Minutes of the Board meeting 2005 Jan 12

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

     Minutes of the Board meeting 2005 Jan 12
     ========================================

  We had a old+new board phone meeting for 90 minutes, backed up
with a lively IRC session avoiding some of the troubles faced by 
having so many people on the line.

Attendance:
===========

   Owen Taylor (chairing)
   Dave Camp
   Miguel de Icaza
   Daniel Veillard
   Murray Cumming
   Glynn Foster
   Jody Goldberg
   Tim Ney
   Dave Neary
   Jeff Waugh
   Bill Haneman
   Nat Friedman
   Jonathan Blandford
   Leslie Proctor
   Federico Mena-Quintero
   Christian Schaller
 
Regrets:
========
   Luis Villa

New Action:
===========
 
   ACTION: Luis make sure the roadmap is converted to Wiki with help of Jeff

Discussion
==========

   - Owen's status from last year
     General overview
     Malcolm driving force at the beginning of year; later
     too busy, had to drop from the board.
     Questions about the relationship with the Advisory Board

   - Tim 50,000 feet view from the financials perspective
     Accountant is preparing final year end financial statement; expected
     next month
     GUADEC financials were good this year, we are waiting for
     the final numbers from Agder University College on the conference.

   - Tim's status for last year
     Focus on the the regional initiatives
     Over $10,000 in bounties, funded by Novell, has been awarded.
     The bounty program has been duplicated by other organizations and
     companies.
     GNOME2 book
     Merchandising

   - Roadmap overview from Dave Camp
     http://www.gnome.org/~gman/roadmap.html
     out of date now, a Wiki might be easier
     
   - GUADEC status from Dave Neary
     Preparation is looking good, papers soon to be selected, and hope
     to have a very interactive conference.

   - Owen on potential changes to the Board and other pending issues
     too many people and items scattered between people, smaller board might
     be more effective. Can be discussed this year.
     Unresolved issue about trademark status of GNOME logo and policy

   - Advisory Board 
     Adding multiple level
     How to cover more members, small companies can't afford the 10,000$/year
     There are various schemes to try to accommodate multiple level of
     contributions

   - Fundraising
     Sponsoring specific event or purposes is more appealing for sponsors
     Financial transparency (newsletter) helps too

   - Miguel about the role of the board
     In most organizations it is defining the stategy, not implementing it.
     As a result they meet only every 3-4 months
     Proposed having a president or executive team to handle most
     day-to-day business.
     Various voices pro and against the current way of working at the
     board level and other model followed
     Should be brought up at GUADEC

   - Next meeting Wednesday January 26 2005 but 2 hours early

Daniel

-- 
Daniel Veillard      | Red Hat Desktop team http://redhat.com/
veillard redhat com  | libxml GNOME XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
http://veillard.com/ | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/