Foundation Board Minutes for Tue, March 13th 2018, 18:00 UTC

Next meeting date Tue, March 20th 2018, 18:00 UTC

Attending

Regrets

AlexandreFranke

Missing

Agenda

Tile server options for Maps (Allan)
Moderation of public mailing lists (Carlos)
Using GitLab to track ongoing issues (Allan)
Time change for board meetings (Meg)

Deferred until next week:

Role of the Executive Director and Director of Operations with regards to the Board

Minutes

Tile server options for Maps (Allan)
- The board has previously discussed paying Mapbox to use their tile servers. Since then some cheaper alternatives have appeared. Our current options:
  1. Use OpenStreetMap's tile servers directly. This would be free, but there aren't any satellite images.
  2. tilehosting.com - costs $40 a month for their "vector" plan - provides relatively low resolution satellite images.
  3. Mapbox - costs about $300 a month (this would be capped) and includes detailed satellite images. This cost falls within budget tolerances.
- There is a Maps branch which allows these different options to be used. The Maps developers are fine with any of them, but would like a decision.
- Neil has talked to OpenStreetMap and they're OK with us using their servers directly.
- Mapbox currently isn't providing Maps with tiles, so this is somewhat urgent.
- Nuritzi - in favour of Mapbox, on the basis of quality
- Allan - no satellite images would be a major regression for Maps
- Neil - the quality of anything other than Mapbox is low
- VOTE: approve $300 a month to pay Mapbox - passed unanimously
- ACTION: Meg to inform Mapbox and the Maps team, cc'ing Rosanna and Neil
  - We might want to revisit this when we set future budgets
Moderation of public mailing lists (Carlos)
- There have been some complaints that mailing lists aren't being properly moderated - primarily unpleasant/toxic emails being ignored
- There's no escalation process - what can people do if they feel they've been mistreated?
- There's no process for becoming a moderator or joining a moderators team
- Questions:
  - Would it be better to tackle this issue once we have a code of conduct?
  - Is it the moderator's role to police behaviour, or is it more of an admin role?
- Rosanna - some moderators have taken a more active role in the past.
- Allan - moderators will have to play a role in policing once we have a code of conduct - they are the ones who have the power to ban people. A code of conduct will require some procedures and agreements for how and when people get banned.
- Carlos - even if we don't have a code of conduct in place, there might be other things we can do, like trying to recruit extra modorators. The problem is, right now there's no process for appointing moderators.
- The board isn't currently managing the mailing lists, but they are hosted on GNOME infrastructure and they do therefore fall under the board's remit.
- Carlos - we should write a process for putting more people into moderator and administratory roles.
- Nuritzi - we could put out a public call to find out if there are any moderators who want help, or if anyone has had problems with a list.
- Cosimo - would prefer to wait until we have a code of conduct. Didier and Nuritzi too. Carlos is mindful that this topic is already overdue.
- ACTION: add this item to ongoing items and check back in a month
Using GitLab to track ongoing issues (Allan)
- Allan has sent a proposal to board-list, to replace the ongoing items section of the agenda with GitLab issues.
- Neil - minutes should be minutes of a meeting, not an account of everything we've done. Significant updates should be on the agenda so they get minuted though.
- We can have a public and a private project, in order to keep some issues private.
- Only board and staff to be able to create issues.
- GitLab admins will have access to our private issues, but that's no different from sysadmin level access.
- Some open questions about responsibilities and policies, but everyone seems positive in general.
- ACTION: Carlos and Neil to help Allan set it up
  - ACTION: Allan to write to foundation-list to inform the membership about the plan, once the details have been worked out
Time change for board meetings (Meg)
- The meeting time is currently 1800 UTC.
- The USA has moved to daylight savings. Europe hasn't.
- We'll keep the time as it is, but change the UTC time once Europe has switched to DST.

