Regular meeting of the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors, 12th Jan 2022, 17:00 UTC
Attending
Regrets
Missing
Consent Agenda
Discussion Agenda
- Feedback request from Mine to get them to stop sending worthless data request emails
- 25th anniversary of GNOME
- GNOME's participation in GSoC 2022
- update from the Election and membership committee
- Approve spend of remaining Dalio Philanthropies grant via contractors
- $31k towards Gtk4 adoption
- $29k towards GNOME Software + PWA support
- $50k towards Flathub support for payments
- Approve budget of $21,000 for 3 Outreachy internships for the May to August 2022 Outreachy internships.
- Approve minutes of August - November 2021
- The board acknowledges receipt of:
- Executive Committee minutes, dated 17 December 2021[1]
- Finance Committee minutes, dated 2 December 2021[2]
- Finance Committee minutes, dated 4 November 2021[3]
- Finance Committee minutes, dated 7 October 2021[4]
- Governance Committee minutes, dated 2 December 2021[5]
- AOB (any other business)
Minutes
- Feedback request from Mine to get them to stop sending those worthless data request emails.
- We regularly get emails via Mine asking us to delete data about people that we don't store data for.
- We reply asking the user to verify what data we store for them and normally don't hear anything back.
- We received an email from Mine asking for feedback.
- Neil to find message and reply.
- 25th anniversary of GNOME
- Do we have any plans?
- COVID… GUADEC in person? Would have an anniversary party social event.
- Neil to ask engagement committee whether they have some plans.
- GSoC 2022
- New requirement: contributors need to be new to the community but the requirement is a little abstract.
- Hard time engaging mentors with GSoC process, many unpaid volunteers, could we consider sharing the GSoC mentor stipend $500 with the mentors?
- Stipend is around 2% of the budgeted income. We can donate to other 501(c)3 or make a payment for services to the foundation.
- Mentors can elect to leave their stipend as a donation to the foundation.
- VOTE: approve unbudgeted expenditure to offer the GSoC mentor stipend to the mentors.
- Felipe, Kat, Philip, Rob, Thib +1 - unanimous
- Kat: In the case where there are two mentors on one project, we still only get one stipend, so note that they will have to split equally by default, or agree on a different split.
- Subject to US OFAC controls.
- Approve spend of remaining Dalio Philanthropies grant via contractors
- There are leftover restricted funds from the community challenge that we need to spend.
- Proposed spending:
- $31k towards Gtk4 adoption - stability in new widgets, developer documentation
- $29k towards GNOME Software + PWA support
- $50k towards Flathub support for payments - allowing first party developers to collect donations/subscriptions via Flathub.
- Neil has already approved amounts for these up to the ED spending limit and work has started on some items. Seeking board approval for the remainder.
- VOTE: Approve spending of $31k towards Gtk4 adoption, $29k towards GNOME Software + PWA support and $50k towards Flathub support for payments:
- Felipe, Kat, Philip, Rob, Thib +1 - unanimous
- Approve budget of $21,000 for 3 Outreachy internships for the May to August 2022 Outreachy internships.
- Already in the budget but the cost of each intern has increased by $500 so we will need to spend $3000 extra for the year to keep the number of interns at 6
- FOSDEM Adboard meeting
- 7th Feb afternoon, email to follow
- ED report
- Discussed with non-profit and fundraising experts about what we do as a non-profit and further discussions are ongoing
- Foundation-wise, December is always quiet
- End of year fundraising ran from end of Nov to Christmas - stats coming next time
- New hardware coming in and being installed in Red Hat racks - moving from openshift 3 to 4, may be retiring puppet
- Bart working on CI for Flathub
- Linux App Summit - currently due to be held in northern Italy in person - COVID permitting
- Work ongoing on the annual report
- GUADEC - currently looking at end of July, dates coming soon
- End of Jan - intending to do university outreach in Africa
- Booth at FOSDEM - reach out to Kristi if you're interested in helping out
- Looking at governance model for Flathub: where should it live, how we should push it. We have a promising option that we're looking into in more detail.
- Approve minutes of August - November 2021
- VOTE: approve edited minutes:
- Felipe, Kat, Philip, Rob, Thib +1 - unanimous
- VOTE: approve edited minutes:
Reports
Executive Committee
IT & sysadmin
- Issues with the CI, sorted by Bart
- Server replacement to come, in early January
- Audit of our services: we’re not affected by the log4j vuln
- EOY fundraising
- Giving Tuesday campaign concluded, stats to follow
- Conferences timelines
- Coming up: LAS, probably held in Italy in person (though we’re not confident, bc covid)
- We have 4 proposals for the Flathub donations contract work (most probably in early Jan), evaluated by Neil, Bart, Rob and Nick Richards
- Chat initiative
- The IRC question:
- IRC is in a grey zone, it’s not really hosted by the Foundation, but it’s not completely independent either
- We know IRC is losing speed, but we can’t afford to just cut it out because many core contributors rely on it for work
- But if compromises have to be made, they can’t degrade the experience
- Need to work on a pragmatic way forward for Matrix
Finance Committee, 2 December 2021
- Attendees: Shaun, Rob, Rosanna, Neil
- Rob approved LAS budget
- the minimum spend (ie: exposure) of €3675
- a maximum spend of €5940
- Intent to draft a new targeted reserves policy [MVP Foundation]
- Protect funding around staffing levels that allow us to do: Events, community management/volunteer coordination, infrastructure, operations
- Associated operating and infrastructure costs for above.
- For 12 months
- Available in unrestricted liquid assets
- Review in finance committee on 27th January for board approval on February 9th
- Cancel December 30 finance committee meeting
- New bank making many things hard (recurring payments, Brex integration, etc)
- Investigate whether Airbase might help with broader payment management
PayPal donations manually reconciled
- GIMP donations need to be separated by hand
Investigate a separate PayPal account?
Finance Committee, 4 November 2021
- Attendees: Shaun, Rosanna, Neil
- Rosanna has created spreadsheet with end of fiscal year finances, team reviewed
- Discussed some issues with Quickbooks migration
Finance Committee, 7 October 2021
- Attendees: Shaun, Rosanna
- Rosanna closing end of FY books in Odoo and dealing with bank acquisition
- Taxes to be filed by December, or June with extension
- Discussion on mission statement on 990, Shaun to email board
- Correlate 990 with checklist of what governance committee wants more of (Rob?)
GNOME Foundation Governance Committee minutes, 2 December 2021
Attendees: Felipe, Philip, Thibault, Regina Regrets: Kat
- Board meetings agenda
- The Governance Committee is interested in increasing board member's engagement. We would like board members to acknowledge the meeting agenda before Board meetings. For this, the meeting chair will create Gitlab issues with the agenda for participants to comment and acknowledge on the week before the meeting takes place.
BoardSource trainings
- The Governance Committee wants to remind Board members to complete the trainings.
- Form 990 review
- The information provided in the form can be valuable to help our fundraising efforts. The Governance Committee wants to establish a recurrent meeting to review Form 990 yearly.
- Handling of the libadwaita situation
- We discussed our handling of the conflict and reflected on how we could address situations such as this in the future. The Governance Committee thinks that responding to messages in a timely manner can help conduct conflicts resolutions, therefore Felipe volunteered to reply to messages acknowledge their reception.
- We also find it important to improve the way we communicate our actions and activities to the broader community. For this reason, we want to participate on the "This week in GNOME" project.