Minutes for Meeting of May 13th, 2010

Next Meeting

  • May 27, 2010

Attendance

  • Brian Cameron
  • Diego Escalante Urrelo
  • Germán Póo-Caamaño
  • Paul Cutler
  • Rosanna Yuen
  • Stormy Peters
  • Vincent Untz

Regrets

  • Srinivasa Ragavan

Missing

  • Jorge Castro (at UDS?)

Recurring Items

  • Review past action items.
  • Did each person with action items send their status reports to the board list before the meeting?
  • Approve and make sure that minutes of last meeting were published to foundation-announce and foundation-list.
  • Make sure to start up the gobby server for better note taking.
  • Update foundation.gnome.org website.

New Items

  • Stormy's bonus review
    • All board members have provided feedback and some final decisions are being made.
    • Plan to have the bonus approved within the next week.
  • GNOME Foundation elections
    • Nobody on the board has yet announced their candidacy for the next term.
    • Germán suggests board members should write/blog about their tasks, what they do, the work involved, what people who are considering to run should expect (i.e. the amount of work per week involved with emails/discussions, etc.)
    • ACTION: Everyone needs to encourage appropriate people to consider running for the board.
    • ACTION: Everyone on the board who plans to run for the next term needs to announce their candidacy.
  • Making the bid for GUADEC public?
    • Germán hopes that this will be done by next week.
    • Getting this completed within the next week would be good. There will be good timing with the extension of the deadline for the 2011 Desktop Summit.
  • Sysadmin job
    • An Interview Team has been established
      • The Interview Team is composed of 3 people: Jonathan Blandford, Bradley Kuhn and Brad Taylor
      • Once hired, the sysadmin will report to Stormy.
      • Paul had an action to touch base with legal. The email has been sent, but no response yet.
      • ACTION: Stormy will contact legal.
  • Andalucia Accessibility Bid
    • Stormy asked the people from Andalucia to introduce themselves on the foundation-list.
    • There was a requirement in the bid that they must work with upstream.
    • Should we do a press release? Stormy highlights that if we decide to do another a11y hackfest that we could combine these.
    • ACTION: Vincent will talk to Juan Jesús Ojeda (Juanje) from Andalucia and ask them to blog about the project.
  • Finances
    • Annual Report update
      • ACTION: Paul will send an Annual Report update by May 16th.
      • ACTION: Paul will follow up with Germán about the financial data for the Annual Report.
    • ACTION: Germán will share the financial data that was provided to the advisory board to foundation-list.
    • Update about what has been done with the GNOME Foundation bank account since we discovered someone tried to cash a fraudulent check.
      • The GNOME Foundation now has a new checking account.
      • The old account is still available for receiving money, but money cannot be withdrawn from that account. To transfer money out, Rosanna needs to call them to unlock it temporarily.
      • The checks for the new account have been received.
      • There is still work to do. Rosanna still needs to set up the new account to accept wire transfers, for example. This work is underway.
    • Acquiring a GNOME Foundation credit card.
      • We need this for mobile donations and for setting up Orbitz.
      • Vincent, Brian, Paul, Diego, and Germán all approved.
      • ACTION: Rosanna will apply for credit cards for herself and Stormy.
    • GnuCash automation

      • Germán received the GnuCash automation information from Rosanna and hopes to have some progress by the next week.

      • We will do a call for volunteers to get the GnuCash automation work done. Stormy recommends hiring someone to do this work if there is not response from the call for volunteers.

    • Providing a program like "Friends of GNOME" to organizations.
      • Perhaps the "Friends of GNOME" program should be expanded to allow organizations to participate, or should a new program be established?
        • ACTION: Diego will touch base with the marketing list to determine the best name and process for managing this.
    • Nokia arrangement and plans to coordinate with consulting firms
      • A conversation has started on the GTK+ list.
      • Once we get feedback from the GTK+ list, the mobile list, and the advisory board list, then the board will need to make a decision about what to do.
      • We probably need to look for leaders to handle this kind of topics in the future. We had Paul and Dave working on this in the past.
    • Donations in Brazil
      • ACTION: Vincent will send an email to Jonh thanking him for doing the research about accepting donations in Brazil via "Boletos".
    • 360° Board Performance Review Survey
      • Results were sent to the list and are under discussion.
  • Event Updates
    • Marketing Hackfest in Zaragoza
      • The Zaragoza Marketing Hackfest went really well and was even more productive than the last Marketing hackfest in Chicago.
      • The marketing team at the hackfest finished or almost finished a lot of new material (talking point, business cards, etc.).
    • GNOME.Asia Summit/COSCUP co-located event in Taiwan
      • On Tuesday, May 11, the organizers for GNOME.Asia and COSCUP had their first IRC meeting together. They are planning to continue to have weekly IRC meetings together to organize and coordinate
      • Currently working to get the website together.
      • Starting the process to seek sponsors.
      • http://mail.gnome.org/archives/asia-summit-list/2010-May/msg00025.html

