Minutes of the Board meeting June 15 2003

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

     Minutes of the Board meeting June 15 2003
     =========================================

  Full day face to face board meeting held at Sun in Dublin before the GUADEC
conference

Presents:
=========

   Nat Friedman (chair)
   Daniel Veillard (minutes)
   Glynn Foster (till 2:25 pm)
   James Henstridge
   Bill Haneman
   Luis Villa
   Tim Ney
   Jeff Waugh
   Jonathan Blandford
   Jody Goldberg (from 10:40)
   Miguel de Icaza (from 1:00 pm)
   Jim Gettys (from 2:25 pm)
   Leslie Proctor (from 3:30 for marketing issues)


Meeting:
========

Nat does an introduction:
    - Decision from last year mostly happened as the result of the face
      to face meeting during the advisory board
    - We build a long issue list by email before today's meeting
    - We have only one full-time person working on board related stuff, 
      Tim the director. We have thematic issues, but the big problem
      is how to get things done on concrete projects.
    - This meeting should focuse on getting more efficient on targetted
      directions:
      thematique issues:
       - how to execute
       - Internal vs. external resources ? Do we want to grow
       - Setting vision/direction for gnome
      concrete issues:
       - financial situation
       - marketing and vision issues
          + administrative
	  + message
       - Advisory Board
       - Employee(s) management

Financial situation of the Gnome foundation:
    - Tim provides balance sheet and statement of revenue/expenses
      for this year and last year
    - Merchandise sale is low, but it requires investments.
    - We get money from:
       + Advisory Board fees
       + Friend of Gnome
       + GUADEC contributions
    - Our main operating expense is Administration, i.e. Tim's salary
    - GUADEC should be accounted as a separate piece, Tim provides
      a financial overview just for GUADEC
       + conference facilities cost more than 10,000$
       + financial overview is not finished
    - Collecting advisory board fees is needed
    - Get a link from the desktop to Friend of Gnome

Marketing Message:
   We need to evangelize the GNOME platform
   How we describe GNOME advantage in order to get companies to invest:
   GNOME selling points:
     - openness
     - non-incomberment
     - simplicity of interface
     - pragmatism

Role and goal of the foundation:
   Make the GNOME project successful, now we need to set goals
   We have goals in the charter, they 
    - facilitating the development of GNOME
    - acting as a point of contact for coorporations and other orgs
      who want to contact GNOME
    - releasing and defining GNOME
    - articulating long term vision and directions internally and externally
    - raising and dispatching money on the in persuit of the fundation goals
      and objectives

Shall we grow:
    Looking at web site and administration example it seems clear that
    we have a lack of infrastructure which prevents us from getting lot
    of community involvement in managing those.
    How do we get the infrastructure, or guarantee focused attention on
    specific work. Lot of discussion about:
      - hiring staff
      - trying to get focused help from companies
      - specific project can be used to rise funds
      - getting better managenent of projects
    The main question becomes how much we want to grow, and how to
    plan and manage that growth.
    There is some consensus that this growth should be very progressive
    for example we do not plan to hire another full time employee in the
    next year. But in 5 years we may have several new full time employees.
    We need to get better at fund raising and this implies having very clear
    message for the marketing.
    Targetted actions would be:
      - roll out the new web site infrastructure
      - improve the documentation
      - provide a newsletter
    getting advisory board feedback on where they would be ready to provide
    resource so that those will actually happen.

Marketing message:
    We already have an internal marketing description, Leslie will
    work with the board to refresh and refine this, and then get a
    synthetic description from it. We will aggregate case studies.
    Discussion about the frequency of PR releases and the interaction
    between board and marketing.
    
Advisory board preparation:
    Nat outlines the schedule of the advisory board meeting

Adjourned at 5:30 pm

ACTION:
=======

    ACTION: Tim to Investigate liability insurance.
    ACTION: Thanks: Wilson-Sonsini for working pro-bono
            Red Hat for bandwidth
        in newsletter and on the foundation site
    ACTION: Nat write a confidentiality policy
    ACTION: Jonathan to set up the mechanism to publish and consult
        Tim's quickbook
    ACTION: Jeff to see how to get a link to Friend of Gnome from the desktop
    ACTION: Tim to look into merchandising options around our logo and
        GUADEC proceedings
    ACTION: Nat to get the charter amended to reflect the current consensus
    ACTION: Nat and Jody to draft a short list of project to propose for
        funding
    ACTION: Tim make sure that Lesley provides a status report every other 
        board meeting
    ACTION: Jeff to build a mailing list for join marketing and board issues


Open issues:
============

    Precise real-time financial reporting
    World tour


-- 
Daniel Veillard      | Red Hat Network https://rhn.redhat.com/
veillard redhat com  | libxml GNOME XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
http://veillard.com/ | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/