GNOME Foundation Meeting Minutes 26/04/07

[Glynn Foster <Glynn Foster Sun COM>]

Board Meeting :: 26th April 2007

Present: Anne, Behdad, Glynn, Jeff, Vincent
Regrets: Zana, Dave, Quim

 o GMAE Post-Mortem

   Jeff focused his post-moretem on the negative feedback. A few people raised
   some concerns about the secrecy and the apparent mystery of the GMAE
   announcement. Jeff tried to comfort them by telling them that it wasn't
   really secret, and that we were just keeping a secret for fun - when in
   reality, many people within the community knew.

   Thilo Pfennig resigned from the marketing group as a result, and Adrian
   Custer gave up his GNOME membership, more likely based on his perception
   of the current transparency of the GNOME Foundation, and the lack of a
   public budget.

   Jeff felt that the way we approached the announcement was surprising,
   though after the announcement, it wasn't a big deal for most people. Jeff
   mentioned that a lot of people started to read into what announcement it
   could be. Jeff feels that using gnome-private would be a bad response
   and a step back in how we have handled things over the last few years.
   We just need to alay people's concerns.

   Behdad asked what the next steps were - board response, or let it pass.
   Vincent commented that he thought people were expecting an answer on
   the whole transparency issue.

   ACTION: Jeff to send a short debrief to foundation-list about the GMAE
           announcement and general issue of transparency.

 o Bank/Mailing Address Details

   Rosanna has made a recommendation on a list of banks to move to, and
   some suggestions of how to move ahead with changing our mailing address.
   Rosanna asked if we could have a letter signed by the board allowing
   her to make these changes.

 o Advisory Board Agenda

   Quim sent out details during the week about the proposed dates for the
   Advisory Board meeting, asking members to fill in an agenda. Anne
   commented that we really need to make sure to continually ping them
   for interaction.

 o Legal action for gnome.it

   We have agreed to be involved in an effort to take back gnome.it, along
   with a number of other domains. This involvment is obviously dependant
   on costs involved.

 o GUADEC

   Have one opportunity from an official conference provider. Will wait to
   see what other groups would like to host. In previous years, we have
   preferred some community involvement instead.

 o Board Objectives

   Glynn sent around a mail linking people's candidacy statements. Jeff
   indicated that it was probably something that we should do at GUADEC,
   rather than try and achieve this over email or phone.

 o Business Development Role

   Our primary candidate for this role has fallen through, believing it to
   be a full time job rather than part time that they could only commit to
   at this point. The board needs to go back, re-evaluate the job
   description and advertise the position again.