Minutes of Board Meeting: 26 Jan 2004

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

 Minutes For Board Meeting: 26 January, 2004
=============================================
Present:
	Nat	(chair)
	Malcolm	(minutes)
	Tim
	Dave
	Jody
	Glynn
	Leslie
	Jeff
	Bill
	Jonathan
	Owen
	James 	(*)

Regrets:
	Luis
	Daniel 	(*)

Absent:
	Miguel	(*)
	Jim	(*)

* = outgoing 2003 board member.

Completed Action Items (from last minutes):
-------------------------------------------
	ITEM: Tim to send a version of revised budget to the board list
		=> Done

	ITEM: Glynn to schedule the board wrap-up meeting
		=> meeting not held.

Continuing Actions:
-------------------
	ACTION: Jeff is to put board confidentiality policy up on the
	        foundation website.
		
		- deadline: 2 Feb 2004

	ACTION: Tim to send credit-card payment interface spec and
	        comments to Owen and Malcolm for review.

New Actions:
------------
	ACTION: Jeff will pull together a web page of links to
		as many of the local groups as he has information for.
			
		- draft version due 2 Feb 2004.

	ACTION: Leslie will create a press release discussing the
		international involvement in GNOME from country-specific
		teams.

		- draft version due 2 Feb 2004. Final version due 9 Feb
		  2004.

	ACTION: Jeff and Glynn are to send mail to appropriate lists
		(gnome-announce, ...) requesting items that can go into
		the GNOME FTP repository for general promotional use.
		These items include papers, slides from talks, and
		photos from conferences, etc, that can be used for
		publicity. All submissions should be freely
		redistributable for GNOME purposes.

	ACTION: Jeff, Nat and Malcolm are to write the surrounding
		portions of the roadmap to fill things out. Jeff is to
		work on the "universal access" portion, Nat on
		"collaboration" and Malcolm on the "mission outline"
		sections. These will be initially posted to board-list
		and then quickly merged and moved onto foundation-list
		for wider input.
		
		- Initial drafts due by 2 Feb 2004.

	ACTION: Tim to talk to the GNOME Bangalore conference organiser
		(who is currently visiting Boston) to get from
		promotional materials from that conference.

	ACTION: Tim to post a Director's Report to foundation-list with
		details of the above (and other points that he covered).

	ACTION: Tim to send links to photos from the recent Linux World
	        Expo (in New York) to foundation-list.

	ACTION: Malcolm to put up a web page of the conference dates and
		known submission deadlines. Also make available and ICS
		file so that people can have it in their Evolution
		calendars, for example.

		- due 27 Jan 2004.

	ACTION: All board members need to participate in discussion on
		board-list in an effort to try and prioritise our goals
		for the coming year and to form initial sub-committees /
		strike teams to tackle some of the main issues.

Items from previous minutes:
----------------------------
	(a) Elections: Request that the membership committee hold a
	referendum on anonymous voting. The membership committee can
	should hold the referendum as part of the 2003 election or
	shortly after it depending on their convenience. (from
	2003-11-04)

		- Jody has talked to the membership committee about this
		  and they are planning to hold a referendum around
		  mid-March 2004.

		- No further action is required from the board on this.

	(b) Put the confidentiality policy on website: Luis to fetch the
	wording and Jeff to put them on-line. (from 2003-11-18)

		- No discussions. See Actions.

	(c) Bangalore & Chile: Local teams are setting up a GNOME user
	group.  We should do a press release to announce it when setup.
	(from 2003-11-18)

		- This item has grown a bit beyond the original two
		  local teams. Board members are aware of a number of
		  GNOME teams in various countries that are quite
		  organised. It was resolved that we should try to
		  capitalise on the publicity that this international
		  involvement can generate. To this end, we want to link
		  to as many of these locale-specific websites and teams
		  as possible, although with suitable notices that
		  their opinions do not necessarily represent the
		  foundation. We would also like to use these groups as
		  contact points for media groups wanting to talk to
		  local GNOME participants, and as coordinators of any
		  local conference presences that may arise. Of course,
		  all of this is only if the local teams are willing and
		  able, but the board certainly wishes to encourage such
		  participation.

	(d) Merchandising options around our logo and GUADEC
	proceedings: Tim will send out interface specs to admin list
	(from 2003-11-18)

		- This item split into a number of separate issues...

		- Firstly, the interface specs for talking to our chosen
		  online have been reviewed from the point of view of
		  implementing the client-side applications and some
		  comments returned to Tim. There was some concern about
		  security aspects of the whole process and that will
		  require a different sort of review (see action items
		  below).

		- Secondly, there was the question as to whether we
		  needed to implement anything here at all. The
		  discussion about a GNOME shop has been postponed
		  until a later meeting (for time reasons), but at the
		  moment there is not necessarily a need for this.
		  However, it was felt that since having programs
		  written that could talk to the interface cost us
		  nothing, it would be good to set it up now and be
		  ready. This will also provide a means for people to
		  give money to the Foundation for whatever reason
		  using credit cards (as an alternative to Pay Pal).

		- Thirdly, there was a discussion about whether we
		  should be selling some kind of "proceedings of
		  GUADEC" book. The feeling amongst the board was that
		  we should not. Since GUADEC is about helping
		  developers use GNOME, we should make the proceedings
		  freely and readily available, just as conferences
		  such as Ottawa Linux Symposium and linux.conf.au do.
		  Further, we should be trying to build up a collection
		  of such works: papers from GUADECs past and any other
		  GNOME-related papers that may be useful to future
		  speakers or developers. Glynn mentioned that
		  approximately 80 or 90% of last year's GUADEC
		  speakers submitted papers, so we want to try and make
		  them available if possible.

