Minutes for Monday, May 2nd 2016, 19:30 UTC

Next meeting date Monday, May 09th, 19:30 UTC

Wiki: https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20160502

Attending

  • Alexandre Franke
  • Jeff F. T.
  • Andrea Veri
  • Ekaterina Gerasimova
  • Allan Day
  • Rosanna Yuen

Regrets

Missing

  • Cosimo Cecchi

Agenda

  • GNOME (Reg. No. 3,142,483); G and Foot Print design (Reg. No. 3,142,484)
  • GUADEC registration fee vs donation system
  • "Request for information concerning GNOME Foundation" from UIA.org
  • "Follow up Cairns Hosting GNOME Asia Summit"
  • Adboard meeting

Ongoing

The following section is part of the Agenda and includes items which have seen updates in the last 30 days. Items which have been updated more than 30 days ago are listed under the "Ongoing but stalled" section.

  • ED Search Update
  • Unixstickers
  • Google ad grant
  • Selling 3rd party merch at confs
  • Friends of GNOME

Minutes

  • GNOME (Reg. No. 3,142,483); G and Foot Print design (Reg. No. 3,142,484)
    • The trademark was the very first being created, the official one is now different
    • We had a discussion about this with Pam and she mentioned we probably don't need to renew it anymore, we should probably double-check
    • ACTION: Jeff to check archives and ask Pam
  • GUADEC registration fee vs donation system
    • In Germany registration fees and donations are legally treated differently
    • On our side of the pond, it makes no difference
    • Donations could be bridged by the WHS Foundation as their summary statement does include name and surnames we could match against attendees registrations happening through the GUADEC website
    • It makes things considerably more difficult to offer more ways to pay for registration, so we advise to keep things as simple as possible
    • ACTION: Kat to get back to Benjamin
    • ACTION: Alexandre to ask WHS about the fee
  • "Follow up Cairns Hosting GNOME Asia Summit"
    • ACTION: Jeff to call

Ongoing

This section includes items which have seen an update in the last 30 days. Format is "YYYY-MM-DD, action|discussion|resume" for this and subsequent minutes sections

  • ED search update
    • 2015-12-01, No news received in recent weeks, mostly because of holidays
    • 2015-12-08, 3 candidates are going to have a couple of one hour interviews with ~2 members of the hiring committee per interview. Scheduling of these metings is just beginning.
    • 2015-12-15 to 2015-01-12, No updates.
    • 2016-01-19
      • Committee has completed interview with two final candidates
      • They should have a final answer/proposal to the board within a few weeks
    • 2016-02-02, Expect more news this week - we'll start scheduling interviews soon
    • 2016-02-09
      • Sri from the ED committee wants to present to the Board at next week's meeting
      • A list of candidates that are deemed good and have been vetted by the committee will be presented at the meeting
    • 2016-02-16, The ED Search committee converged on a single candidate

    • 2016-02-23, The item has been discussed during the meeting, details are available at https://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-announce/2016-February/msg00003.html

    • 2016-03-14, Jonathan Blandford (jrb) has agreed to lead
    • 2016-04-11, Jonathan mailed the Board mentioning the ED Search Committee is back on track, they'll start meeting on a regular basis again
  • Unixstickers
    • 2016-02-02
      • Allan has an action item to follow up with this
      • Kat put some information on the agreements page for similar cases
    • 2016-02-09, Allan drafted email - need to send that out
    • 2016-02-16, Allan has been in touch with them. Got a good response and sent a draft agreement document. Will be having a call with them on Friday.
    • 2016-02-23 (excerpts taken from the mailing list)
      • Allan confirms the Unixstickers team read the draft trademark agreement and acknowledged it
      • 10% of the proceeds will be returned back as royalties
      • Only GNOME sticakers are sold right now, the idea is to encourage them to also sell t-shirts and mugs
    • 2016-03-01, Allan followed up and is now waiting to hear back to Unixstickers
    • 2016-03-08, Allan to ask who will pay for postage
    • 2016-03-22, they'll pay for sticker postage
    • 2016-04-04, Allan has asked Pam to draft an agreement for them to sign. Waiting to hear back.
    • 2016-05-02
      • Pam sent a draft back to the Board, certain details (such as royalty prices for items) are still to be discussed
      • A vote has happened on the mailing list as a general "we're good with it" approval, another vote will be required before signing it
  • Google ad grant
    • 2016-02-02, Alexandre to follow up with the procedure to get registered
    • 2016-02-09 to 2016-02-23, No updates

    • 2016-03-01, Shaun will ask his contacts about TechSoup as joining the organization is required for us to be recognized as a non-profit from Google

    • 2016-04-11, Rosanna to provide Shaun the needed tax-related documentation (IRS Data check should be enough for Google to assign the grant if the non-profit is US based)
  • Next adboard meeting
  • Friends of GNOME
    • 2016-04-04, ACTION: Andrea to get in touch with Tobi about what he needs in order to migrate the Paypal scripts over to the GNOME Foundation Infrastructure
    • 2016-04-04, ACTION: Shaun to investigate other possible solutions to mere Python scripts + Paypal API solution

    • 2016-04-04, ACTION: Allan to investigate what information is needed to answer friends@gnome.org queries, with a view to potentially turning off paypal notifications to that address.

    • 2016-04-04, ACTION: Allan to get in touch with the Engagement team about all this as a first step,with a view to recruiting people to maintain Friends of GNOME and document how it operates.
    • 2016-04-11, ACTION: Alexandre to request more information about the donation data from the European donations system (Wau Holland Stiftung Foundation)
    • Selling 3rd party merch at confs
      • 2016-04-11, There's a proposal (by Allan) to sell third party merchandise during GNOME events

Ongoing but stalled

This section includes items which haven't seen an update in the last 30 days.

