Foundation Board Minutes for Tuesday, September 18th 2018, 15:30 UTC
Next meeting date Tuesday, September 25th 2018, 15:30 UTC
Attending
Agenda
- GUADEC dates
- Discuss hackfest agenda (Kat)
- Committee requirements (Kat)
- (semi-urgent) SeaGL trip approval (Neil)
Review compensation committee charter (Rob, see https://gitlab.gnome.org/Community/Board/issues/78)
Funding Outreachy intern spots (Philip) - see board-list, https://gitlab.gnome.org/Community/Board/issues/83
- COSCON'18 speaker invitation (Nuritzi)
- LAS GNOME report (Nuritzi)
Review to-do GitLab issues - https://gitlab.gnome.org/Community/Board/issues?label_name%5B%5D=To-Do
- From issue 39 (devolved conference bidding process) - how can we allocate conference budget for CoC-enforcement training for one or two of the local organizers? (Federico)
Minutes
- GUADEC dates
- Kat polled our ex-interns and general consensus is end of August. The local team would also prefer end of August.
- The options are July 5–10 or August 23–28.
- Allan: Is August 23–28 going to conflict with the release cycle?
- Kat: Can we move the release schedule?
- Carlos: Usually no, because of the downstream distributions.
- Philip: During the last weeks of the release cycle is actually better than right before the feature freeze like this year's GUADEC.
- Nuritzi: Does this affect our other conferences such as GNOME.Asia? We should not prevent core members from going to both conferences. No need to move this date, but we should let the GNOME.Asia organizers know that they need to keep this date in mind.
- Federico: The concern last time we discussed this was conflict with school semesters starting.
- The dates are inconvenient for Rosanna and Federico.
- Kat: The end of July isn't an option because it conflicts with Debconf.
- Nuritzi: When is Akademy next year? - They are still on the call for hosts, so the date is not known yet.
VOTE: Set dates of GUADEC 2019 to be August 23-28.
- +1 Nuritzi, Kat, Carlos, Allan, Philip, Federico. Abstained: Rob
- Note from Philip, Federico, Rob: This date seems not-ideal, but also seems the best out of a number of not-ideal options.
- Nuritzi: Can we let bidding teams know what the board considers ideal dates?
- Kat: This should be a broader discussion with the conference organizers.
- Philip: Would be good to set what those dates are based on, e.g. no earlier than the stipend payments of the internships, no later than the beginning of school semesters in X country, with exceptions possible.
- Kat: Announcing is the job of the GUADEC team; they can work with Engagement on this.
ACTION - Allan: add a comment to our GitLab issue about setting a date range.
- Hackfest agenda
- Current agenda, after making the changes discussed in this meeting:
- Financial policies and transparency (Nuritzi)
Fundraising & campaigns (Carlos)
- Approve budget for next year (Nuritzi)
- Committee check-ins (Nuritzi)
- Topics for future rounds of GNOME internships (Philip)
- Community check-ins (Philip)
Board & Foundation planning
- Project-wide Code of Conduct (Federico)
- Cross-project hackfests (Kat)
- Travel sponsorship policy (Philip)
- "Hacking time" (Allan)
- Kat: Let's keep the agenda relatively light so we have time to work on things.
- Neil: Work out a timeline for the day, and what we're going to discuss at what times, to maximize the efficiency of our time.
- Nuritzi: We should pre-plan lunch options.
- Nuritzi: We should also figure out which day we want to hold the community event. How about Thursday evening?
- Neil booked a hotel for everyone already.
- Nuritzi: Are there whiteboards? - Kat: Yes
ACTION - Philip: Add the things mentioned here to the agenda
ACTION - Nuritzi: Plan out a schedule for the days
- Current agenda, after making the changes discussed in this meeting:
- Committee requirements
- What's the status of this?
- Nuritzi: The engagement committee discussed it, but didn't get all the way through the items.
- Philip: Sent an email to the travel committee mailing list.
- Federico: Sent an email to the CoC committee mailing list.
- Rob: Will send an email to the sponsorship committee mailing list.
- Carlos: Will send an email to the membership committee mailing list.
- Philip: Rob, Carlos, feel free to adapt my email text.
- SeaGL trip approval
- Neil: We've been offered a booth, at SeaGL, November 7-9 in Seattle.
- Neil and Rosanna are going to attend, and combine it with a trip to Denver to talk to James Donnelly (LuNEL) on work for Odoo.
