Foundation Board Minutes for Monday 8 April 2019, 15:30 UTC
Attending
Regrets
Agenda
- Board initiatives check in
- Travel committee status
Minutes
- Board initiatives check in
- This is a short check in for initatives that the board members have been working on, in order to determine what we should work on during the hacking session next week.
- Allan has been working on the GNOME software definition.
- Going back and forth with the release team for ideas.
- Next step is to brainstorm ideas for what to call the collection of apps and libraries.
- Nuritzi has been working on the compensation committee report with Rob and Carlos.
- Will take another week or two to come up with a recommendation, which will be presented at a board-only meeting to get the board's input.
- Nuritzi has been working on GNOME Foundation goals with Philip.
- We took the goals that we came up with at the Foundation hackfest in October, and have been reorganizing and prioritizing them.
- Still a lot of work to be done. It's quite late in the board term, so we would like to get this set up for the next board can easily jump into it.
- Since this is a 10-year plan, maybe the Board doesn't need to do much more than to ensure that these are valid goals for GNOME.
- Federico: Do we give out the goals to the staff, and have them figure out how to accomplish them?
- Philip: It's Neil's job to direct the staff with actionable tasks.
- Nuritzi: It's important to ensure good continuity for Neil, even across board terms.
- Rob: The board needs to own the goals, but not change them all the time.
- Nuritzi: This is something we need to cover in the board handover meeting at GUADEC, and make sure we have enough time to discuss it thoroughly.
Federico: We should leave this well-documented in a place such as GitLab.
- Nuritzi: We are going to work on operationalizing the 10 and 5-year goals into 1-year goals.
- Nuritzi: Are we overstepping into Neil's work?
- Philip: Neil has said we haven't; he expects us to provide the operational plan.
- Rob: Please keep me in the loop on that conversation. It's one of my regrets from the Foundation hackfest that we didn't complete this at the time. Neil should be a participant in this conversation and can help provide the continuity.
- Federico: It's easy for the board to fall into a trap of discussing things but without being sure how to put them into action. Neil and Rosanna play an invaluable role in providing context.
- Nuritzi: We should recommend that next year's board tries to prioritize this during the handoff.
- Philip is working on the travel sponsorship policy. There are still some open questions, which he posed in a thread on Discourse. There was a legal notice in the application form that from the Discourse discussion, sounds like it needs to be preserved, which needs to be reincorporated into the draft. People are welcome to read it and give feedback; the plan is to vote on it during the next meeting. Not expecting much feedback from the travel committee at this point; already sent a draft and got very little response.
- Philip is writing guidelines on meeting minutes. Working on splitting the draft into information for the foundation, and procedures for the board.
- Travel committee status
- There is a big backlog of unreplied requests.
- Rosanna talked to Adelia Rahim (travel committee member); Adelia said she needed an updated spreadsheet of how much the travel committee has spent, and how much budget is left.
- Philip mailed Adelia asking about what needed to happen with the spreadsheet on Sunday.
- We may have to approve requests ourselves, especially for hackfests that already happened.
- Allan: What would it look like if we started approving requests?
- Philip: This already happened last GUADEC, so there is a precedent for it.
- Federico: Guillame Gomez has also expressed interest in helping the travel committee.
- Allan: Would we need to allowing the travel committee some particular amount of money to spend while the spreadsheet is being reconstructed?
- Nuritzi: Will we need to have a meeting next week to vote on this? If so, let me know by Thursday to announce it.
- Rosanna: I have the information to reconstruct the spreadsheet, but I need the time.
ACTION: Nuritzi, Rob - Ask Neil to allocate time for Rosanna to reconstruct the travel committee's spreadsheet.
ACTION: Philip - Figure out from Adelia what the travel committee needs, and figure out a plan for how to proceed.
- Nuritzi: should we ask committees to produce status reports for May?
- Will start a discussion on Discourse.
Actions
Nuritzi, Rob: Ask Neil to allocate time for Rosanna to reconstruct the travel committee's spreadsheet.
Philip: Figure out from Adelia Rahim what the travel committee needs, and figure out a plan for how to proceed.