= Foundation Board Minutes for Tuesday, October 2nd, 2018, 15:30 UTC =
Next meeting date Tuesday, October 9th, 2018, 15:30 UTC
== Attending ==
* CarlosSoriano
* KatGerasimova
* AllanDay
* NuritziSanchez
* FedericoMenaQuintero
* NeilMcGovern
* RosannaYuen
* PhilipChimento
== Agenda ==
* Monthly Foundation report from the ED (Neil)
* URGENT: Banking authorization for Rosanna (Nuritzi)
* Fortnightly hiring update (Nuritzi)
* Gabor GNOME T-Shirts approval, see board-list (Carlos)
* Apple Developer certification, see board-list (Philip)
* Travel committee status and Pipewire hackfest (Allan)
Deferred to next week
== Minutes ==
* Monthly Foundation report from the ED
* Recruitment: second and final interviews for two of the positions; program coordinator scheduling the first interviews; good candidate for development coordinator.
* End of fiscal year coming up; lot of work in the next 2-3 weeks to finish up our books and file tax returns.
* Need a new budget for the new fiscal year. This should be able to be discussed at the Foundation hackfest.
* Changing how we are doing the switchover between Gnucash and Odoo: rather than running things in parallel, we will finish out this fiscal year with Gnucash.
* We have a confirmed booth at SeaGL.
* Neil was asked to speak at Freenode Live, Nuritzi as well.
* Donations via Friends of GNOME were broken horribly, but are now fixed. We can now process Friends of GNOME donations.
* Kat: The call for papers at FOSDEM is open, first round deadline is October 15 if you want to submit anything.
* Neil: I'll add it to my list.
* Kat: What does 27 registrations at LAS mean?
* Neil: it's people who have signed up on the website and bought a ticket. There are others who didn't go through the same system.
* Rosanna: It was above 60.
* Allan: would it be of interest to invite the LAS organizers to one of our meetings? - Yes.
* Nuritzi: We're also talking to KDE about co-organizing something.
* Philip: Neil, are you planning a blog post for this report as well? - Yes.
* '''ACTION''': Allan - Invite the LAS organizers to a subsequent board meeting to give a report.
* URGENT: Banking authorization for Rosanna
* In order to open an account with a new bank, we need to sign a new letter authorizing Rosanna to do banking on the Foundation's behalf; the old letter was not sufficient for the new bank.
* '''VOTE''': The Director of Operations is authorized to open new checking, savings, and other accounts for the Foundation at additional financial institutions to meet the financial needs of the Foundation. The Director of Operations is also authorized to exercise the depositing and disbursement of funds under section 10.9 of the Bylaws.
* +1 unanimous, vote passed.
* Fortnightly hiring update
* Allan: It seems like the hiring is a bit delayed relative to the original plan, and there are some conditions attached to the donation about time scales for hiring - Neil: Not exactly. There is an expectation that we will spend money on hiring soon, i.e. in months rather than years, and not just put the donation in our bank account. I talked to the donor's organization recently and they were happy with the current timeline.
* Allan: Any idea when we can announce our first appointment?
* Neil: It depends on who we select at the end of the interview process, where they are based, and how long the contract negotiations take. Very roughly, we are looking at confirming offers at the end of the month, and the timeline after that depends on the hires' notice periods at their previous employer.
* Federico: I'm looking at the table in the ED report and having trouble understanding the different columns and how many people are pending for an interview. - Neil: people in the "first interview" column have had an interview. They move to "second interview" when they have had a second one. Process goes: applications come in, we process them and remove irrelevant ones, then they get sent a questionnaire (e.g. "How do you know about the GNOME Foundation", "Tell us about free software", salary range and location), then if we want to continue with them they go into "first interview".
* Nuritzi: Are we still accepting applications? We should mention in the blog post if they are still open.
* Neil: GTK developer and devops positions are closed, and likely progam coordinator will close soon.
* Nuritzi: We should mention the ones that are still open, in any case.
* Nuritzi: We should do a larger retrospective on hiring, but are there any blockers for now that we should know?
* Neil: We didn't quite expect this volume of applications and we should use Odoo from the start next time. We should link up an email to Odoo in order to avoid spending time transferring things from mailing lists.
* Gabor GNOME T-Shirts approval, see board-list
* Neil already responded. We already have a trademark agreement with HelloTUX, which says they have to ask whenever they add a new product.
* Allan: In other cases we needed a new trademark agreement? - Neil: There's provision in this agreement for adding products by mutual agreement.
* Philip: Our response that we needed to discuss it in the board meeting could have been confusing, it's something that Neil handles.
* '''ACTION''' - Neil: Change the contact details with HelloTUX not to go through the board.
* Apple Developer certification, see board-list
* Summary: GIMP doesn't have an Apple Developer signed certificate. That costs money unless you're a non-profit. Neil has started applying for a non-profit status in Apple's system so that we can get free developer certificates.
* Federico: Is this something we could provide as a service for other applications in the GNOME ecosystem?
* Neil: Once we're verified as a non-profit, then essentially yes.
* Travel committee status and Pipewire hackfest
* Allan: There are a number of applications pending for the Pipewire and Rust hackfests for a long time, and the hackfest is coming soon.
* Allan: if we wait until next week, it will start getting too close to the Pipewire hackfest; we should talk to the Travel committee before that.
* Rob: Would it be possible to move the travel committee into the Foundation, e.g. hire a junior administrator?
* Nuritzi: The program coordinator could be part of this committee?
* There are tools issues; RT is a pain to use, and doesn't notify the travel committee when a new request comes in. The new tools were adopted to comply with privacy regulations, and in most other ways have made the situation worse.
* Nuritzi: should we announce the status of the travel committee to the community?
* Federico: in the Gitlab issue about formalizing requirements from committees, we had an item about each committee being responsible for defining their response times; maybe this is a good time to have the travel committee formalize the expectations the community should have from them.
* '''ACTION''': Rob - Follow up with Neil and Andrea about the tools issues.
* '''ACTION''': Philip - Follow up with the travel committee about a reasonable deadline for the hackfest (the two Pipewire hackfest requests processed by Friday) and whether the board needs to step in for the Pipewire hackfest.
* '''ACTION''': Committee liaisons - Remind your committees if you haven't received a response about committee guidelines.
== Actions ==
* Allan - Invite the LAS organizers to a subsequent board meeting to give a report
* Neil - Change the contact details with HelloTUX not to go through the board.
* Rob - Follow up with Neil and Andrea about the travel committee's tools issues with RT.
* Philip - Follow up with the travel committee about a reasonable deadline for the hackfest (the two Pipewire hackfest requests processed by Friday) and whether the board needs to step in for the Pipewire hackfest.
* Committee liaisons - Remind your committees if you haven't received a response about committee guidelines.
