Minutes of the Board Meeting - 2012-02-07

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

Wiki: https://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20120207

= Minutes for Meeting of February 7 =

== Next Meeting ==

 February 21, 2012

== Attending ==

 * Bastien Nocera 
 * Brian Cameron
 * Emmanuele Bassi (late)
 * Germán Póo-Caamaño
 * Karen Sandler
 * Rosanna Yuen
 * Shaun !McCance
 * Stormy Peters

=== Regrets ===

=== Missing ===

 * Ryan Lortie

== Board Meeting Agenda ==

 * Karen sent a membership certificate to Milan Bouchet-Valat on January 29th as requested via Membership Committee (Andrea Veri).

 * Next Advisory Board Meeting
   * Planning for Tuesday, February 28th.
   * Were notifications sent out?
   * Last Advisory Board meeting was on 10/25/2011.
   * Agenda Topics:
     * Accessibility (Friends of GNOME).
     * Hackfest Update (GTK+, Docs, Accessibility, GStreamer, WebKitGTK+).
     * Have a GNOME release that is supported similarly to distribution LTS releases (Cc: adboard, distributor-list, release-team).
     * How systemd as a dependency is changing GNOME. 

 * Bylaws
   * Karen sent an email about how to improve our voting process.
   * Any news from Luis Villa?
     * Luis has no record of proposed changes that were discussed when Luis was on the board.
   * How should we best move forward?
   * +1 votes from Stormy, Germán and myself to do voting by email.
   * '''ACTION''': Karen - Will put together a proposal on how we should update the bylaws to improve voting.

 * Events
   * FOSDEM
     * There was a marketing meeting.
     * An update is going to be sent to the marketing-list.
       
 * Budget
   * Germán recommended not approving spending more funds until we have a clearer picture of finances.
   * Issues:
     * Lost a number of advisory board members (HP, etc.).
     * Employee costs have risen.
     * Having difficulty getting paid for invoices.
     * Large number of hackfests were held in the past few years (~12 in 2009, 2010 and 2011).  In previous years there were far fewer hackfests.  The GNOME Foundation has been primarily funding many of these hackfests, so this is a factor.
   * Need to seek new revenue sources.
     * Find new advisory board members.
     * Do more deals with companies for advertisement.
     * Increase the fee for projects for which we hold funds and fund-raising (GStreamer, Gimp).
   * When we will be able to resume funding?
     * A clearer picture is needed.
     * Anything that was not approved will have to be put on hold.

 * Friends of GNOME
   * Status.
     * The FoG banner is now live and being displayed on www.gnome.org 
   * Next steps for a11y FoG campaign.
     * Need to re-launch the campaign now that the banner is up.
     * Waiting on permission for a new testimonial.
   * What constitutes a donation for the campaign?
     * All new one-off donations.
     * First month for new recurring subscriptions.
   * How do we measure success of the campaign?
     * Increase in the overall donations and subscriptions to Friends of GNOME.
     * What can we clearly show as a result for accessibility that was made possible by the campaign?
     * Target items on the GNOME roadmap.
     * Accessibility hackfest.
     * We need better metrics for future campaigns, to show good use of the money that was donated.