	(e) Luis to publish the current draft version of the Roadmap on
	the web site and send it to the advisory board list and
	foundation-list. (from 2003-12-02)

		- The current draft version is available from
		  http://www.gnome.org/~gman/roadmap.html

		- There was a discussion about what purpose the roadmap
		  should and could serve. Presently, it contains a
		  number of detailed points, where the requirement for
		  most of the points is that they have an "owner" and so
		  are likely to be completed. At the recent Advisory
		  Board meeting, the Advisory Board members asked that
		  this roadmap be expanded to the point where it could
		  be used in more general marketing and publicity
		  situations. This involves adding some broad
		  descriptive items about what GNOME is trying to
		  achieve in the wider sense.

		- Coming out of this conversation was a plan for a
		  slightly modified type of roadmap: we want to have a
		  "mission statement" style of introduction and broad
		  direction outlines. Also include a description of some
		  specific areas we are intending to improve (Nat was
		  very excited about "collaboration" that other people
		  are also in favour of, both on the board and in the
		  wider community). Jeff proposed the idea of matching
		  the detailed goals to the broader areas that they
		  fulfilled (collaboration, or universal access, or
		  developer aids, or ...). This was felt to be a good
		  idea.

		- The board was aware of the need to have something
		  available to the community in short order and also to
		  keep the goals updated (once GNOME 2.6 is released,
		  the 2.6 goals should be replace by more specific 2.8
		  goals and more general "next release beyond that"
		  points).

	(f) Nat send picture of the LINUX Bangalore GNOME booth to Tim
	Ney (from 2003-12-02)

		- Nat did not have any really good publicity photos from
		  this event. He recommended that Tim talk to the
		  Bangalore conference organiser, who is visiting Boston
		  at the moment.

New business:
-------------
	(a) Tim's status report / 2003 recap of what has been achieved

		- Tim gave a brief summary of the major events from 2003
		  and what he saw as the critical issues. Some key
		  points:
		  
		- There is a growing number of regional groups. They are
		  becoming very effective in local advocacy efforts.
		  This is also an offshoot of having GNOME personnel
		  available at conferences to encourage and train local
		  people.

		- Support of GNOME from large companies is good.

		- In the past year, the Foundation has made efforts to
		  support user group efforts, by doing things such as
		  booking speakers to talk about GNOME. This is
		  something which should be developed further in 2004.

		- Tim suggested we take extra effort to use the Friends
		  Of GNOME URL as much as possible. Make people aware
		  that they can support GNOME if they wish. Put it in
		  every talk about GNOME, etc. This is an area that the
		  community can instantly help with.

		- Tim will shortly be starting an online blog. He has
		  the software already.

	(b) GNOME calendar

		- Malcolm talked about the list of conference dates he
		  has already posted to board-list. These are
		  conferences at which GNOME could reasonably be
		  expected to either have a display or give a
		  presentation or two. In many cases, this involves a
		  certain level of pre-planning as talk submissions need
		  to go in some months prior to the event.
		  
		- The key to making this work is to ensure people are
		  aware of what is coming up and encourage local GNOME
		  groups to help out in their area.

		- This has already happened with LinuxWorld Expo and
		  linux.conf.au in January and preparations are underway
		  in the gnome-fr.org team to have a display at the
		  Solutions Linux conference in Paris during 2 - 4 Feb.

	(c) 2004 goals

		- This was a general discussion about how the board
		  might be able to achieve some significant goals this
		  year.

		- The three new board members (Dave, Owen, Malcolm)
		  spoke about what they hoped for and what they thought
		  could be improved, having observed the board from the
		  outside last year. The main areas were:

		  	- organise a sysadmin team.
			
			- provide more assistance to developers through
			  avenues such as developer.gnome.org.

			- Reach out aggressively (in a good way) to
			  ISV's, including face-to-face contact at
			  conferences such as GUADEC.

			- as much transparency as possible (for example,
			  more comprehensive minutes).

		- It was suggested that for a number of items, such as
		  the sysadmin team, or developer assistance, it might
		  be better for the board to form small strike teams
		  that will tackle a single issue and report back. A
		  strike team may wish to include some non-board members
		  to help out as well. This was generally thought to be
		  a good idea and will be discussed more on board-list
		  in the coming weeks.

		- On the sysadmin front, Owen reported that his initial
		  mail on this
		 
(http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2003-October/msg00001.html)
		  had generated some feedback, so getting qualified
		  people was not going to be a problem -- it was now a
		  coordination issue. Although Owen has now relocated to
		  sunny Boston, the GNOME hardware is still in Red Hat's
		  colocation facility in Raleigh. It is being physically
		  administered by somebody from Red Hat who is
		  considered very competent.

		- Jody highlighted the need to do follow-ups on his
		  visit last year to Korea, Japan and China. Open Source
		  adoption in those areas is taking off, with the
		  blessing of governments, and we need to not miss the
		  boat on this.

	(d) Thanks

		- The board extends its grateful thanks to the four
		  outgoing members for their services on the board over
		  the past years.

Meeting closed at 22:11 UTC (101 minutes).

Next meeting: 9 Feb, 20:30 UTC