Re: Minutes of the Board meeting of July 25th, 2014



Hello Sindhu!

1. Visa reimbursements (and any other item listed under "What is NOT eligible for sponsorship?" at [1]) will have to be approved by the Board to pass. Reimbursements of these items should still be considered exceptional and will be carefully evaluated by the Board. (the current Board has a strong commitment to make sure all the requests will be handled in time)
2. No retroactive reimbursements are planned. The applicant should wait for Board's approval before applying for a Visa when willing to receive a reimbursement for that item.

A little background on this matter:

the Travel Committee is a pure emanation of the Board of Directors which decided in the past to let the Committee handle some of the duties that were previously being handled by the Board itself. It's clear the Board and its members would have difficulties managing and processing all the reimbursements and travel-related queries and that is why the travel committee was born. The Board at that time had to delegate some of their duties to not create bottlenecks.

That said we should still not forget the Travel Committee is just a pure emanation of the Board of Directors and thus the place where particular discussions, decisions and exceptions to the policies should be taken. This point wasn't really clear at the time and during GUADEC we had a long discussion on how to prevent this to happen again. Jeff and Marina (as the ACTION items are showing) will take care to clarify what I just outlined on the wiki page.

I'm very sorry if there was some kind of uncertainty from the Board side but we are making sure the issue won't happen again.


[1] https://wiki.gnome.org/Travel


2014-08-05 18:06 GMT+02:00 Sindhu S <sindhus live in>:
So what's the final consensus on the reimbursement of rejected visas?
Does this mean retroactive reimbursements?

On Tue, Aug 5, 2014 at 8:53 AM, Andrea Veri <av gnome org> wrote:
= Minutes for Tuesday, July 25th, 2014, 16:00 UTC =

== Next meeting ==

 * Wednesday, July 30th, 2014 at 09:00 UTC

== Attending ==
 * Ekaterina Gerasimova
 * Rosanna Yuen
 * Marina Zhurakhinskaya
 * Jeff Fortin
 * Sriram Ramkrishna
 * Tobias Mueller
 * Emmanuele Bassi (outgoing board)
 * Andreas Nilsson (outgoing board)
 * Andrea Veri (afternoon)

=== Regrets ===
 * Karen Sandler
 * Joanmarie Diggs (outgoing board)

=== Missing ===

== Board Meeting Agenda ==

 * Documenting our board decisions/measures wrt finances
  * Documented on the wiki: if a budget is 4 weeks late, expenses should be frozen; non-essential spending is currently frozen, although some exceptions have been made

 * Financial plans and ideas for the remainder of 2014 and til Q2 2015
  * Missing invoice payments

 * Pants award

 * Groupon

 * Visa reimbursement policy
  * The board voted to reimburse for a rejected visa which triggered a discussion
  * Suggestion to modify policy text
  * Board can make exceptions for items which are normally not sponsored (https://wiki.gnome.org/Travel for a list of those items)
  * '''ACTION''': Marina will shuffle around some paragraphs to make it look nicer now.
  * '''ACTION''': Jeff will lead the efforts with interesting parties to prepare a new text hopefully for the next meeting

 * Friends of GNOME - perks
  * Do we want to buy 25 new LWN tokens?
   * +1: Kat, Tobi, Jeff, Marina, Andrea (Sri missing)
   * Rosanna will buy tokens
   * '''ACTION''': Tobi will mention that we pay for lwn codes when sending the offer to donors
   * '''ACTION''': Tobi will implement that "no gift" on the FoG page also means no LWN subscription

 * Receiving Donations in the EU via the WHS
  * Tobi sent around a new draft to the board
  * Tobi also sent it to the WHS and waits for feedback

 * Preparing for the GUADEC AGM (reports session & open floor): Andreas Nilsson to chair the sessions

 * GUADEC 2015
   * We probably need to be more flexible with the date as the venue is being renovated
   * Discuss the availability of a venue and any other issues with the Gothenburg organization team

To be discussed on Wednesday morning at GUADEC:
 * Outstanding brand use requests (ex: Julio Cesar Caraça's mail sent to licensing@ on 7 Jul 2014 20:05:14 -0700, titled: "Sharing an idea...")
 * Taking pictures for the Foundation's Web site
 * OPW - next round and beyond (on July 30, when Karen is there)

== Discussed on the mailing list ==
 * happybirthdaygnome.org renewal

== Completed Actions ==
 * Rosanna to contact Emily about the state of the GNOME.Asia payment
 * Marina to contact the GNOME.Asia local team on their current budget (obsolete)
 * Kat to contact Karen and Pam about the trademark use request from Carol Hanson
 * All Directors to reply Andreas's/Kat's email on board list about visa fees reimbursements (partially complete; obsolete)
 * Tobi to draft a new WHS agreement after the feedback from the board
 * Emmanuele to draft a date and time for the post-release meeting (obsolete from 3.12)
 * Jeff to send the agenda to the advisory board list for the upcoming meeting on the 30th at GUADEC
   * Kat to book a restaurant for advisory board meeting

== Pending action items ==
 * Andrea to improve board's docs about what a Board member should know before participating to board's decisions and discussions
 * Andreas to put together a GNOME supporter card for our donors
 * Andreas, Joanie to draft thank you letters to our donors
 * Andreas to investigate the GNOME gifts situation
 * Andreas to ask Karen and Pam how much we should disclose to the community about the ongoing discussion with Groupon
 * Emmanuele to send Zana and Tobi an update on FoG donors gifts
 * Jeff to lead the efforts with parties that are interested in sponsorship to prepare a new text hopefully for the next meeting
 * Jeff to send the agenda to the adboard
 * Joanie to draft a proposal for the photography policy at GNOME conferences to discuss on foundation-list
 * Joanie and Karen to meet and discuss about the photography policy for GNOME events
 * Kat to create a private wiki page on the web services accounts holders and passwords
  * Allan and Kat decided to go for a private git account instead for security reasons
 * Kat to draft a proposal for a privacy policy for review
 * Kat to draft a contract template for future use organizations for which we handle money
 * Karen to write the Privacy policy for GNOME services
 * Karen will look at gnome-software privacy issues from a legal standpoint
 * Marina will shuffle around some paragraphs to make it look nicer now
 * Marina check with engagement team about re-sharing GNOME-related job offers from adboard members
 * Tobi to continue pursuing the fund collection in Europe
 * Tobi to talk to Andrea to move the !PayPal data extraction scripts over to the GNOME infrastructure
 * Tobi will mention that we pay for lwn codes when sending the offer to donors
 * Tobi will implement that "no gift" on the FoG page also means no LWN subscription
 * Sri to investigate better uses of adsense/adwords on the GNOME websites
 * Sri to communicate to Rosanna and work on the donation for the West Coast hackfest
 * Sri, Marina, Kat to work on establishing criteria for drafting for the hiring committee for the ED role
 * Zana to check the inventory of merch she has in storage (low priority)

--

Cheers,

Andrea

Debian Developer,
Fedora / EPEL packager,
GNOME Sysadmin Team Coordinator,
GNOME Foundation Membership & Elections Committee Chairman

Homepage: http://www.gnome.org/~av

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--
-Sindhu

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--
Cheers,

Andrea

Debian Developer,
Fedora / EPEL packager,
GNOME Infrastructure Team Coordinator,
GNOME Foundation Board of Directors member,
GNOME Foundation Membership & Elections Committee Chairman

Homepage: http://www.gnome.org/~av


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