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

Laptop for European events box (Nuritzi)
- We've had a message from Kat that we have some time if we want to try and get a laptop donated for the events box, rather than having to buy one
- Neil isn't sure who might provide one, but will bring it up at the next sponsors call
- ACTION: Neil to ask the sponsorship committee to see if they can help
GUADEC 2019 call for bids (Allan)
- We need to do this
- Ideally we'd have the code of conduct agreed prior to the call
- ACTION: Neil and Allan to finalise the events CoC draft very soon, so the board can review it
- ACTION: Nuritzi to try and raise awareness of GUADEC 2019 as part of the Engagement Team's social media plan
Report from Adboard meeting at FOSDEM
- Attending Foundation representatives were Neil McGovern, Carlos Soriano, Didier Roche and Alexandre Franke
- Attending adboard members were Canonical, SUSE, FSF, PIA and TDF
- Positive atmosphere, constructive discussions about shared issues
- ACTION: Neil to send a summary to adboard list
  - 2018-03-06: complete
- ACTION: Neil to extract action items and conversation starters for the adboard list
Events code of conduct arrangements
- Draft in progress
- Once ready, we can start a community consultation phase
- Current draft mentions a committee that would help resolving incidents
  - Is the board ok with forming a committee for that purpose?
  - No objections, the responsabilities and attributions will be explored further down the line
- When a local organisation handles the event in Europe for us, we need a contract with them
  - This contract should cover handling of personal data that they collect for us
  - See http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/international-transfers/transfer/index_en.htm for the standard contracts
- The board needs to consider letting the community vote eventually
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
- 2018-01-30
  - No updates on this for a while
  - ACTION: Cosimo to check status with Zeeshan
- 2018-03-06: Nuritzi to take this over
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
- 2018-01-10
  - Carlos in contact with mentors, going to publish this as soon as one of the mentors confirms dates.
- 2018-01-28
  - Carlos checked and we will do with Outreachy dates on the second round. Everything ready, waiting a small clean up on the wiki ideas and to be anounced.
- 2018-01-30:
  - ACTION: Carlos to clean up the wiki and announce it
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
- 2018-01-30:
  - Feedback from multiple sources has been that the quality is low.
  - Designs needs to be updated.
  - We might want to close the store down. Allan to contact stormy again to get access, then possibly defer the question of what to do with the store to the Engagement Team.
2018-02-02:
- Allan has been in touch with Stormy again, and she can't access the account either. He's now contacted Zazzle directly.
- 2018-02-12: Allan heard back from Zazzle - they need the holder of the email address that originally created the account to ask for access. This is stormy@gnome.org. Stormy agreed to do this but hasn't responded to messages subsequently.
- 2018-03-06:
  - Allan has heard from Stormy and has successfully logged in. Rosanna is going to look at the account records. Neil thinks we should just shut it down.
  - ACTION: Nuritzi to talk to the Engagement Team about running the Zazzle store.
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. - DONE
  - 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
- 2017-12-19 Committee check-ins - we were supposed to have done this in November
  - Travel call should happen in January, currently being scheduled
  - Membership call should also happen soon
  - Cosimo is not on the call and won’t be back from travel until the end of January
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
- 2017-11-21 - Karen came back, call set up for next week
- 2017-12-12 - Karen is drafting some texts which should get Flathub the legal framework required.
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
- 2018-03-06: This didn't happen, new aim is this to be in place for the September '18 release.

Ongoing but stalled

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

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
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

Completed items

Secretary position (Allan)
- Alexandre resigned as secretary a little while ago
- Allan has been filling in and has nominated himself as a replacement. He is also vice-president, and it's difficult to take minutes and chair at the same time. However, we can work out someone to take minutes if Allan is chairing.
- VOTE: appoint Allan Day as Secretary of the Board - passed unanimously
- ACTION: Nuritzi to announce the decision. Allan to update the wiki.
  - 2018-03-13: Nuritzi and Allan have done this - complete
GNOME Maps and Amisha's email
- The Mapbox service is going to run out at the end of the year
- Meg spoke to some of the Maps developers about this the last time it was an issue. Available options back then:
  1. Get another coupon for free access
  2. Pay, but with a discounted rate
  3. Run our own tile server
- We probably need a short-term solution before the coupon runs out, and we don't have long
- We think that the current coupon was organised directly between the Maps developers and Mapbox - the Foundation Board probably wasn't involved
- Neil backs a short-term solution by renewing the coupon; then need to calculate how much capacity we're using and what it would cost
- ACTION: Meg to speak to the Maps developers about renewing the coupon and calculating the long-term cost
- 2017-12-19
  - We got a cost estimate and they are willing to give us a discount, we need to tell them how much we’d be able to pay
  - They are willing to extend the free coupon temporarily
  - We need to explore options
    - Client-side rendering + our own vector server should be the preferred one
  - ACTION: Meg to discuss with the Maps team
- 2018-01-23
  - Meg had a meeting with their team last week, and proposed work on client-side rendering
    - That would not actually help the problem of many downloads
    - What may help is working on client-side caching to reduce the number of requests instead
    - Another option could be to also write and maintain our own caching server
    - Ideally we'd love to formulate a longer-term plan with the team
  - ACTION: Meg to ask the Maps team about what kind of resources we'd need to build a caching server on GNOME's side, and if client side caching with pre-made data packs could work as well.
  - ACTION: Neil to ask Mapbox if they can put a cap on the number of requests on their side
  - ACTION: Neil to ask advisory board members if there's anything that they can help with (money or developers) (this happened at the FOSDEM meeting)
  - 2018-01-30: They can cap the requests and voucher the rest if we need.
- 2018-03-06:
  - Previously we've only considered Mapbox as a viable options, but some others have emerged:
    1. Neil has talked to openstreetmap about us using their tile server, which they'd be fine with
    2. There are some other cheaper options, but we wouldn't get the same quality of satellite images
  - Marcus, one of the Maps developers, has done some preparatory work to enable one of these other options to be used
  - ACTION: board to discuss these options and decide what we want to do
- 2018-03-13:
  - The board discussed the options and voted to use Mapbox - complete