Minutes of the Board Meeting of May 6th, 2014

[Ekaterina Gerasimova <kittykat3756 gmail com>]

wiki: https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20140506

= Minutes for Tuesday, May 6th, 2014, 16:00 UTC =

== Next meeting ==
 * Tuesday, May 20th, 2014, 16:00 UTC

== Attending ==
 * Andreas Nilsson
 * Marina Zhurakhinskaya
 * Tobias Mueller
 * Joanmarie Diggs
 * Ekaterina Gerasimova
 * Emmanuele Bassi
 * Rosanna Yuen
 * Sriram Ramkrishna

== Board Meeting Agenda ==

 * Conference sponsorship
  * Marina, Tobi, and the GNOME.Asia local team have been hard at work
to find sponsors
  * Kat proposes that GUADEC and GNOME.Asia discounted sponsorship is
by default split proportionately and that it's officially recorded for
future reference
   * For instance: GUADEC sponsorship is 10k, GNOME.Asia is 5k; if the
combined donation is 12k, we split at 8k/4k, maintaining the same
proportion
   * The proportion depends on the sponsorship levels between the two
conferences
  * Improve ability to plan a conference budget
  * The board can still override this on a case by case basis
  * Can this be left to the board discretion?
   * Better to document this as part of the process for organising our
conferences
  * '''ACTION''': Kat to document the GUADEC/GNOME.Asia combined
sponsorship on the wiki

 * Finances
  * Kat sent a to-date budget/account summary to review on board-list
  * USD ~160k reserves
   * Removing the funds that are earmarked for reimbursements,
GNOME.Asia, expected invoices and OPW we have around USD 30k to spend
on operational costs
  * GUADEC is also coming up and required a travel budget
  * Publish up-to-date projected budget on the wiki
   * We usually publish only the account summary as part of the annual report
   * We don't publish the operating budget for the current year
    * We used to do that with a fairly complicated spreadsheet
   * It could lead to more PR issue because people will not take the
time to properly understand it
   * Once we unfreeze the expenses we could summarise our budget
   * We should revisit publishing a summarised budget monthly,
quarterly, or yearly
   * The board should have access to more financial updates
   * Increase accountability of the financials for board, advisory
board, and membership
   * Consider doing from the new financial year so that there's a clean break

 * Receiving Donations in the EU via the Wau Holland Stiftung (WHS)
  * Went through various rounds of reviews
  * Comments on the board mailing list
  * Tobi, Karen had a meeting with WHS last year
  * Advantages for the foundation
   * Allow bank transfer in the EU
  * Disadvantages
   * Administrative fees
  * Does it impact GUADEC?
   * Not really
   * We have local organizations that handle the money closer to the local team
  * '''ACTION''': Tobi to draft a new agreement after the feedback
from the board
  * We will vote as soon as we have a reply

 * Travel sponsorship processing and reimbursements
  * New process has been in place for 9 to 10 months
  * Has not been very successful
  * Burden imposed on the event organisers and the board
  * Vetting by the board has not been up to par
  * Board assigned more funds than the travel committee used to, and
to fewer people
  * Re-evaluate the travel sponsorship process
  * The travel committee is now four people strong (soon to be five)
  * Options
   * Allocate a fixed budget every year/quarter
   * Have the travel committee ask for a budget for each event
   * Mix between the two
    * Allocate a fixed budget and allow for extensions on a case by case basis
   * We need to properly document the whole process
  * '''ACTION''': Kat to draft a new policy for the travel committee
and send it to the board for review

 * Handling Friends of GNOME gifts
  * We should investigate having gift vouchers or print-on-demand from
online printing web services
  * '''ACTION''': Andreas to investigate the GNOME gifts situation

 * Visa fees reimbursements
  * We usually did not reimburse visa costs
  * We want to reassess this situation
  * Visa costs can be fairly expensive, especially for students
  * If we're willing to expense travel we should probably expense the
visa cost in case it was rejected
  * The Foundation does not benefit directly from reimbursing visa
costs, so they cannot be treated the same as travel
  * In some cases, we invited attendees
  * Travel committee guidance rules say that the visa will not be
reimbursed after the fact
  * [Discussion of this item was not finished in this meeting, will be
continued at a later time…]

 * Upcoming events
  * GUADEC 2014
   * We will need to decide how much resources should be allocated for
the travel expenses
    * EUR 30k (42K USD) is the usual budget
   * We should wait until we receive more payments

== Discussed on the mailing list ==

== Completed Actions ==
 * Kat and board to review the tax return form
 * Tobi to follow up the GNOME.Asia budget issue with the local organisers
 * Board will review the agreement for collecting funds in Europe

== Pending action items ==
 * 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
 * Emmanuele to send Zana and Tobi an update on FoG donors gifts
 * Emmanuele to send hackers up for "adoption" the list of donors that
want a postcard
 * Emmanuele to draft a date and time for the post-release meeting
 * Emmanuele to send a proposal to foundation-list about possible IRC meetings
 * Emmanuele to ask the adboard members for help with Bugzilla update
 * 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
 * Joanie to go over Michael Schumacher ideas on the Gimp funding
processes and merge them with her ideas on the wiki
 * 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 document the GUADEC/GNOME.Asia combined sponsorship on the wiki
 * Kat to draft a new policy for the travel committee and send it to
the board for review
 * Karen to write the Privacy policy for GNOME services
 * Karen will look at gnome-software privacy issues from a legal standpoint
 * 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 to follow up with Alexandre and Karen about the contract for
the GUADEC local organisation
 * Tobi to draft a new agreement after the feedback from the board
 * 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
 * Zana to check the inventory of merch she has in storage (low priority)