Foundation Board Minutes for Tuesday, September 11th 2018, 15:30 UTC

Next meeting date Tuesday, September 18 2018, 15:30 UTC

Attending

Regrets

Agenda

Minutes

  • Akademy report (Carlos)

    • Carlos went to Akademy with Felipe Borges. There is a blog post about his experience (https://csorianognome.wordpress.com/2018/08/24/a-gnome-dev-enters-an-akademy-and/). There are a few things that could be useful to us.

    • They have 3-year board terms, so only one-third of the board turns over every year.
    • They have a code of conduct, both for conference and the project
      • Kat: has the CoC fixed any issues in their community?
        • Don't know. This would be something to ask them.
    • Color-coded badge straps to implement photo policy. Not sure whether it is working well.
    • They didn't have any employees. Now they have contractors for marketing, thanks to the Pineapple funding. It's working very well.
    • Anyone in the community can reach out directly to the marketing contractors: "need feedback on X", "need to promote this".
    • They split into the KDE Community and KDE Projects. There is no single KDE project anymore.
      • The KDE Community is a loosely defined group of people with free software goals.
      • An example of a KDE Project is Plasma (the desktop product).
      • KDE is kind of like an umbrella for projects made by the KDE Community, rather than a specific product.
    • They have a process to get software in: how a project can be called a KDE project.
      • Carlos discussed with Tobias Bernard and others during GUADEC about having something like this for GNOME.
        • KDE has a committee doing that.
    • Changed their focus to usability / user experience, rather than doing everything for everyone.
    • We do newcomers onboarding better; we have tooling/people for that.
    • Kat: they have better GSoC retention rates than we do (info from 3-4 years ago)
      • They integrate more with the students, whereas our students work more in isolation.
      • Krita reduced number of students to increase quality
    • They do diversity better.
      • They have age diversity, both younger and older. The young people are not only from Google Summer of Code.
      • More women, maybe the proportion is twice as much as in the GNOME community.
    • Things to collaborate on:
      • Wayland. There is an opportunity for a hackfest here. They feel that GNOME pushes hard on Wayland because we have more manpower; some feel like they try to catch up.
      • Flatpak. Their VP is the KDE maintainer of Discover and Flatpak integration.
        • Carlos discussed with Alex Larsson about this.
    • The discussion turned briefly to GNOME-branded hardware.
      • Kat: What are the criteria to define that hardware works with GNOME properly? Usability?
      • Rob: We need to define requirements to let someone use the GNOME trademark.
      • Taking small steps first is better. We should first define a process to get software into GNOME.
      • Rob: There are different requirements for the GNOME logo on hardware, vs. "GNOME Foo" for a foo program.
      • Federico: There's been some work done on making it easy for ISVs to integrate their software into GNOME - is there a list of requirements in terms of certification?

    • ACTION - Philip or Federico - create a task in GitLab to investigate hardware certification and assign it to Neil

  • Rust hackfest venue sponsorship. See board-list (Carlos)
    • The hackfest is in Greece, and the organizers are asking just under EUR 500 for a coworking space for 4 days for 15 people. There's a hackfest page and an agenda. 7 participants so far, mostly from Europe. Federico plans to attend.
    • Kat: It would be interesting to have the hackfest in Thessaloniki, because then Federico can take a look around at the GUADEC venue.
    • Rosanna: Is this something that the engagement committee is supposed to approve?
      • Federico: The engagement committee should be asked in any case for marketing materials such as stickers

      • Carlos: There's a pending GitLab issue to figure out what to do with hackfests. Currently it's not clear who has to approve it.

    • Rosanna: The board hasn't been asked for sponsorship for a hackfest in a long time; it's not in our minds.
      • We'll vote on this hackfest, since it's time sensitive, and then consider how the process should be in the future.
    • Rob: What budget is this coming out of?
      • Rosanna: The engagement committee budget, so we should let them know that we're spending their money
      • Rob: We should also honor any requests to increase their budget if they run out.

    • VOTE: Assign EUR 496 for the Rust hackfest venue.

      • +1 unanimous

    • ACTION - Kat to reply to Sebastian Dröge that the request has been approved.

  • Review compensation committee charter (Rob)

    • https://gitlab.gnome.org/Community/Board/issues/78

    • Background: This is about having a committee to consider yearly the compensation package of the ED, and evaluate the ED's performance, and make a recommendation to the board for the ED's compensation for the next year.
    • One requirement is to prove to the tax authority that there is an independent process and the ED is not setting their own salary.

    • A useful resource from Neil that the committee will be able to use: https://www.councilofnonprofits.org/tools-resources/executive-compensation

    • The committee charter is ready for the board to review, we'll discuss it next week.
    • Federico: Should we set a timeline?
      • Rob: I've told Neil that we're targeting around the time of the hackfest.

    • ACTION - Everyone to review the committee charter in the GitLab issue, deadline September 18.

  • Review to-do GitLab issues - https://gitlab.gnome.org/Community/Board/issues?label_name%5B%5D=To-Do

Actions

  • Philip or Federico - Create a task in GitLab to investigate hardware certification and assign it to Neil.

  • Kat - Reply to Sebastian Dröge that the budget request for the Rust hackfest venue has been approved.

  • Everyone - Review the compensation committee charter (https://gitlab.gnome.org/Community/Board/issues/78) (deadline September 18)

FoundationBoard/Minutes/20180911 (last edited 2018-09-15 05:56:28 by PhilipChimento)