Minutes of Board Meeting: 9 Feb 2004

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

 Minutes For Board Meeting: 9 February, 2004
=============================================
Present:
	Luis	(chair)
	Malcolm	(minutes)
	Tim
	Dave
	Jody
	Jeff
	Bill
	Jonathan
	Owen

Regrets:
	Glynn
	Nat

Absent:
	Leslie

Meeting started: 20:40 UTC

Minutes of last meeting were approved.

Completed Action Items (from last minutes):
-------------------------------------------
	ITEM: Tim to send credit-card payment interface spec and
	      comments to Owen and Malcolm for review.

	      	=> done.

	ITEM: Tim to post a Director's Report to foundation-list.

		=>
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2004-January/msg00054.html

	ITEM: Tim to send links to photos from the recent Linux World
	      Expo (in New York) to foundation-list.
	      
	      	=> done (as part of above report)

	ITEM: Tim to talk to the GNOME Bangalore conference organiser
	      to get from promotional materials from that conference.

		=> Tim spoke to organiser, who has sent some promotional
		materials to Tim. He is also going to send a scan of the
		conference poster to Tim for future use.

	ITEM: Malcolm to put up a web page of the conference dates and
	      known submission deadlines. Also make available and ICS
	      file so that people can have it in their Evolution
	      calendars, for example.

	      	=> Mail sent to gnome-foundation list.
		http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2004-February/msg00014.html
		=> Some updates have already been received.
		=> ICS version of this file has been put on hold until
		Evolution 1.5 stabilises a bit more.

Continuing Actions:
-------------------
	ACTION: Jeff is to put board confidentiality policy up on the
	        foundation website.
		
	ACTION: Jeff will pull together a web page of links to
		as many of the local groups as he has information for.

	ACTION: Jeff and Glynn are to send mail to appropriate lists
		(gnome-announce, ...) requesting items that can go into
		the GNOME FTP repository for general promotional use.
		These items include papers, slides from talks, and
		photos from conferences, etc, that can be used for
		publicity. All submissions should be freely
		redistributable for GNOME purposes.

	ACTION: Jeff, Nat and Malcolm are to write the surrounding
		portions of the roadmap to fill things out. Jeff is to
		work on the "universal access" portion, Nat on
		"collaboration" and Malcolm on the "mission outline"
		sections. These will be initially posted to board-list
		and then quickly merged and moved onto foundation-list
		for wider input.

	ACTION: All board members need to participate in discussion on
		board-list in an effort to try and prioritise our goals
		for the coming year and to form initial strike teams to
		tackle some of the main issues.

			- Nothing happened on this front. Malcolm is
			  charged with posting an initial mail to board
			  list in an attempt to kickstart the
			  conversation.

	ACTION: Leslie will create a press release discussing the
		international involvement in GNOME from country-specific
		teams.

			- Jody to follow this up with Leslie. Some
			  progress has already been made.

New Actions:
------------
	ACTION: Jeff to resume talks with Luke Stroven about replacement
		hardware for gnomedesktop.org.

	ACTION: Tim to send board's comments on latest trademark draft
		back to lawyers for another revision.

			- Aiming to have another draft ready for the
			  board before the next meeting.

	ACTION: Luis to talk to Andrew Hutton to get details about
		proposed Desktop Summit.

	ACTION: Jody to post to board-list a brief summary of salient
		points from his trip to Korea last year.

	ACTION: Tim to talk to credit card clearance agent about a
		processing setup appropriate for GNOME Foundation
		purposes.

Items from previous minutes:
----------------------------
	(a) Many action items were not completed. Stronger attempts will
	be made to try and complete these items *this week*.

	(b) Jeff and Glynn are to send mail to appropriate lists
	requesting items that can go into the GNOME FTP repository for
	general promotional use.

		- Jeff reported that he and Glynn have started to
		  organise an area for storing these items. No mail has
		  gone out about it, since they are not yet ready to
		  receive submissions. This is on an ongoing task for
		  the coming fortnight.