== Status of action items ==

 * Bastien - To contact the BBC to discuss about possible collaboration in working directly with GNOME.
 * Bastien - Reach out to the GNOME Advisory Board via email to see if they can help out with providing contacts at Yahoo.
 * Brian - Develop trademark usage forms for common use cases. James Vasile from legal is working with Brian on this.
   * This has been done.  Will close once the Foundation website is updated, refer to bug #644932.
   * https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=644932
 * Brian - Check records of organizations with existing contracts to use the GNOME trademark. Taken over from Vincent Untz. Look at the archives in 2005 and try to determine which companies can use the GNOME trademark. Know what kind of contracts we had with them.  Taken over from Jorge.
 * Brian - Will take over organizing the GNOME Foundation IRC meetings.
 * Germán - Will continue the discussion with Frédéric about the Gitorious instance on gnome.org. Touched based with Frédéric on Sep 30, we will elaborate more on his proposal once he has more time.
 * Germán - To inform the local GUADEC 2010 organization the decision to make final payment to cover remaining costs.  Touched based with Reinount and Vincent.  There was a misunderstanding with respect to Koen & Sanne working hours, we need to discuss it again.  Everything is fine.
 * Germán - To get in touch with Daniel to work on the Annual Report.
 * Karen - Will follow up with CiviCRM contract.
   * After some tracking down of the status of the communications, cedwards sent email to get discussions with Claudian moving again.
 * Karen - Will follow up with !LojaGeek. 
   * Emailed, so far no response.
 * Karen - To look into Google Checkout as an annual payment option for FoG.
 * Karen - Will work with Gil Forcada from guifi.net and gnome-marketing to define the best way for organizations like guifi.net to participate in the GNOME community. Not many replies from the community. Diego Urrelo will draft something more concrete for gnome-marketing to determine the best name and process for managing this. There was a discussion on the mailing list and a few good ideas, Diego will wrap them up and send them again for further comments.  Will follow-up with Board to read the Advisory Board fees for small businesses proposal, ask for feedback and set a date to vote by.
   * Have been in touch with Gil
 * Karen - To finish the Privacy Policy, get review from James Vasile, etc.
 * Karen - To contact GIMP, GStreamer, and PiTiVi to outline the board's thoughts about earmarked fund raising.
 * Karen - Follow up with getting Alan Day and Sumana Harihareswara to sign the Copyright Assessment from SFLC.  Transferred from Brian.
 * Karen - To continue working with Justin about renewing the old trademarks.
 * Karen - To communicate with the GNOME.asia bidders for sponsorship.
 * Karen - To send an email to the board-list and adboard list for the announcement and request for agenda topics.
 * Karen - To talk to Simon about an amendment to OSI's charter to mention freedom.
 * Rosanna - Automate the process of entering !PayPal information into !GnuCash.
 * Rosanna - Will apply for the GNOME credit card.
 * Rosanna - To pay Baptiste Mille-Mathias for the stickers to bring at FOSDEM.
 * Ryan - To help Alberto draft a public announcement regarding change in PGO editorial policy.
 * Ryan - To talk to the release-team about the external dependencies process.
 * Shaun - Will post the January 18th, 2012 IRC meeting minutes.
 * Shaun - To contact Dave Neary and Ekaterina Gerasimova to get a list of attendees to get feedback for the summit. 
 * Shaun - To help out extracting the GNOME respondents of Describe FoundationBoard/Minutes/20111115 here.the Desktop Summit survey.
 * Shaun - To contact the previous editors of the Annual Report to gather a better picture of how to move forward.
 * Stormy - will send an email to GWOP interns to attend the Grace Hopper Conference.
 * Stormy - Take care of !GnuCash automation.  Taken over from Paul & Behdad.
 * Stormy - to ask LWN if they can automate it with gnome.org addresses
 * Stormy - To send an email to the GNOME.asia list for plans for next year.
 * Stormy - To create a wiki page on the accounts holders.

=== New Action Items ===

 * Karen - Will put together a proposal on how we should update the bylaws to improve voting.

== Discussed on the mailing list ==

 * Events
   * GUADEC Committee Planning meeting on January 30.
     * https://live.gnome.org/GUADEC/GUADEC-2012-0130
   * Día GNOME 2011.
     * Fabio Duran Verdugo thanked The GNOME Foundation for helping to make this event a success.
   * Karen Sandler attended LCA.
     * http://blogs.gnome.org/gnomg/2012/01/24/back-from-lca/

 * Emily Chin did a call for the 2011 Q4 report.
   * https://live.gnome.org/GnomeMarketing/QuarterlyReports/2011/Q4

 * Canonical Group Limited will be making a payment to the Gnome foundation in the amount of $2319.36 for our quarterly donation (October 2011 - December 2011). This figure is a result of a percentage of income that we are receiving from the UbuntuOne music store.

 * Discussion about updating the budget.

-- 
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.name
B: http://blogs.gnome.org/ebassi