Minutes of the Board Meeting of April 22nd, 2014

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

wiki: https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20140422

= Minutes for Tuesday, April 22nd, 2014, 16:00 UTC =

== Next Meeting ==
 * Tuesday, May 6th, 2014, 16:00 UTC

== Attending ==
 * Andreas Nilsson
 * Marina Zhurakhinskaya
 * Tobias Mueller
 * Joanmarie Diggs
 * Ekaterina Gerasimova
 * Sriram Ramkrishna
 * Emmanuele Bassi
 * Rosanna Yuen

== Board Meeting Agenda ==

 * Accounting
  * Budget/accounts
   * USD 280k in invoices sent in April
   * adboard fees have been sent
    * USD 130k adboard invoiced
    * USD 20k adboard paid
   * cheques for the OPW: USD 50k
   * donations: USD 17k
    * more than what we usually get in a year
    * great response from the community
    * various >1k donations
    * new donors
    * need to write thank you letters for the donors
    * Rosanna usually adds a quick thank you notes when sending a gift
    * would be nice to have a proper thank you note
    * '''ACTION''': Andreas and Joanie to draft thank you letters to our donors
    * would be nice to have that note ready for the GNOME.Asia Summit
as Tobi is working with the local team to send gifts to our donors
    * how much money do we have?
     * donations will cover our running costs for 3 months
     * only one OPW payment was sent for this round; the other ones
are back payments
    * last meeting, Marina proposed that interns that OPW income for
the upcoming round is pooled to pay interns
    * after discussions off line before this meeting, they decided to
scrap the idea and pay interns only if their sponsor is in good
standing and has paid the sponsorship for the upcoming round
    * we should have a donation page on the OPW website as well
     * we used to have a donation page there but we never really promoted it
   * Friends of GNOME donations are going to require time and effort
from Zana to work on the gifts
    * it'll take some time to get through the queue
    * should we try offloading the gifts to one of our merchandise partners?
    * we did try with Stormy to get Amazon to handle tees and
stickers, but it was fairly expensive
    * we never asked one of the stores we already use for GNOME merchandise
    * '''ACTION''' (very low priority): Zana to check the inventory of
merch she has in storage
   * Bradley/Conservancy offered his time to handle OPW if the
Foundation gets overwhelmed by it
    * last resort option, but good to have a backup
    * we may need to hire somebody to handle OPW administration
    * we don't have enough resources for a hire
    * in the meantime we must engage the OPW volunteers to take
pressure off of Zana
    * current plan:
     * contracts
     * website maintainance
     * maybe help with the financial/admin side
    * Marina, Karen, and Zana did a great job in handling the OPW
administrivia, as well as hunting down status of the invoices, over
the last two weeks
    * we need to build reserves for the OPW operative expenses
     * we can use donations to build both reserves for making payments
and for operative expenses
  * Tax return
   * due date for filing: approx 3 weeks
   * bookkeeper to fill the tax return and sent it to Joanie
   * '''ACTION''': Kat and rest of the board to review the tax return
form once it's ready
  * Handling money for other organisations
   * we haven't kept good records for the agreements in a formal location
   * most of them were handled and iterated via email
   * Kat and Zana have been moving this information to a wiki page
   * we still need to find out some of the historical information for
some deals, like the one with GIMP
  * the board would like to thank Kat for the hard work in handling
the financial issues of the foundation

 * Upcoming events
  * GUADEC 2014
   * Karen was drafting a contract for the local organisation that
handles the GUADEC financials
   * somebody will have to take over this task
   * '''ACTION''': Tobi to follow up with Alexandre and Karen about
the contract for the GUADEC local organisation
   * we need to start looking for sponsors
   * can we ask the OPW sponsors?
    * it'd be too ambitious to have a full OPW presence at GUADEC
    * many sponsors/interns are from the US
    * may be worth asking OPW general sponsors that are not on the adboard
   * add a new sponsorship tier for adboard that only covers GUADEC/GNOME.Asia
  * GNOME.Asia
   * the local team sent their budget
   * the Foundation approved USD 15k for general expenditures of the event
   * Google has a combined sponsorship for GNOME.Asia and GUADEC
   * there is a discrepancy between the budget advanced by GNOME and
the one provided by the GNOME.Asia organisers
    * the budgeted expense from the Foundation is USD 15k, offset by
the sponsor fees
   * we need more sponsors for GNOME.Asia
   * '''ACTION''': Tobi to follow up the GNOME.Asia budget issue with
the local organisers
  * Upcoming hackfests

 * extending the term of the next board's term
  * hand over at GUADEC
  * up to 4 board meetings (June and July) overlap between the old and new board
  * may be better to extend the next board's term by one month
  * more discussion on the mailing list, until the end of this week

== Discussed on the mailing list ==

== Completed Actions ==
 * Marina will follow up with Rosanna on OPW finances
 * Karen will review the agreement for collecting funds in Europe
(obsolete, being done by the board now)

== Pending action items ==
 * Board will review the agreement for collecting funds in Europe
 * Andreas to put together a GNOME supporter card for our donors
 * Andreas, Joanie to draft thank you letters to our donors
 * Emmanuele to send Zana and Tobi an update on FoG donors gifts
 * Emmanuele to send hackers up for "adoption" the list of donors that
want a postcard
 * Emmanuele to draft a date and time for the post-release meeting
 * Emmanuele to send a proposal to foundation-list about possible IRC meetings
 * Emmanuele to ask the adboard members for help with Bugzilla update
 * Joanie to draft a proposal for the photography policy at GNOME
conferences to discuss on foundation-list
 * Joanie and Karen to meet and discuss about the photography policy
for GNOME events
 * Joanie to go over Michael Schumacher ideas on the Gimp funding
processes and merge them with her ideas on the wiki
 * Kat to create a private wiki page on the web services accounts
holders and passwords
 * Allan and Kat decided to go for a private git account instead for
security reasons
 * Kat to draft a proposal for a privacy policy for review
 * Karen to write the Privacy policy for GNOME services
 * Karen will look at gnome-software privacy issues from a legal standpoint
 * Tobi to continue pursuing the fund collection in Europe
 * Sri to investigate better uses of adsense/adwords on the GNOME websites
 * Tobi to talk to Andrea to move the PayPal data extraction scripts
over to the GNOME infrastructure
 * Zana to check the inventory of merch she has in storage
 * Kat and board to review the tax return form
 * Tobi to follow up with Alexandre and Karen about the contract for
the GUADEC local organisation
 * Tobi to follow up the GNOME.Asia budget issue with the local organisers
 * Sri to communicate to Rosanna and work on the donation for the West
Coast hackfest


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