome-software privacy issues from a legal standpoint
  • Karen to draft a proposal for the photography policy at GNOME conferences to discuss on foundation-list
  • 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

  • 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
  • Sri, Marina, Kat to work on establishing criteria for drafting for the hiring committee for the ED role
  • Sri to investigate the GNOME gifts situation

FoundationBoard/Minutes/20141205 (last edited 2014-12-15 17:52:17 by AndreaVeri)