Foundation Board Minutes for Tue, November 14th 2017, 17:00 UTC

Next meeting date Tue, November 21th 2017, 17:00 UTC

Wiki: https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20171114

Attending

Alexandre Franke
Carlos Soriano
Zeeshan Ali
Meg Ford
Rosanna Yuen
Neil McGovern

Regrets

Allan Day
Cosimo Cecchi
Nuritzi Sanchez

Missing

Agenda

Follow-up on "Reviving Free Software Macedonia"
Review outgoing items

Minutes

Follow-up on "Reviving Free Software Macedonia"
- Monthly rental fee for the place where they meet (€300)
- They seem to have a lead for sponsors, but would like us to help bootstrap
- Not clear what their ask is.
- We recommend they come up with a clear plan and specific outcomes for GNOME, then take it to the engagement budget holder

Ongoing

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

Check in about budget and policies roll out
- Blocking on a couple action items from Neil, hopefully sorted out today
- Neil will then announce it, as well as TransferWise being an option
- 2017-11-14:
  - Waiting for Nuritzi to come back from her trip so she can review drafts before they are sent out
Conference spending policy updates
- The current policy would allow organizers to spend money they haven’t raised yet, which could lead to a loss
- Carlos suggested to approve two complementary budgets
  - a part that can only be spent if raised
  - a part that can be spent even if not raised, to make sure the conference happens
- Organizers are expected to make a profit, but a small loss would not be a problem
- The main goal should be to make a good conference
- How does the organizers forecast the amount they’ll raise?
- How does the newly appointed sponsorship committee tie in with that?
  - Coordination between the two is expected
- VOTE: approve new policy with 2 budgets for conferences (minimal + extras depending on money raised)
  - +1 Carlos, -1 Allan, Meg. Abstained: Alexandre. VOTE DOESN’T PASS
- VOTE: conference organizers should be required to have a new budget approved by the board if they raised less than 70% of their budgeted income
  - +1 Allan, Meg, Abstained: Carlos, Alexandre. VOTE PASSED
- 70% by what time? The problem is that conferences often don't know what their income is going to be until very late - sponsors are often confirmed at the last minute.
- VOTE: invalidate the previously passed vote (let's give this more time to see if we can find a good solution)
  - +1 Alexandre, Allan, Carlos, Abstained: Meg. VOTE PASSED
- 20171031 - Neil suggests new rule that allows to limit the loss and gives organizers a bit of leeway, taking into account the evolving nature of account balance
  - ACTION: Allan to prepare a new proposal to revisit this at a later meeting
Privacy campaign funds
- 2016-09-27
  - Draft is out for the Board to review and give feedback
  - ACTION: Cosimo to try and form a committee to review internship proposals
- 2016-10-26
  - We are aiming for an internship round in spring 2017
- 2017-07-26
  - Carlos and Zeeshan are taking this over -- the plan is still to do internships
    - 2017-10-14
      - Carlos created wiki page at https://wiki.gnome.org/Internships
Name for internships for privacy funds
- If there is no contract it is not technically an internship
- Discussion needs to continue on list
- 2017-10-24
  - GSoC are not called internships and there is no contract with the student
    - The organising entity also does not have authority over the participants, the project entity does
  - Outreachy on the other hand is called internship and there is a contract
    - Same kind of relationship
  - We could try and reuse the contracts from Outreachy
  - ACTION: Zana to get a copy of the contract
    - Done
  - ACTION: Neil to ask Karen
    - 20171031 - Done, karen says steal away.
  - ACTION: Carlos to prepare a version for us
Payment authorization policy
- https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoardPrivate/Budget#Payment_authorization
- VOTE: approve the new Payment authorization policy as specified on the private budget wiki page
  - +1 Allan, Nuritzi, Carlos, Cosimo, Meg, Alexandre, Zeeshan - VOTE PASSES
- ACTION: Allan to make the page public (with ACL to prevent modifications from anyone else than the board)
  - 2017-10-08 - page has been made public but Allan isn't certain what to do about the ACL
- ACTION: Nuritzi to ensure that this is announced to the Foundation
Intention to create marketing committee
- To dispense money for small events and marketing line items
- In the meantime, we would have an individual budget holder
- VOTE: appoint Nuritzi as the temporary budget holder
  - +1 Nem con. VOTE PASSES
- There are concerns about the correct course of action.
- ACTION: Nuritzi to come up with a charter for the proposed committee
Zazzle store
