Foundation Board Minutes for Tuesday, July 31st 2018, 15:30 UTC
Next meeting date Tuesday, August 7 2018, 15:30 UTC
Attending
Regrets
Missing
Agenda
- Hiring update (Neil)
- Standardising bidding and budgetting processes for conferences (Kat)
- GUADEC 2019 bidding process update (Kat)
- Travel committee update (Philip)
- Adding Christel to the code of conduct committee (Federico)
- Code of Conduct questions from Benjamin Berg (Allan)
- Who responds to what on the board mailing list (Philip)
Review to-do GitLab issues - https://gitlab.gnome.org/Community/Board/issues?label_name%5B%5D=To-Do (Allan)
Low priority:
- Transparency between employees and the board/community. i.e. status reports (also read emails from Kat) (Carlos)
- Internships status and possible ideas (Carlos)
- Switch meetings to California time (Allan)
- Odds and ends from the community at GUADEC (Philip)
Minutes
- Hiring update (Neil)
- General update: few more applications for sysadmin and program coordinator.
- Sysadmin/devops - first batch of interviews planned.
- GTK+ developer - pre-interview questionaire scheduled.
- Allan and Kat have been added to Odoo.
- We'll figure out who to send the questionnaire to from there.
- Allan: we should have some questions and screening around online conduct. Whoever we hire will also be a kind of champion of the project. They have to have good online behaviour.
- Neil: We do have questions about this. I'm drawing on my experience writing similar questions for Collabora. The questions will reflect that working for the Foundation is different.
- Nuritzi: PSA, don't add the name of the person who should answer the agenda item, instead add the name of the person who proposed it.
- Standardising bidding and budgetting processes for conferences (Kat)
- Kat: Meeting tomorrow with Allan and Carlos to talk about what we want to standardize across conferences. After that, a call with conference organizers. More updates next week.
- GUADEC 2019 bidding update (Kat)
- Kat: Nuritzi mentioned that Turkey '19 was likely to drop out. No contact yet with Muhammet. Greece '19's bid looks relatively solid, they are still on track to send it in by the deadline of August 6.
- Nuritzi: Turkey '19 is stuck at getting the venue information and that's why they are not likely to get it in on time.
- Kat: Some of the '20 bids are already starting to look at venues.
- Travel committee update (Philip)
- Philip has got access to infra.
- Philip: 2 members may become unavailable due to personal circumstances in the near future.
- Philip: may need to increase committee at least temporarily - will consider after talking to the other TC members first.
- Email from Adelia about possibly going over budget. Question is, stick to the deadline (27 July) for LAS and stick to the budget, or allow applications after the deadline (since the CFP deadline is 30 July) and go over budget?
- Kat: What's the reason that the GNOME.Asia sponsorships are coming out of the general Foundation budget?
- Allan: Can't remember, but we should ensure that each conference has its own budget line for travel
- General consensus is that we should still allow LAS applications after the CFP deadline as people may have been waiting to see if their paper was accepted.
- Rosanna: Deadline was only announced on foundation-list, so many may not have been aware.
- Kat: travel committee can work this out and ask for more budget if needed.
- Philip: we should decide now whether we're OK with a reasonable budget increase.
- Nuritzi: let's tell them to use the LAS surplus for GNOME.Asia and ask for more budget for LAS.
ACTION: Philip to communicate that we would like them to ask for a budget and we'll vote on it next week, in the meantime they can move the budget from LAS to GNOME.Asia as they see fit to accommodate the last-minute requests.
- Adding Christel to the code of conduct committee (Federico)
(Submitted by Federico, by email) During GUADEC, the CoC committee met with and invited Christel Dahlskjaer to be part of it. The Board met her during the Advisory Board meeting; she's the representative for Private Internet Access. She is also one of the Freenode.net moderators, and has experience dealing with troublesome people and with CoC enforcement. With the Board's approval, we'd like to have Christel as part of the CoC committee
- Nuritzi: We did mention that we wanted more members from other parts of the world
- Kat: Are the current committee members explicitly looking for more members from different backgrounds, e.g. Asia?
- Rosanna: The committee itself didn't hear anything from the board on the subject, so we didn't discuss it.
- Rosanna: Christel brought in a lot of expertise during our discussions at GUADEC, so it makes sense to add her as a member.
- Kat: We should ask the committee to talk about their membership target before appointing any new members
- Rosanna: It would be a shame to pass on Christel's expertise.
- Kat: can we see the contributions during GUADEC discussions anywhere?
- Rosanna: There were individual notes, no minutes.
- Kat: There should be minutes, committees are accountable.
- Philip: There don't need to be minutes for informal discussions.
- Rob: If it was a committee meeting, then Christel wouldn't have been there. On the other hand, committees do need to be board-like in their conduct.
- Kat: The board can invite external people to a board meeting, committees can do that too.
- Allan: Let's talk about guidelines for committees another time.
- Allan: the committee has requested that we appoint a new member, I'm happy to vote on it.
- Carlos: Is she a Foundation member?
Nuritzi: she is a foundation member and she's listed on the website: https://www.gnome.org/foundation/membership/#
VOTE: Appoint Christel Dahlskjær to the Code of Conduct committee.
- +1 Nuritzi, Rob, Allan, Philip, Carlos
- -1 Kat
- Kat: I am not familiar with Christel's work and the CoC discussions from the GUADEC meeting have not been shared so I cannot see her contributions to the CoC discussions at his point.
ACTION - Federico to communicate the result to Christel
We should followup on https://gitlab.gnome.org/Community/Board/issues/67
- Code of Conduct questions from Benjamin Berg (Allan)
- Allan: There's been some discussion on the mailing list about how to reply, Rob made a proposal, it seems fine.
- Rob: To make the implicit explicit, we can explicitly thank the WG and delegate the responsibilities to the COC committee.
VOTE: That the board thanks the Code of Conduct Working Group, and confirms that future work on the Code of Conduct will be performed by the Code of Conduct Committee and approved by the Board.
- +1 Nuritzi, Rob, Carlos, Philip, Allan
- Abstained: Kat
ACTION - Federico to reply to Ben
- Who responds to what on the board mailing list (Philip)
- Philip: We should have a guideline for "should I respond to this or not?" Do we usually wait for the board member whose expertise it is to answer, or should the first person to see the item respond with a quick "Thanks, we'll get back to you"?
- Allan: Some of both, usually.
- Kat: If somone responds with "Thanks, we'll get back to you" then it's their responsibility to add the item to the agenda for the next week. It's the president's responsibility to add action items from emails to the agenda if they haven't been answered by another board member.
- Neil: Some things that used to go to the board list now go to me, if it looks like something I should handle then send it on
[ Kat leaves ]
Review to-do GitLab issues - https://gitlab.gnome.org/Community/Board/issues?label_name%5B%5D=To-Do (Allan)
- Nuritzi: Everyone should go through these themselves, but if there's no significant movement next week we'll do this in a seprate meeting.
- Allan: Let's have a label for issues that need discussion by the board.
Low-priority agenda items
- All deferred.
Actions
- Federico - Notify Christel Dahlskjær and the code of conduct committee that she has been appointed to the committee
- Federico - Notify Benjamin Berg of the results of the vote to thank and disband the code of conduct working group
- Philip - Recommend the travel committee to grant the last-minute GNOME.Asia requests and ask them to submit a request to increase the budget