    • GUADEC
      • The AGM will be on Thursday at the end of the day so that there are no conflicting meetings.
      • ACTION: Stormy will ping the GUADEC organizers to make sure that meeting rooms for the board and advisory board meetings are properly scheduled.
    • "Co-locating in 2011"
      • The deadline for the Call for Bids will be extended.
    • AEGIS conference and a11y hackfest there
      • The AEGIS project is an EU-funded effort at building primarily open source accessibility solutions in the desktop, web, and mobile spaces
      • http://www.aegis-project.eu/

      • AEGIS is having their first international conference & user workshop in Seville, Spain October 6-8. The announcement and call for paper submissions can be found at:

      • Joanmarie Diggs from the GNOME accessibility community will be giving a keynote.
      • Should we plan to do a GNOME accessibility hackfest either before or after the AEGIS event?
      • Need to consider having more of a GNOME presence at this event.
      • This is a topic for the next a11y IRC meeting, so there will likely be more of an update soon.
  • The board has been using Vincent's gobby server and it has proved to be useful for taking minutes. Therefore, having a reliable long-term solution is something we should investigate.
    • ACTION: Paul will talk to the sysadmin team about setting up a gobby server for the GNOME Foundation board to use for minute taking and other purposes.

Completed Actions

  • Diego - Will lead the board member review process: pick a date, send reminders and coordinate with Stormy the missing members surveys.
  • Diego - Will help Stormy to organize the Zaragoza event.
  • Diego - Will respond to Ronaldo Padula (Loja Geek Depto Comercial) to let him know that the GNOME Foundation is interested in negotiating merchandising agreements, but only if they are non-exclusive. This task was done shortly after the meeting.
  • Germán - Regarding the Accessibility contract from Adalucia, Check if Emergy and/or Yaco can attend at least one day at Zaragoza. If not possible, Stormy may have a meeting with them in Seville. People from both companies went to Zaragoza event and they had a meeting.
  • Rosanna - Will send emails about the state of GnuCash automation to Paul so that he is in the loop about the state of affairs.

  • Stormy - Will provide Diego with information about the results from the survey that each board member was responsible for filling out.
  • Everyone - To review Stormy's report and provide feedback on Stormy's bonus.

Status of action items

  • Brian - Get information about what should be in an "Employee Handbook". Draft approved by board. Now under review by the GNOME legal team.
  • Brian - Develop trademark usage forms for common use cases. James Vasile from legal is working with Brian on this.
  • Brian - Will track progress of GNOME.Asia event organization.
  • Brian - Will follow up with the GNOME Usability community to determine a schedule for upcoming Usability hackfests. An email was sent to the GNOME usability list to encourage planning for GUADEC BOF's, but no response yet.
  • Diego - Taken over from Stormy. Will work with Gil Forcada from guifi.net and gnome-marketing to define the best way for organizations like guifi.net to participate in the GNOME community. Not many replies from the community. Diego will draft something more concrete for gnome-marketing and ask for comments.
  • Germán - Will do the needful to make the bid for GUADEC public.
  • Jorge - Will send an email seeking hackfest sponsorships from the advisory board.
  • Jorge - Taken over from Lucas - Work to ensure that Foundation members sign the GNOME Code of Conduct, and make it a requirement that new Foundation members need to sign this. Lucas completed a draft currently under review, tarted discussion on foundation list, got a lot comments and feedback, and summarized the discussion points. The board seems to be still interested in proposing Code of Conduct as an official guideline for Foundation members as a way have a more clear message about the values of the GNOME community.
  • Jorge - Check records of organizations with existing contracts to use the GNOME trademark. Taken over from Vincent. Look at the archives in 2005 and try to determine which companies can use the GNOME trademark. Know what kind of contracts we had with them.
  • Paul - Will send an email to the foundation-list and the gnucash list seeking someone to take over the GnuCash automation. Taken over from Behdad.

  • Paul - Will provide the board update in a week to the Board with a list of articles and percentage completed for the Annual Report.
  • Paul - Will lead putting together the GNOME Annual Report.
  • Paul - Will reschedule the GNOME Foundation IRC meeting.
  • Paul/Germán - Automate the process of entering PayPal information into GnuCash. Taken over from Behdad.

  • 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.
  • Srini - Follow up with potential sponsors for the co-located summit in 2011.
  • Srini - To update the GNOME Foundation private Wiki with new Intel dial-in information.
  • Stormy - To schedule a meeting with companies that do consulting work with GNOME to start discussions on how we can help (how can we work together). Sent email. Got a couple of positive responses. Will follow up with others and schedule a meeting.
  • Stormy - To follow up with the Advisory Board about acquiring a second machine. Email sent, but no response yet.
  • Stormy - Set up a Euro bank account.
  • Stormy - To follow up with LiMo.