- Nuritzi: Any talks or meetings other than the booth at SeaGL? - Neil: My talk and Sri's 2 talks were turned down, we asked for feedback on why.
- Kat: What's the value for the Foundation? Do we expect a lot of booth visitors? Do we have a North America events box nowadays?
- Nuritzi: Yes, we have the contents of the events box, but no box to put them in. Maybe Rosanna can ship them or take them there?
- Neil: It's a good free software conference that we haven't gone to in the past, so it's good for expanding our reach
- Kat: Let's publicise the attendance, Neil can blog about it.
- Nuritzi: Start mapping goals to conferences, based on people attending?
- Carlos: Neil, how did you hear about this conference?
Neil: LibrePlanet last year, it was recommended as a conference that would fit well
- Carlos: It might be interesting to explore conferences where there's not much of a Linux presence or desktop presence. - Neil: An example of this might be OSCON
- Kat: A plan for attending conferences for marketing purposes for next year would be a good thing for the engagement committee to work on.
- Nuritzi: We should view this in the light of the board's goals for next year, at the hackfest
- Kat: Is there budget for this? - Neil: Yes
VOTE: Approve Neil's travel to SeaGL and Denver
- +1 unanimous
- Review compensation committee charter
- Nuritzi: Why do we have this on the agenda? To remind people to review it, or vote on something? - It's not ready for voting yet as not everyone has reviewed it.
- Nuritzi: The main thing to discuss is the powers that are devolved to the committee.
- Prioritize for next week.
- Rob: Will do a round of edits for next week.
- Funding Outreachy intern spots - see board-list, email from Marina Zhurakhinskaya
- Nuritzi: Agree with Allan's comment that it would be good to sponsor 2 to 3 interns if we can afford it.
- Neil: There isn't a problem with affordability, as the Developing Nations donation can also be earmarked for it.
- Kat: What's the Developing Nations money?
- Neil: We received a donation of 50,000 USD in earmarked funds at one point.
- Carlos: If the Developing Nations donation can be used for Outreachy, are the projects required to be related to developing nations? - No
- Kat: Have we spent any of that money?
- Neil: The recipes hackfest and performance hackfest came out of that, and we were planning to set up user groups. There's enough left for 3 internships; I originally proposed 2, but setting up user groups hasn't really happened yet.
- Federico: Interested in mentoring a translation of GNOME to indigenous Mexican languages.
- Kat: Will we have enough money left for the Outreachy summer round? - Neil: That's next fiscal year, so it's separate from this.
- Allan: Do we have enough mentors?
- Philip: Mentors were not the bottleneck last round.
- Kat: What happens if not all the spots get filled?
- Rosanna: Then we don't pay the money.
VOTE: Number of Outreachy intern spots to approve (Directors voted for a number, rather than for/against each number)
- 3: Nuritzi, Rob, Federico, Carlos, Philip, Allan
- 2: Kat
ACTION: Philip - Reply to Marina with the results of the vote.
- COSCON 2018 speaker invitation
- Nuritzi: Received an invitation to speak here on behalf of the GNOME board, would anyone like to attend this?
- Neil: October 20-21, Shenzhen, China - it would require you to fly out and miss the last day of the board hackfest.
- Kat: they have a slot for someone to give a GNOME talk; it doesn't have to be a board member.
ACTION: Nuritzi: Respond to Emily and Ted that the board members and Foundation employees won't be able to attend, suggest that a Foundation member give a talk.
- LAS GNOME report
- Discussed report from board members attending LAS conference.
- Aleix from KDE foundation requested to meet with us during the conference and is very excited about carrying communication forward between the GNOME and KDE communities.
- From issue 39 (devolved conference bidding process) - how can we allocate conference budget for CoC-enforcement training for one or two of the local organizers? (Federico)
- (postpone to next week, Federico will send a mail in the meantime)
Actions
Allan: add a comment to our GitLab issue about setting a date range each year for GUADEC bids.
- Philip: Add the hackfest agenda items discussed in this meeting to the agenda.
- Nuritzi: Plan out a schedule for the hackfest days.
- Philip: Reply to Marina with the results of the vote, that GNOME will sponsor 3 Outreachy interns this round.
- Nuritzi: Respond to Emily and Ted that the board members and Foundation employees won't be able to attend, suggest that a Foundation member give a talk.