Minutes for Meeting of September 3, 2009

Next Meeting

September 17, 2009

Attendance

  • Brian Cameron
  • Diego Escalante Urrelo
  • Germán Póo-Caamaño
  • Lucas Rocha
  • Rosanna Yuen
  • Srinivasa Ragavan
  • Stormy Peters
  • Vincent Untz
  • Paul Cutler, from GNOME marketing was invited and present

Regrets

  • None

Absent

  • Behdad Esfahbod

Minutes

Recurring Items

  • Review past action items.
  • Approve and make sure that minutes of last meeting were sent.
  • Make sure to start up the gobby server for better note taking.
  • Sysadmin hiring - waiting for funding.
  • Update foundation.gnome.org website.

Old items

  • None

New items

  • Discussion with Paul Cutler about the status of Friends of GNOME.
    • How to best present matching funds versus actual contributions on the donations ruler.
    • Discussion about hiring a system administrator. How much money do we need and how will it be funded? In the past the board agreed that funding should come from the Friends of GNOME program. We need some marketing information to help explain to people the benefits of hiring a system administrator and how this will benefit the community.
    • ACTION - Paul will provide an overview of hiring a sysadmin and the benefits that has for the overall GNOME community.
    • ACTION - Stormy to propose on the marketing list a case study on how the improvements we made with bugzilla made a difference to show the way that funding and infrastructure work can improve the GNOME project and to serve as input for the marketing materials for why the Foundation needs to hire a system administrator.
  • GUADEC Update
    • Bidding for next year's GUADEC. Need to get the process moving.
    • Known possible bids:
      • A Coruña - GNOME Hispano/Igalia people talked to Diego when he was visiting A Coruña. They are willing to send a BID, but they are concerned about community not happy having yet another GUADEC in Spain.
      • Netherlands
      • Seattle - Concerns about people having difficulty getting visas, perhaps Vancouver might be an option?
      • Tampere - They said that they would host during a meeting in Gran Canaria.
    • ACTION - Srini to talk to Seattle local community about the possibilities of hosting an event and possibly having an event instead in nearby Canada (perhaps Vancouver) where there are less visa concerns.
    • ACTION - Srini to post a follow-up mail on the GUADEC call for hosts for a chat/meeting with previous organizers (Dave Neary, Paul Cooper, ...).
  • Budget for sponsorships
    • The board agreed that it makes sense to provide travel subsidy for people attending the Boston Summit this year if it will enable some significant project or hacking.
    • There is some money in the budget (ear marked for community travel) that can be used for funding travel subsidies for the Boston Summit and upcoming hackfests.
    • ACTION - Srini to communicate travel budget for Zeitgeist and Boston Summit to the Travel Committee.
  • Next advisory board meetings
    • September is about the GNOME.Asia Summit. It was suggested that we should also discuss the upcoming Boston Summit and hackfests at this meeting.
    • A good topic for a November/December advisory board meeting would be to discuss the results of these events.
    • ACTION - Stormy will invite Boston Summit organizers to the next advisory board meeting.
    • ACTION - Vincent will invite the Zeitgeist hackfest organizers to next advisory board meeting.
  • Hackfests
    • Need to organize a usability study, and perhaps use the Zoom 2 notebooks provided by Texas Instruments in that context.
    • Need to track FISOL invitation.
    • Need to seek sponsorships.
    • ACTION - Brian to look into organizing a hackfest on "how to make it easier for more people to do some usability magic".
    • ACTION - Stormy will send the Texas Instruments Zoom 2 netbooks to the Boston Summit (perhaps to J5 or Rosanna).
    • ACTION - Diego to keep track of FISOL invitation (Chiapas, Mexico), take over from Germán.
    • ACTION - Vincent to send an email to advisory board list enumerating upcoming events and seeking sponsorships.
  • IRC meeting with the membership: do one in September? (who, how, what, when)
    • ACTION - Diego to organize an IRC meeting with the membership this month.
  • Other business
    • ACTION - Vincent will put the event box topic on the agenda for next meeting (unless it's completely handled at that time ;-))

Action Items

Completed Actions

  • Diego - Will send an email to the gnome-women mailing list and otherwise try to find people to help organize. This is done, but feedback has been low.
  • Srini - Put out call for GUADEC hosts. First check with Stormy what questions the bidders should answer so that we can take an informed choice. Draft completed, but still under review.
  • Srini - Send out an email announcing to the foundation-list who are the officers.
  • Vincent - Implement an automatic reminder email for meetings. Still waiting for the time of the bi-weekly meetings to be settled before doing this.

Old Actions

  • Behdad - Tasked with scrubbing the GnuCash file so it can be made public. Behdad sent a scrubbed GnuCash file to Rosanna to check, but still pending.