- We have a link on the page where we list vendors
- Andreas confirmed that Stormy is the one with access
- ACTION: Allan to try to reach out to Stormy
  - 2017-10-08 - Allan got in touch with Stormy and got some login information, but he still can't access the account. More followup is required.
- ACTION: Nuritzi to assess the quality and check whether we want to continue using them
Using TransferWise or some other payment system
- This has been recommended to us as a good alternative to Paypal that is cheaper and works in certain countries where Paypal does not work
- 2017-09-19
  - Since Rosanna and Neil would be the main users of this, a good next step would be for them to review options and report to the Board
  - ACTION: Neil will look into this and coordinate with Rosanna when she's back
- 2017-10-08
  - This is now set up
  - Need to put this into travel sponsorship form
  - ACTION: Alexandre to talk to the travel committee to add this to the options
  - ACTION: Nuritzi to add this option to the small events reimbursement page
  - ACTION: Rosanna to test if it works well
    - 2017-10-24 - DONE. Tested two separate payments that both went through
  - ACTION: Nuritzi to announce it to foundation-list
Looking for sponsorship for GitLab runners
- To increase our Continuous Integration capacity on the GNOME GitLab server, we'll need to provision some more servers, as we migrate more projects there
- We could ask for help to our Advisory Board, or use our network to ask for support from other companies
  - It would make more sense to ask for hardware/cycles directly, rather than fundraising, since server bandwidth is a recurring cost
- 2017-10-08
  - Neil is waiting for verification before this can proceed further
  - 2017-10-31 - we're verified! Neil to talk to sysadmin
- ACTION: Neil to talk with Andrea Veri about this
- ACTION: once done, Neil to announce it
Calls with committees
- Twice a year with each committee, once after the board elections (end June/early July and then late November-early January).
- The call is a touch point - a way of checking in. Needs to stimulate ongoing conversations and ad hoc problem solving. Committees will be invited to calls with the whole Board to problem solve around specific things.
- One board member and the ED meet with each committee (or a board member and the director of operations if there's no ED).
- Where possible the same board member should be consistent.
- Board representatives then feed back to the rest of the board.
- 2017-10-08
  - First meetings in the sequence to happen in November. Should focus on collaboratively setting goals and identifying issues.
  - Once the
  - ACTION: Carlos to meet with membership committee, see if we should update committee charter https://wiki.gnome.org/MembershipCommittee
  - ACTION: Alexandre to meet with the travel committee, see if we should update committee charter https://wiki.gnome.org/Travel/Committee
  - ACTION: Cosimo to meet with the sponsorship committee
Foundation support for Flathub
- 2017-05-09
  - The Board voted to try and use some of our pro-bono counsel time towards the Flathub legal framework, provided our lawyers agree
  - ACTION: Neil to connect to Luis
- 2017-05-16 - Exact questions to ask Luis are being worked up
- 2017-06-06 - Questions sent to Luis, being looked at.
- 2017-09-05 - Being passed to Karen now, discussions have stalled a little, Neil chasing up
- 2017-10-08
  - Neil and Rob are going to meet Karen at Freenode Live and try to talk about this
- 2017-10-31 - Rob got sent to Indonesia, Neil to set up call with Karen/Rob to discuss
- 2017-11-14 - Prodding email sent
- ACTION: Neil to send another email to Luis and check if he’s available.
- ACTION: Meg to ask Karen whether she can recommend someone
Hackfest process documentation
- 2017-02-14
  - ACTION: Nuritzi to take a stab at updating the documentation for the process to request a hackfest and responsibilities between Board and TC
- 2017-05-02
  - Nuritzi will work on this by end of May, check in then
- 2017-09-05: Nuritzi updated the wiki about a week ago but we should go over this in Berlin.
- 2017-10-08
  - Part of this was done at the hackfest, we'll need to update the wiki page
  - Another part is pending reply from Pam about how an event can use the GNOME wordmark
  - ACTION: Nuritzi to update the wiki page, including Alexandre's proposed statement about openness of hackfests
Friends of GNOME
- 2016-08-10
  - ACTION: Allan to get in touch with Tobi and the sysadmin team to migrate the FoG infrastructure over to GNOME
- 2017-03-07
  - Allan will pass this on to Neil, and connect him to Tobi
- 2017-04-18 - Neil has CRM working (ish) on the gnome website, we're looking at how to move the PayPal IPN to CiviCRM
  - At sysadmin meeting at GUADEC
- 2017-10-31 - Should happen around december

