Re: Minutes of the Board meeting June 15 2003

[Eric Baudais <baudais kkpsi org>]

On Wed, Jun 18, 2003 at 10:56:53AM -0400, Daniel Veillard wrote:
> Shall we grow:
>     Looking at web site and administration example it seems clear that
>     we have a lack of infrastructure which prevents us from getting lot
>     of community involvement in managing those.
>     How do we get the infrastructure, or guarantee focused attention on
>     specific work. Lot of discussion about:
>       - hiring staff
>       - trying to get focused help from companies

I believe this should only be used to suppliment areas where GNOME is
weak.  I see it as a short term solution.  A company will not provide
staff indefinitely to improve GNOME.  I believe the focused help from
a company should be used to develop an interest in people who are
excited about GNOME.  This should turn in to people working alongside
the company and who can maintain the project should the company decide
not to provide the staffing to the project.  A long term solution is
to interest individuals to work on these areas.

>       - specific project can be used to rise funds
>       - getting better managenent of projects
>     The main question becomes how much we want to grow, and how to
>     plan and manage that growth.
>     There is some consensus that this growth should be very progressive
>     for example we do not plan to hire another full time employee in the
>     next year. But in 5 years we may have several new full time employees.
>     We need to get better at fund raising and this implies having very clear
>     message for the marketing.
>     Targetted actions would be:
>       - roll out the new web site infrastructure

I also think foundation.gnome.org needs some love too.  It hasn't been updated 
very much since it was first designed.

>       - improve the documentation

What documentation do you think needs improving?  Right now Sun is doing the 
core desktop documentation and the GDP is working on documentation around the 
edges so to speak.  Also Shaun McCance has been submitting patches to improve 
Yelp.  His patches has been mainly to improve the XSL transformations as well 
as improving the time it takes Yelp to load a document.

>       - provide a newsletter

I think this is where help from a company can be very useful.  It would be nice 
if we had the newsletter designed by someone in the print business instead of 
rolling our own.  If the idea is to provide a print version of the newsletter 
to execs and friends of gnome.

>     getting advisory board feedback on where they would be ready to provide
>     resource so that those will actually happen.

...

>     ACTION: Tim to Investigate liability insurance.
>     ACTION: Thanks: Wilson-Sonsini for working pro-bono
>             Red Hat for bandwidth
>         in newsletter and on the foundation site
>     ACTION: Nat write a confidentiality policy
>     ACTION: Jonathan to set up the mechanism to publish and consult
>         Tim's quickbook
>     ACTION: Jeff to see how to get a link to Friend of Gnome from the desktop
>     ACTION: Tim to look into merchandising options around our logo and
>         GUADEC proceedings

I think more people would be interested in buying merchandise if it
was interesting and fairly new.  One example is Calum's t-shirt for
GUADEC.  I would love to see the t-shirt sold by the foundation and
would probably buy one.  I believe merchandise with just the GNOME
logo is okay, but not terribly exciting (i.e. not making me think that
is really cool, I want one!)

I also think the merchandise needs to be advertised on the gnome.org website as 
well as on the foundation.gnome.org website.  The merchandise can possibly be 
advertised at GUADEC and other conferences.  I'm not sure if this is feasible though 
due to other companies giving away t-shirts or not.

>     ACTION: Nat to get the charter amended to reflect the current consensus
>     ACTION: Nat and Jody to draft a short list of project to propose for
>         funding
>     ACTION: Tim make sure that Lesley provides a status report every other 
>         board meeting
>     ACTION: Jeff to build a mailing list for join marketing and board issues
> 
> 
> Open issues:
> ============
> 
>     Precise real-time financial reporting

I'm not sure this is really needed.  I think a quarterly report to the
foundation membership and Tim providing a report on the foundation's
current financial position for each board meeting will be sufficient.
I believe it would be a huge improvement to just have quarterly
reports submitted to the foundation's membership.

Eric Baudais