  • Google Play account
    • 2015-12-01, ACTION: Alexandre to follow up with the Release Team about this
    • 2015-12-08, Alexandre mailed the Release Team today, still waiting for an answer.
    • 2015-12-15 to 2016-01-19, No updates.
    • 2016-02-02, Release team did not come to an agreement/conclusion. Unclear what next steps should be
  • Status of logo copyright
    • 2015-12-01, ACTION: Shaun to send out email to d-d-l with proposal
    • 2015-12-08 to 2016-01-19, No updates.
    • 2016-02-02, Shaun will try to pick it up this week

  • Meta-discussion on attracting new contributors - https://etherpad.gnome.org/p/attracting-contributors-discussion

    • 2016-01-05, Item has been deferred.
    • 2016-02-09, Allan and Jeff have a list of ideas, we could rank them by feasibility/effectiveness and take action on the first few
  • Bitcoins donations data
    • Tobi is the only person with access to the Bitcoin donations data
    • 2016-02-23, ACTION: Alexandre to get in touch with him about this

    • 2016-03-01, Account is on BitPay using friends@gnome.org

  • Conference sponsorships
    • 2016-03-15
      • ACTION: Kat to adapt a contract from previous years' conference brochures
      • ACTION: Jeff to chase the companies for a second time after the pages (where the status of whether/which companies have been contacted is listed) are up to date
  • Yorba Copyrights
  • 2016-03-28, ACTION: Kat to communicate with Yorba and propose them to first get in touch with other organizations then come back to the GNOME Foundation if not satisfied by the proposed options

Ongoing but no director assigned

This section includes items which haven't seen an update in the last 30 days and have no Director assigned

  • Sysadmin fundraising levels and perks (last discussion from 2016-01-05)
    • 2016-01-12, Awaiting for Andrea's reply
    • 2016-01-19
      • Andrea replied back to Jeff
      • Jeff to bring the item back during any of the upcoming meetings
    • 2016-02-23, Jeff un-assigned the action item from himself, no current assignee

Nice to have

This section includes items which we would love to see happen at some point but lack the time to effectively become reality

  • Web page for prior pants winners
    • Shaun and Allan to do this
  • Contract template for future use organizations for which we handle money
    • Kat to draft this
  • Gifts situation
    • Inventory management: some stuff we have heaps of, some we run out of stock quickly; consider an on-demand production service
    • Christian to investigate
  • Licensing of artwork and visual assets
    • Engagement team doesn't always licence photos on gnome.org and soon. We need guidelines for them to follow.
    • Allan and Sri to draft guidelines and discuss withthe Engagement Team
  • Privacy campaign funds

    • Previous plan was for Kat to propose privacy bounty T&C/rules for review

    • Cosimo to follow up with interested parties on how to spend the Privacy campaign funds
  • GNOME logo use by podiatrist - possible trademark infringement
    • Shaun to check the trademark details for the GNOME logo and update the licensing page on the website (obsolete)
  • Money raised for defense against Groupon
    • Kat to draft a call for Free Desktop-style hackfests which would be sponsored with money raised for defence against Groupon
  • Logo usage for t-shirts
    • Allan to carry on with the process and follow up and have some general guidelines written down for future cases
  • Standard code of conduct for GNOME annual events (so we don't have to reinvent the wheel each year)
    • Cosimo 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
  • Privacy policy for GNOME services
  • gnome-software privacy issues
    • Software sends information to third parties; could have legal implications for GNOME
    • Allan to look at this
  • Photography policy for GNOME conferences
    • Cosimo to draft a proposal to discuss on foundation-list

Discussed on the mailing list

  • Unixstickers trademark license agreement
    • Pam sent the Board a draft of the unixstickers license agreement, which Allan updated to reflect suggested changes
    • Further details (like royalty prices for each item) should be discussed before sending it to the counterpart
    • A separate vote will be needed in order to effectively sign the agreement
    • VOTE: +1 Allan, Cosimo, Alexandre, Jeff
    • VOTE PASSED
  • gnome.io domain

    • https://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2016-May/msg00000.html

    • VOTE: approve the 30 USD expense (this is a new expense on the Infrastructure side, which requires a vote)
    • VOTE: +1 Andrea, Jeff, Alexandre, Cosimo
    • VOTE PASSED
    • Domain is being transferred
      • Gandi refused the transfer as the domain expired back on 2016-04-20
      • The only way for the transfer to happen would be paying for the renewal (75 USD) directly on park.io, then perform the transfer
      • Using a different registrar is another option
        • We ideally would want to keep all our domains registered under the same registrar
      • VOTE: Pay additional 75 USD to have the domain renewed to finally finalize the transfer itself
      • VOTE: +1 Andrea, Cosimo, Jeff, Allan. Kat abstains.
      • VOTE PASSED
  • 2016 Board of Directors elections: possible timeline

Completed actions

  • tibit (from the mailing list)
    • 2016-02-23, ACTION: Alexandre to investigate a way to eventually include the Tibit donate button together with the existing ones
    • 2016-03-08, Alexandre fixed the broken Flattr image link url at wgo
    • 2016-03-15, Action item for Alexandre to get back to Carl still pending
    • 2016-03-28, FoG web page should require a revamp, we can then start to re-discuss this item
    • 2016-04-11, No updates. Alexandre still to get back to them.
    • 2016-04-24, Alexandre explained that Friends of GNOME is currently being revamped by the engagement team and we don't know how such programs will fit in that yet
    • 2016-05-02, No further actions from the Board are expected as Alexandre resolved its assigned action item from 2016-04-24

FoundationBoard/Minutes/20160502 (last edited 2016-05-06 08:05:15 by AndreaVeri)