Ongoing but stalled

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

Dropping dates in copyright claims on our websites
- 2016-12-06
  - ACTION: Alexandre to send an email to foundation-list with a proposal for discussion
- 2016-12-20
  - Next step seems to be to reach out to Creative Commons to get advice on what exactly can and should be done
- 2017-01-24
  - Alexandre reached out to Creative commons
- 2017-02-28
  - Alexandre will try alternative channels
- 2017-05-02
  - We got a reply, Alexandre to follow up
- 2017-05-30
  - Two options
    - Have terms of use on the website that state that linking to a page is sufficient attribution
    - Require contributors to assign their attribution to the GNOME Foundation
Paypal Giving Fund
- Alexandre suggested in december 2015 to get us enrolled in the program
  - That would give us exposure. For example Humble bundle allows to direct the charity part of purchases towards any of their participants
- Zana tried to get us in sometime before may 2016, we never heard back.
- 2016-09-06
  - ACTION: Zana to look into it

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

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

Contract template for future use organizations for which we handle money
- Kat to draft this
- Alexandre took over
- 2017-07-26
  - This is close to being done
Privacy policy for GNOME services
- Current draft is at https://wiki.gnome.org/Foundation/Privacy
- Sysadmin Team's NDA should also be covered when dealing with this item
- Kat or Allan to write up the policy
- Kat or Allan to write up recommended wording for distribution privacy policies, regarding the behaviour of GNOME software
- 2017-07-26
  - Allan is still working on this, but with low priority

Discussed on the mailing list

Completed actions

Nextcloud shared calendar for the board
- 2016-08-10
  - Cosimo tested creating an event, but with mixed results
  - ACTION: Cosimo to take it on from here
- 2016-09-06 - Allan has started a list of reoccuring events on the wiki - https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoardPrivate/Minutes/UpcomingAgenda
- 2017-03-07
  - Neil is looking into a similar calendar so will take over
- 2017-07-26
  - (Neil) can someone else have this? Alexandre volunteers. #challengeaccepted
- 2017-08-19
  - Alexandre tested the shared calendar that Allan set up a while back on nextcloud, seems to work well
  - We are entering beta phase with some directors opting in
- 2017-10-31
  - Positive feedback from those who used it
  - Would be used for meetings (to avoid e.g. people getting off because of DST), away time, reminders (e.g. call for GUADEC bids)
- 2017-11-07
  - It's up and running and we should use it.
  - Add things like time that you'll be away, recurring events like renewals and trademark filings, AdBoard meetings, etc.
  - There is a list of reoccuring events that we might want to include in the calendar on the wiki - https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoardPrivate/Minutes/UpcomingAgenda#Reoccurring_Events
Julita’s new programme
- Programme to get students ready for outreach programme applications
- Budget request for $? for 3 events
  - We should probably approve a budget for the whole programme, 6 events
  - To be taken out of the GNOME events budget, held by Nuritzi
- Questions collected on the list
- Budget holders to keep records under https://wiki.gnome.org/Foundation/Budget/ , or perhaps in a spreadsheet on cloud.gnome.org?
Reviving Free Software Macedonia
- Zeeshan met with Jovanka Gulicoska
- The activity has come to a halt for lack of funding
- Seems to fall under our GNOME events budget, deferred to budget holder
Budget for FY2018
- VOTE: approve the budget as presented by Neil
  - +1 Unanimous. VOTE PASSES
- ACTION: Neil to communicate with Shaun
- ACTION: Neil to put the budget spreadsheet into cloud.gnome.org and link to it from appropriate places, including a written version of the reserves policy
- 2017-11-14: Done!