	(c) Tim to send credit-card payment interface spec and comments
	to Owen and Malcolm for review.

		- Malcolm posted some comments about this specification
		  to the board list. See the GNOME shop discussion under
		  new business for details.

New business:
-------------
	(a) Footnotes hardware
		- The current footnotes hardware is reaching its
		  capacity for service. Jeff is talking to Luke Stroven
		  about possible replacement options that the GNOME
		  Foundation can help with (in terms of helping to
		  provide new equipment).

		- Luis mentioned that we might also investigate whether
		  Luke thinks the current bandwidth/hosting arrangement
		  is suitable, or if we should be considering other
		  options in that arena as well. Jeff will continue with
		  these conversations.

	(b) GNOME and third-parties
		- As a matter of general policy, the board wants to come
		  up with a clear statement of requirements for when
		  corporations or third-parties wish to begin to
		  incorporate their products into the GNOME desktop.
		  This is intended to be something similar to the
		  requirements for modules to enter the GNOME platform.
		  However, it will be a principles and goals of the
		  platform as a whole. In introductory talks with
		  corporations, we can then explain that if they have
		  grave objections to items on that list (be they
		  licensing issues, or distribution issues or whatever),
		  then those problems need to be solved before they can
		  hope to make progress. Producing this statement is an
		  ongoing activity for the board.

	(c) Desktop summit prior to OLS
		- This has been proposed as something akin to the GCC
		  summit that has been held in Ottawa the past couple of
		  years. Luis is going to talk to the organiser and find
		  out more specific details about the proposal and
		  GNOME's potential involvement.

	(d) Trademark license draft
		- Another draft was circulated to the board,
		  incorporating changes based on recent foundation-list
		  email. Malcolm sent back some comments on this draft,
		  which appears to have identified the issues that
		  others also wanted considered a bit further.

		- The draft and comments are going back to the lawyers
		  for another round of changes and will then be read by
		  the board and sent to the foundation list. Jeff, Tim
		  and Malcolm are nominally on the strike-team taking
		  care of this at the moment. More volunteers may be
		  needed.

	(e) Jody's visit to Korea
		- This trip was a while ago now, but a couple of board
		  members wanted to get a short summary of the pertinent
		  points to see if there are things we should follow up
		  in the future. Jody will send a brief summary to the
		  board mailing list.

	(f) GNOME shop
		- Based on a detailed analysis by Curtis Hovey and
		  experiences of board members, it was felt that running
		  a web-based shop front for selling GNOME merchandise
		  was probably too large a task for the Foundation at
		  present.

		- Jeff mentioned some ideas that had been coming out of
		  conversations with local businesses: the possibility
		  of licensing the sale of GNOME products to merchants
		  covering various geographical regions. With careful
		  management, this would be a lower-effort way to sell
		  branded merchandise to interested people. There was
		  agreement that this was a possibility worth exploring
		  further and the board will try to work out some of the
		  details of such a scheme.

		- Another item to come out of this was whether the GNOME
		  Foundation should set itself up to be able to process
		  online credit card payments, regardless of whether we
		  have a shop or not. Malcolm provided a review of a
		  proposal that was received by the board to provide
		  this facility. The main difficulty is the necessity of
		  providing high levels of data security for credit card
		  information flowing through the GNOME machines. In the
		  short-term, this was not seen as a practical option.
		  We are going to go back to the clearance merchant to
		  talk more about a system that does not require the
		  GNOME machines to ever receive such sensitive data.
		  Tim is going to start those discussions.

	(g) Replacement cvs.gnome.org machine
		- Owen reported that the new machine (donated by
		  Hewlett-Packard) is sitting in the colocation facility
		  and running happily. Owen and Jonathan are going to
		  attempt to transfer the data from the existing
		  cvs.gnome.org to the new machine this weekend.


Meeting closed at 21:33 UTC 

Next meeting: 23 Feb, 20:30 UTC