I should note that these minutes were to be approved in the board meeting of August 5th, but the board deferred the approval until today because there was only limited time for the meeting of August 5th. According to the guideline that we recently adopted, I should have notified foundation-announce of this, but I forgot. I am interested in feedback about whether readers would have found this notification useful? If so, I will make a better effort to ensure it happens next time, or if not we can reconsider whether it belongs in the guideline.
= Foundation Board Minutes for Monday 22nd July 2019, 15:30 UTC =
== Attending ==
* AllanDay
* FedericoMena
* TristanVanBerkom
* BrittYazel
* RobMcQueen
* RosannaYuen
* NuriziSanchez
* NeilMcGovern
* PhilipChimento
== Regrets ==
* CarlosSoriano
* KatGerasimova
== Agenda ==
* Approve minutes of July 8
* Approve minutes of July 15
* LAS 2019 Bid
* Officer Elections
* Email from Chronojump
* Email about article in Opensource.com
== Minutes ==
* Approve minutes of July 8
* Approved,
* Approve minutes of July 15
* Amendments: Add Kat and Federico to list of (missing) attendees.
* Approved.
* LAS 2019 bid
* Rob and Allan have led the discussion during the past week about the requirements to move forward with the LAS bid. This has resulted in the writing of a draft co-hosting agreement for the conference, which defines the shared sponsorship and how the funds are to be held and handled.
* Allan: One requirement of this is that we would have someone on the Foundation side to monitor the progress of the fundraising.
* Neil: That would be the responsibility of myself and Molly de Blanc, with a shared spreadsheet.
* Britt: I feel that negotiating this contract should have been the responsibility of the staff, not the board. I'm willing to vote on it now, but would like to see it done differently in the future.
* Rob: In the previous board term we discussed that Neil did not want to divert resources from existing priorities to LAS unless the board was fully behind it. I agree with you, but that's the context of why things happened this way. The hope is that this can be re-used for future LAS events.
* Britt: Neil, are you OK with the state of things?
* Neil: Now that we have more staff compared to previous years, there is a period of adjustment for the board moving to a strategic role rather than an operational one. For this particular issue, it is fine.
* Philip: Neil, are you happy with the contract?
* Neil: Yes.
* Allan: The division of responsibilities between the ED and the board probably needs a more extensive conversation during GUADEC or a board hackfest.
* Britt: Could this be discussed in the board days prior to GUADEC?
* Tristan: What is the maximum risk for the Foundation?
* Rob: In case no funds are raised, we would be committed to spend half of the minimum budget of the conference, which is around EUR 5000.
* Nuritzi: The space for the signature has my name pre-filled in it. We should amend the draft under discussion to have a blank for the GNOME representative's name.
* Rob makes the amendment.
* '''VOTE''': Approve executing the LAS co-hosting agreement.
* +1 unanimous
* Officer elections
* Deferred because not all board members are present.
* We decide to elect officers on August 5th, before the executive director's report, and ask people to communicate beforehand which positions they're interested in so that we can have the discussion all prepared and vote quickly.
* '''ACTION''': Neil - send around an email asking about board members' interest in officer positions.
* Email from Chronojump
* We received an email on the board list asking to make a Gitlab project (chronojump-server) private, as the maintainers are considering licensing away from the GPL. They want the server component of Chronojump to be hidden while they make this determination.
* Neil: I have taken a position of saying no, since we host only free software.
* Philip and Tristan don't see any reason to deviate from that.
* Rob: I can upload proprietary code to my personal space on GitLab, this isn't that different.
* Tristan: No, we don't have the ability to create private repositories on our GitLab without admin assistance.
* Rob: So they should just delete it then?
* Philip: What is the relationship between Chronojump and GNOME?
* Federico: It's one of the oldest end-user applications in GNOME and the relationship has been cordial over the years. It's an application for recording data from sports competitions, and the server component isn't necessary to use the application.
* The board agrees with Neil's last communication to the Chronojump team; we are willing to delete the server repo but not to make it private.
* '''ACTION''': Neil - Reply to the Chronojump team that the board has considered their request.
* Email about article in Opensource.com
* Neil already handled this.
* We are moving back to the biweekly schedule for board meetings:
* July 29: Hacking session
* August 5: Annual board meeting to elect officers; executive director's report with discussion session following
* August 12: Hacking session
* August 19: We are meeting in person a few days later, so the normal Monday board meeting is cancelled.
== Actions ==
* '''Neil''' - Send an email to the board members asking which officer positions they are interested in.
* '''Neil''' - Reply to the Chronojump team.
