Minutes of the face to face Board meeting 28 May 2005

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

          Minutes of the face to face Board meeting 28 May 2005


Administrativia:
  - full day face to face meeting done the day before GUADEC in Stuttgart
    from 10am to 5pm


Attendance:
   Owen Taylor (chairing)
   Murray Cumming
   Daniel Veillard
   Dave Neary
   Tim Ney
   Federico Mena-Quintero
   Jonathan Blandford
   Christian Schaller
   Luis Villa
   Miguel de Icaza

Regrets:
   Jody Goldberg

New actions:

   ACTION: Dave to proceed to details stage of merchandizing agreement

   ACTION: Federico will start a list of GNOME certifications checkpoints
           in the Wiki

   ACTION: Dave to investigate the charter and make a concrete proposal
           for a cheaper class of advisory board membership

   ACTION: Tim to secure space for the GNOME Summit and then send invitations
           to contacts in governments.

   ACTION: Tim look at the legal details of what it would take to contract
           someone work on our documentation

   ACTION: Federico and Murray to create an outline for improving areas
           where our documentation is missing or obsolete

Discussion
   - Merchandizing
     + choice now reduced to 2 companies
     + checking samples
     => select one company, and get a yearly renewable agreement with them

   - GNOME mission statement
     Notes: we are not focusing on wording, which is better left to the 
            marketing people, but rather trying to define the axis of what
	    we think should be our communication statements
     
     + an easy to use desktop built on a free software platform
     + the means is to provide a well-integrated platform
     + we encourage an non-exclusive ecosystem, by providing a free software
       reusable stack

   - How to grow GNOME
     + working on the stable pieces of the software is less interesting
     + what do we need to change to become more inclusive and welcoming
       as a community
     + release set is a way to encourage the developer of applications
       developed with GNOME to feel more part of the developer community
     + the notion of "GNOME Certified" applications might help growing
       mindshare probably using levels of certification
       We need to start doing a list of various checkpoints
   - Lunch
   - Tim's review
   - Relationship with Nokia
     lot of cool stuff going on
   - Advisory board
     + we have currently 5 paying Advisory Board members:
       IBM, HP, Novell, Red Hat, Sun
     + providing different classes of membership may help get new members
       currently we have 2 classes one for non-profit which is free and
       for profit companies which is 10,000 USD per year.
     + governement related participation would make sense, they can collect
       user related feedback on the large scale and help grow the local
       community
     + looking at where the advisory board membership can provide value
       to the companies like communication and press releases
     => it's better to focus on the value of the foundation
   - Where we should be spending money
     various options were raised:
     + full-time sysadmin
     + live CDs/tradeshow promotion
     + hiring for completing the GTK documentation
     + small funds for local groups/trade shows/evangelism
       having a yearly pool of cash dedicated to this would help
   - GUADEC
     The identity crisis: developer versus user conference.
     Talk about the format of the conference, possibility of co-hosting,
     and potential future locations.
     
Adjourned at 5pm.

Daniel

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