Foundation Board Meeting Minutes :: 23rd Auguest 2007

[Glynn Foster <Glynn Foster Sun COM>]

Present: Lucas, Anne, Glynn, Quim, Rosanna, Jeff
Regrets: Behdad, Vincent

1) Zana's planning to be out of action with a baby due at the end of
   November. She commented that she has 2 weeks off per year as is
   the minimum requirement working for a single employee organization.
   Quim commented that the board should meet to discuss other
   timelines around Zana's maternity leave and communicate accordingly.

   ACTION: All to discuss maternity leave dates on board-private.

2) Boston Summit

   In the process of confirming the venue. There is a minor development
   where 2 groups are saying different things about the venue - one
   saying that it's free, and the other (conferencing services) saying
   it is not free. There's no current summit planning team on the ground,
   but Jeff expects that to happen once the core summit details are worked
   out.

3) Treasurer

   Vincent commented that he could do the treasurer position if no one
   else was keen. Board voted to approve Vincent as the ongoing treasurer
   after Dave's departure.

4) Election Term

   Jeff commented that his current thinking was to change the bylaws to
   state that there is a maximum 2 year term to be defined by the board
   by the time of elections, so that it can adapt to any changes in the
   future, but also have a limitation that is reasonable. Jeff suggested
   that a change to the bylaws should be written, and then taken to the
   membership. We aren't sure whether we have the infrastructure for
   such a vote, and would be good to check with the membership committee.

   Quim commented that it seemed reasonable to make this smaller change
   rather than a wide reaching revision of the bylaws. Glynn commented
   that the membership should feel free to suggest changes (just like
   any other board member). Lucas agreed that it should be a set of
   atomic changes rather than a larger one. All agreed we should get this
   out sooner than later to the membership.

   ACTION: Jeff to contact James Vasile about changing the election term
           in the bylaws.

   ACTION: Lucas to check with Baris about the current election mechanism
           and see what is possible to do.

   ACTION: Jeff to send new proposal to foundation-list once it is written.

5) GUADEC Debrief

   Paul joined the call temporarily to give a quick debrief of GUADEC this
   year. He commented that there was a good selection of high quality talks
   and that credit was due to the members and paper committee. Other big
   hits were stickers, USB keys, the venue and social events. He said that
   most things that went wrong were those he expected to go wrong, and that
   nothing major was unexpected. Most of the heartache was caused by only
   getting into the venue the day the conference started. Paul commented that
   he was in the process of getting the finances finished, and if there was
   money available, he thoguht it was worth printing more stickers. He said
   that travel assistance hadn't yet been paid out, and was still waiting
   for a few sponsors to push their invoices through the system - once that
   was done, he would re-imburse everyone. The videos are having a few
   technical difficulties, so it may take time to post process.

6) Planet GNOME

   Jeff wants time to think about it more, and will respond on list.

   ACTION: Jeff to respond to Planet GNOME maintenance thread on board-list.

7) Marketing Team Board Blessing

   Jeff commented that we shouldn't be creating official committess of
   the Foundation unless we're absolutely sure of it - they are quite
   heavyweight and have certain responsibilities according to the bylaws.
   We should be blessing leaders and teams instead rather than anything
   moreformal. Anne commented that it would be nice to develop these
   teams futher to a stage where they could eventually be made an official
   committee if necessary. Jeff replied that he didn't think very many
   had a need to official, and wasn't stopping them getting work done. Glynn
   commented that official committees wasn't exactly in the spirit of the
   GNOME Foundation, and we should try to keep things as least bureaucratic
   as possible. Jeff commented that many of the teams grown up around GNOME
   took on positions of responsibility because the rest of the community
   bought into them by their own merit.

   Quim clarified that his intention was just to get a marketing team
   formalized just as much as other official teams in the project, like
   i.e. Sysadmin or the Release team, not to get the status of official
   committee of the Foundation. This topic will continue in the
   marketing-list.

8) Summer of Code

   Lucas commented there was 27 projects that reached the end of the program,
   and some had really nice results. He mentioned that the mentors were a
   lot closer to the students during the development, and this helped a lot.
   He expected to have some regular contributors to the proejct out of
   the program this year.

   ACTION: Lucas to write up a summary of our participation, and blog about it,
           and include it in the annual report.