  • Brian - Get information about what should be in an "Employee Handbook". Still pending.
  • Brian - Since there was little interest on the foundation-list about getting international general liability and accident insurance, the board decided to not pursue getting such coverage at this time. Brian agreed to follow-up with the lawyers to find out what sort of text we should include in the travel subsidy agreement to ensure that people who receive subsidy understand that the Foundation is not providing coverage. An email was sent to the GNOME legal team, awaiting response.
  • Diego - Contact the sysadmin team about account creation. Talk with Bruno about who needs accounts. Diego has done a lot work contacting people about this, and is close to completing this task, but is still pending.
  • Germán - Put together a proposal for how to address board members who become inactive. Still pending.
  • Germán - Take over J5's previous task to propose new obligations that people who receive travel subsidies should be asked to do in return.

  • Lucas - Work with Andreas for the donation ruler. Try to put $15k in the ruler in "yellow" ($10k for Canonical, $5k for Google) to indicate that these funds are matching. http://www.gnome.org/friends/drive/

  • Lucas - To work on next year's budget and annual report since he is now vice-treasurer.

  • Lucas & Alberto - Set up a Euro bank account. Alberto is waiting for a reply from a friend who works in a bank to give some initial directions. We'll have a meeting next Monday (August 24).

  • Rosanna - Research the GNOME Guidestar website and update if necessary. Rosanna sent an update about the status of Guidestar, but work is still needed. Need to find someone to keep the website up-to-date.
  • Rosanna - to send check to pay 401K setup fees.

  • Srini - Ping J5 for status about importing Paypal data into GnuCash. J5 was pinged, but no response yet.

  • Stormy - GNOME Foundation needs a CRM. Dave Neary agreed to set up one, he just needs to be told which one. Stormy will research over the next week. UPDATE: The sys admin team is now looking into this but waiting on a requirements document from the marketing team.
  • Stormy - Should the GNOME Foundation buy a blanket LWN membership. Very low priority. Will bring it up with Jonathan Corbet when they next meet.
  • Stormy - Contact advisory board members about raising fees. Waiting on a waterfall financial model (done) and a 2010 budget before sending this out.
  • Vincent - Will contact advisory board members to see if they will sponsor the Zeitgeist hackfest in Bolzano. Partially done: contacted some advisory board members. Still working on it. Will send a mail about the hackfests, Boston Summit and GNOME.Asia
  • Vincent - Will look into who the GNOME Foundation should send to the Mobile User Experience conference, perhaps Paul Cooper. Vincent mailed Paul and is waiting for an answer.

  • Vincent & Lucas - Determine how to announce the endorsement of Franklin Street Statement on Freedom and Network Services: http://autonomo.us/2008/07/franklin-street-statement/

New Action Items

  • Brian - Look into organizing a hackfest on "how to make it easier for more people to do some usability magic".
  • Diego - Keep track of FISOL invitation (Chiapas, Mexico), take over from Germán.
  • Diego - Organize an IRC meeting with the membership this month.
  • Paul - Will provide an overview of hiring a sysadmin and the benefits that has for the overall GNOME community.
  • Srini - Talk to Seattle local community about the possibilities of hosting an event and possibly having an event instead in nearby Canada (perhaps Vancouver) where there are less visa concerns.
  • Srini - Post a follow-up mail on the GUADEC call for hosts for a chat/meeting with previous organizers (Dave Neary, Paul Cooper, ...).
  • Srini - To communicate travel budget for Zeitgeist and Boston Summit to the Travel Committee.
  • Stormy - To propose a case study on how the improvements we made with bugzilla made a difference as input for the marketing materials for why the Foundation needs to hire a system administrator.
  • Stormy - Invite Boston Summit organizers to the next advisory board meeting.
  • Stormy - Send the Texas Instruments Zoom 2 netbooks to the Boston Summit (perhaps to J5 or Rosanna).
  • Vincent - To send an email to advisory board list enumerating upcoming events and seeking sponsorships.
  • Vincent - Invite the Zeitgeist hackfest organizers to next advisory board meeting.
  • Vincent - Put the event box topic on the agenda for next meeting (unless it is completely handled at that time ;-))

Discussed on board-list

  • Certification of GNOME contributions for Alberto Ruiz (needed for his university degree).
    • Approved.
    • Alberto will write the text Brian will sign it.
  • Hosting the Google Summer of Code money for GStreamer (as we did last year).
    • In discussion.
  • Women in GNOME: Marina wrote some ideas in a text draft.
  • Draft of call for bids for next GUADEC.
  • Lucas will attend "LSE / IBM / OFE Roundtable" in London, on behalf of the foundation
  • Review of a text explaining to the adboard why we want to raise the fees (after it was drafted on marketing-list)
  • Discussion on where to print the foundation annual report.
  • Agreement to work on publishing the minutes a few days after the meeting (instead of just before the next meeting).

FoundationBoard/Minutes/20090903 (last edited 2010-01-31 00:49:05 by LucasRocha)