GNOME Board meeting minutes, 2008/01/02

["Luis Villa" <luis tieguy org>]

[Special thanks to Lucas Rocha for taking notes for this meeting on
short notice when I was unable to attend.]

= Minutes for Meeting of Jan. 2nd, 2008 =

== Next Meeting ==

2008, Jan. 16rd

== Attendance ==

Members of current board and board-elect attending.

 * Behdad Esfahbod
 * Anne Oestergard
 * John Palmieri
 * Vincent Untz
 * Jeff Waugh
 * Brian Cameron
 * Lucas Rocha

=== Missing ===

 * Quim Gil
 * Glynn Foster

=== Regrets ===

 * Luis Villa

== Minutes ==

=== Conference Calls ===

The new Board needs to find a way to proceed with the conference calls
for the meetings. So far, Sun has been provinding the infrastructure.

  ACTION: Brian to check with Sun about conference calls infra for
Board meetings

=== Summer Event in Peru ===

Diego Escalante requested sponsorship from GNOME Foundation to bring
latin american GNOME contributors to a summer FLOSS event in Peru. The
Board has aproved a $3000,00 sponsor for this event. Diego is also
discussing with GNOME Chile about a Latin American tour of some key
GNOME contributors from Europe and/or US. A request related to that
will come as soon as they have more concrete information.

 * ACTION: Vincent to send a confirmation to Diego about this
sponsorship request

=== Sysadmin Hiring ===

Vincent sent a message to sysadmins asking their opinion before going
on with the hiring process. Jeff thinks that, because of lack of
structure and leadership in the sysadmin group, it's really hard to
get a collective opinion from them, only individual opinions. For
Jeff, we should guess the best we can and go ahead and start the
hiring process. Vincent suggested to wait some more time before going
ahead.

=== Annual Report 2007 ===

Lucas said the design work starts on January 15th. The content is
mostly done. The idea is to release the Annual Report in the beginning
of February. The printing service to be used is still undefined. Anne
suggested asking Advisory Board members about potential printing
services. Jeff suggested asking Andreas Nilsson about local printing
services in Sweden (as they might be cheaper than in Australia).

 * ACTION: Lucas to ask Andreas Nilsson about printing services in Sweden
 * ACTION: Lucas to send a message to AB members about printing services

=== GTK+ Hackfest ===

Behdad said everything is going fine. He should follow up with Mathias
Hasselmann to find and book the venue.

=== Planet GNOME Maintainership ===

Jeff talked with Lucas and Vincent about co-maintaining Planet GNOME.
The guidelines are being worked out by Jeff. Andreas and Tuomas worked
on the guidelines for the hackergotchis, which is good.

=== GNOME @ FOSDEM ===

FOSDEM is in good hands. Some people from GNOME-NL are taking care of
the GNOME booth. A call for talks is about to be sent by Christophe
Fergeau.

 * ACTION: Vincent to check with KDE guys about meeting them at FOSDEM
to talk about joint activities

=== Bostom Summit 2008 ===

Jeff said is good time to make the booking of the venue. The expected
day is Columbus Day holiday's weekend.

 * ACTION: John to talk with Jonathan about the Summit venue booking

=== GUADEC 2008 ===

GUADEC dates were officially announced. Lucas said it would be nice to
have a press release for GUADEC in Istambul.

There is a proposal to use a proprietary system for handling GUADEC
2008 registrations and billing. John said he only feels it's ok if we
publish a major plan to use free software in the future editions of
the conference. It seems that None of the current FLOSS systems help
on the billing part. Jeff said there's no option for FLOSS systems for
what we want. In his opinion, the current Drupal at guadec.org is
badly deployed which makes things more complicated. Jeff suggests to
host the guadec.org website in a GNOME's Wordpress MU and make it the
conference web frontend. On the GUADEC financial handling side, Anne
suggests to take all payments to GNOME Foundation's office in Boston
and then transfer to the GUADEC organizers as they need. Anne suggests
to ask Zana to contact our Bank to know our options. John thinks any
solution we choose now should be reusable for next editins. The
payment nd agenda sustems would be separate from cms. LUCAS TO SUGGEST
BARIS TO MAKE SOME FLIERS TO PROMOTE GUADEC.

 * ACTION: John to contact Zana about financial handling between GNOME
Foundation and GUADEC organizers
 * ACTION: John to ask Baris about their timeline around the website,
registration, and billing systems
 * ACTION: Behdad to work on the initial version of the GUADEC press release

=== Membership Committee situation ===

According to Lucas, the MC is not in a good situation. For some
reason, the new volunteers are not processing the membership
applications and handling daily requests.

 * ACTION: Lucas to check with new volunteers if they need any help
 * ACTION: Jeff to make sure the new MC volunteers have their
accounts, in case this is blocking their work

=== Thanks to parting directors ===

This was the last meeting with the 2007 board. Big thanks for the
parting directors Glynn, Quim and Anne for the nice work on the board.

=== Positions within the Board ===

Lucas suggested to start discussing the positions in the mailing list
and then wrap it up in the next Board meeting.