Minutes of Board of Directors Meeting, Mar. 26th, 2008

["Luis Villa" <luis tieguy org>]

(Apology as per last two minutes. This is the last one tonight;
minutes of the Apr. 9th meeting will be finalized and sent out in the
next few days.)

= Minutes for Meeting of Mar. 26th, 2008 =

== Note on meeting of 3/12 ==

Because of a variety of travel and other conflicts, no meeting was
held on Mar. 12th.

== Next Meeting ==

April 9th

== Attendance ==

 * Brian
 * J5
 * Vincent

=== Regrets ===

 * Behdad
 * Luis

=== Missing ===

 * Jeff
 * Lucas

=== Asia.Summit ===

Three coordinators of the GNOME.Asia Summit attending this meeting

 * Emily Chen
 * Will LaShell
 * Alfred Peng


== Minutes ==

 * Since this meeting did not meet quorum, little was discussed aside
from talking about the GNOME.Asia Summit.  The "Old Items" section is
pretty much a copy of the previous week's minutes with some updates to
reflect what was discussed on the list.

=== GNOME.Asia Summit ===

 * Sun Microsystems has become a sponsor, providing $10,000.  They
also have $2,000 from other sources.
 * The organizers are considering reducing the length of the summit
from 3 days to 2 days to reduce costs.
 * The organizers have done some work to further reduce their minimum
budget.  Previously it was $24,515, with $16,056 being for 3-day
rental at the Tsinghua Science Park venue.  They have talked with 2
other venues.  For a 2-day event, Tsing-Hua Science Park will charge
$9,127, UNIS Center will charge $4,901, and Tsing-Hua University will
charge $1,408.  However Tsing-Hua University cannot guarantee the
space will be available.  The organizers plan to provide us with an
updated budget by the end of the week.
 * They are expecting 300 people to attend.  However, the largest room
available at Tsing-Hua University would only hold 200 people, which
might limit the number of people who could attend. It was mentioned
that it's important, from a cultural point of view, that there's
enough room for everyone willing to attend.
 * The target for attendance is students, so it's nice to be near a university.
 * The organizers would like the Foundation to help with funding, and
will provide the board with numbers by the end of the week.
 * The organizers would like the Board to assist them in contacting
potential sponsors.  If the organizers sent us brochures, would the
board be willing to forward them to sponsors we have worked with in
the past?  Or should we provide them with a list of contacts and let
them contact the potential sponsors directly?
 * The organizers would like advice about how to time the release of
the call for sponsors, call for participants, and other aspects of
coordinating the event.  It was suggested the Behdad or Baris would be
good to talk with the GNOME.Asia Summit organizers to help them know
how to do this.
 * They would like help to better advertise for the GNOME.Asia event
on the GNOME website. Vincent will help with this once the GNOME.Asia
website is up.

= Discussed on board-list =

* GTK+ Hackfest went well.  Behdad said that they might need the
$5,000-6,000 originally allocated for the event from foundation money.
 The $20,000 that was raised paid for the venue and travels, but not
hospitality and other on-the-spot charges.

* Lucas put together a proposal on how to boost Friends of GNOME.  He
has a new mug design, and a plan to allow people to pay money over
time via PayPal.  Some discussion about how to further promote Friends
of GNOME by better advertising it on the websites, and talking with
the marketing team about how to better market the program.

* Discussion about providing PayPal service for Libre Graphics Meeting
under the same conditions as we provide for GIMP (i.e. 5% cut that
goes to the Foundation)

* Lengthy discussion about Epiphany and Mozilla relations.  The board
and/or release team may need to provide some direction in terms of
ensuring how the new Epiphany+WebKit will meet requirements to be
included in future GNOME releases.  The Epiphany team wants the board
to do a press release, though there was some disagreement whether this
was appropriate.  The Epiphany team was asked to send an email to
d-d-l or gtk-devel-list to explain their plans before a decision is
made.

* Discussion about providing GNOME certification for non-GNOME
programs that are approved for use with GNOME for programs like
firefox and thunderbird.

* Zana provided administrative updates on finances.

* Agreement to pay customs/import tax for the machines that Google
will give to GNOME.