  • Stormy - To finish following up with Orbitz to find out if the GNOME Foundation can pre-purchase travel tickets.
  • Stormy - Will discuss the opportunity to fund Mobile projects on the GNOME mobile mailing list to determine the best way to coordinate and make use of these resources.
  • Vincent - Update the blog and planet to highlight that people are expected to sign and follow the GNOME Code of Conduct. BLOCKED: Waiting for Jorge's action on Code of Conduct.
  • Vincent - Follow-up with Intel to determine what to do about copyright assignment for clutter. Waiting for an official update from Intel.
  • Vincent - Follow up with Michael Meeks and Bradley Kuhn to see if there is an interest in defining a policy the release team can follow to know whether a project with a copyright assignment requirement can be accepted or not. What sorts of copyright assignments are acceptable? ONGOING: Bradley is working on an updated draft. Pinged Bradley and Michael, got a substantial reply, but not the updated draft yet.
  • Vincent - Create a Philosophy page on the GNOME Wiki. BLOCKED: need the Speaker Guidelines first.
  • Vincent - Announce that the Speaker Guidelines are approved. ONGOING: need to rework the guidelines a bit following comments on foundation-list.
  • Vincent - Organize the interview team for sysadmin. ONGOING: we have three people in the team, we are improving the job description, and we will hopefully be able to announce the job next week.

New Action Items

  • Diego - Will touch base with the marketing list to determine the best name and process for managing this.
  • Germán - Will share the financial data that was provided to the advisory board to foundation-list.
  • Paul - Will send an Annual Report update by May 16th.
  • Paul - Will follow up with Germán about the financial data for the Annual Report.
  • Paul - Will talk to the sysadmin team about setting up a gobby server for the GNOME Foundation board to use for minute taking.
  • Rosanna - Will apply for the credit card.
  • Stormy - Will ping the GUADEC organizers to make sure that meeting rooms for the board and advisory board meetings are properly scheduled.
  • Vincent - Will talk to Juan Jesús Ojeda (Juanje) from Andalucia and ask them to blog about the project.
  • Everyone on the board - Needs to encourage appropriate people to consider running for the board.
  • Everyone on the board who plans to run for the next term - Needs to announce their candidacy.

Discussed on the mailing list

  • Preparation for the upcoming GNOME Foundation elections.
  • The guadec.org domain was transferred to GNOME Foundation. Stormy finished the process through Network Solutions.
  • Planning for starting the interview process for hiring a system administrator.
  • Preparation for the GNOME Advisory Board meeting on Tuesday, May 11th. The topic was about GNOME Finances and included a review of the GNOME budget.
  • Cornelius Schumacher sent an email to the board proposing that the deadline for 2011 Desktop Summit Call for Hosts be extended. It was agreed to extend the deadline to June 9th.
  • The board is discussing Stormy's bonus for the time period October, 2009 through March, 2010.
  • Working with the bank to address the fact that someone tried to cash a fraudulent check against the GNOME Foundation. The old account is now on hold and a new account has been set up. Now working to ensure that the new account information is provided to those that need it.
  • Stormy proposed setting up a survey that will be sent to people after attending hackfests to better gather information about what happened at the events to help the travel committee make sure travel subsidy recipients are providing value.
  • The costs for the GSettings hackfest were over budget. $1,984.56 instead of $1,400. This was due to the fact that lodging was more expensive than anticipated. The board approved paying the higher amount.
  • Germán gave a very rough estimation of the travel sponsorships if the GNOME Foundation decides to sponsor all 56 people who requested full and partial sponsorship: $60,570. However, it does not include the costs of the invited speakers.
  • Jonh Wendell continued to research whether the GNOME Foundation could accept Brazilian Boletos. Unfortunately, there do not seem to be any banks that will allow Boletos to be connected to the U.S. GNOME Foundation account. This will likely not be possible for now. If a solution can be found (e.g. a service like PayPal can accept Boletos or setting up a not-for-profit in Brazil with a Brazilian bank account), then this will be looked into further.

  • Diego suggested asking Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier about getting the people who helped at the Texas Linux Fest GNOME booth to blog about their experience.
  • Planning for the AGM meeting at GUADEC 2010.
  • Stormy let the board know that she was on a panel at a CU law school/Silicon Flatirons event on April 29th about open source and patents.
  • Discussion about the draft GNOME Speaker Guidelines.
  • Rosanna got the information about how much it costs to reprint Friends of GNOME t-shirts. The cost breaks down as follows:
    • 12-24 shirts: $16.90 each
    • 25-48 shirts: $12.20 each
    • 49-72 shirts: $10.05 each
    • 73-144 shirts: $9.05 each
    • 145-288 shirts: $8.35 each
    • 289-500 shirts: $7.40 each
    • 501-1000 shirts: $6.70 each
    • XXL adds $1 each, XXXL adds $2 each
    • no cost for screens as it is a reorder

FoundationBoard/Minutes/20100513 (last edited 2010-07-14 16:13:58 by BrianCameron)