Minutes for Meeting of October 28th, 2010

Next Meeting

• November 6th, 2010

Attending

• Andreas Nilsson (IRC only since he is attending the Ubuntu Developer Summit)
• Bastien Nocera
• Brian Cameron
• Emily Chen
• Germán Póo-Caamaño
• Og Maciel
• Paul Cutler
• Stormy Peters
• Rosanna Yuen

Regrets

Missing

Recurring Items

• Review past action items.
• Did each person with action items send their status reports to the board list before the meeting?
• Approve and make sure that minutes of last meeting were published to foundation-announce and foundation-list.
• Make sure to start up the gobby server for better note taking.
• Update foundation.gnome.org website.

New Items

• Unity and GNOME 3

  • http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/10/shuttleworth-unity-shell-will-be-default-desktop-in-ubuntu-1104.ars

  • Canonical announced that Unity will be the default Ubuntu 11.04 desktop.
  • Unity is based on compiz and not GNOME Shell or mutter.
  • This news is disappointing. It is also potentially distracting and disruptive to GNOME 3 plans and release.
  • Paul highlighted that Ubuntu has 70% of the Linux Desktop market share, so losing GNOME Shell on Ubuntu is a big loss.
  • Regardless, Canonical is still an important ongoing partner in the GNOME community.
  • While Unity is a concern, it is still more important to focus on making sure that GTK+ based GNOME is competitive with Qt than to fight over the best shell for GNOME.

  • ACTION: Andreas is at the Ubuntu Developer Summit and is talking to people about the situation with Unity and will write up a report to the board list.

• GNOME Foundation IRC Meetings
  • The most recent October 27th Foundation IRC meeting was better run, organized, and attended than previous IRC meetings.
  • There were some flaws in the planning. Need to be better about planning future meetings. For example:
    • The time was not mentioned in the email reminder to foundation-list.
    • Date/time was not included in /topic of the #foundation IRC channel.
  • The next IRC meeting is planned for Wednesday, November 3rd
• Desktop Summit 2011
  • Dave Neary has been playing the lead role in Desktop Summit planning.
  • Should Dave formally be the leader? How does this fit in with what Kat and Andreas have been doing?
  • Agreed to discuss on the mailing list.
• When will we have a budget for the current fiscal year?
  • Germán said it will be ready in 1 week.
  • Emily and Germán agreed to meet over the next week to work together on this.

• Nokia / MeeGo call for bids

  • No updates yet. Bastien has talked with stakeholders in the community to push this.

  • ACTION: Bastien to mail people he is talking to about the Nokia / MeeGo call for bids about 1) what it would cost to do the work 2) whether they are interested in the project

• Status of Annual Report
  • Paul received a proof document last Tuesday.
  • Need to update some financial numbers.
  • Should have the final version done by next week.

• Need to tell FreeWear we approved their marketing agreement.

  • ACTION: Brian to contact FreeWear about moving forward with their marketing agreement.

• Stormy leaving The GNOME Foundation
  • Stormy announced to the board that she is leaving The GNOME Foundation CEO position. She announced this to the board on Wednesday, October 20th.
  • Stormy and the board agreed to make this information public on Tuesday, November 2nd. Just before the Boston Summit to give people time to have face-to-face interactions with Stormy to help with the transition.
  • Stormy is going to start a new job to work on the open web at the Mozilla Foundation.
  • The board wishes her well and the best of luck with her new position in the free software community!
  • Stormy is planning to run for The GNOME Foundation board of directors in the next term.
• Reminder to the board: Complete Stormy's bonus feedback.

Completed Actions

• Og - Organized the next GNOME Foundation IRC meeting and create an agenda.
• Og - Was recommended the name of Mauro Parra as a speaker for the Open Source Software Conference 2010 in Mexico
  • Mauro's contact information has been sent to Stormy by email.
• Og - Started a discussion on the mailing list about how The GNOME Foundation wants to organize event planning for events that carry the GNOME brand.
• Og - Loja Geek/GNOME-BR agreement - This is now being reviewed by our lawyer and Brian
• Paul - Emailed and pinged Owen three times re: Boston Summit plans (no response).
• Paul - One on one with Christer to discuss Sysadmin projects and next steps
• Stormy - To follow up with Orbitz to find out if the GNOME Foundation can pre-purchase travel tickets. Tried to contact them several times. Exchanged emails to set up a time - they did not respond to availability. Found Egencia which looks like it will work perfectly for us. In talks with them.

• Stormy - Will follow up the GULEV Free & Open Source Software Conference 2010 organizers and provide them with a list of potential GNOME speakers in Mexico. Waiting on Og for the list.

• Stormy - To follow up with Friends of GNOME post card senders to make sure they have sent them.
• Stormy - Will confirm final cost of the Boston Summit. We will need to pay only for custodial costs.
• Stormy - To add advisory board member roles to wiki.
• Stormy - To add the information she got about opening nonprofits in other countries to the wiki.
• Stormy - To update the hackfest wiki pages to make it clear that we need detailed information about expenses included with proposals if they are asking for GNOME Foundation sponsorship.

Status of action items

• Andreas - Will finish the Friends of GNOME revamp and find someone with proper javascript skills to help.
• Andreas - Follow up with Vincent Untz about creating a Philosophy page on the GNOME Wiki.

• Andreas - Will follow up with Andrew Savory from LiMo to see if relevant information from their GTK+ study can be made more public.

• Andreas - Will get feedback for the Annual Report for Daniel Galleguillos.
• Andreas - Will find out if the GTK+ and WebKitGTK+ Hackfests need help fund raising.
• Andreas - To reach out to Ekaterina (Kat) Gerasimova to see if she wants to be the GNOME representative for the 2011 Desktop Summit and, if so, to invite her to the Desktop Summit meeting.
• Andreas - To take the GUADEC feedback and post it to a public wiki page.

• Andreas - To ask Kat if she can reach out to the gnome-de@gnome.org mailing list about finding local German volunteers to help with the Desktop Summit 2011.

• Bastien - Will try to find people who can consolidate the feedback about the Texas Instruments Zoom2 device to provide back to Texas Instruments.
• Bastien - Will take over the internal review process task from Diego Urrelo (hopefully he can automate it).
• Bastien - To find a way to automate the process of exporting results from internal review process and email it to the board.
• Bastien - To discuss the use of badges (a-la Creative Commons, last.fm page colors, or PSN badges).
• Bastien - To talk to Olav Vitters about using bugzilla to track Friends of GNOME post card sending.
• Bastien - To get _a_ WebOS/Palm contact from Lennart Poettering.
• Bastien - To contact the BBC to discuss about possible collaboration in working directly with GNOME.
• Bastien - Will create private Wiki page to sort ideas about how to better organize events like GUADEC.
• Bastien - Will reach out to Dave Richards from the City of Largo to plan for a hackfest there.
• Bastien - To write up a call for bids for Nokia proposal, and discuss the technology with people from Nokia.
• Bastien - Emailing with Nokia and GTK+/XI2 maintainers to further detail out the proposal of how to spend the money provided by Nokia. Major issues include the bug discussed on d-d-l and touch framework. Bastien gathering more information currently.
• Bastien - To talk to sysadmins about the GNOME IRC meeting, follow-up on Sept 16th.
• Bastien - To update and flesh out what we expect from Nokia bids.

• Bastien - Will send out a deadline date for the MeeGo call for Bids after getting some feedback from the community

• Brian - Get information about what should be in an "Employee Handbook". Draft approved by board. Now under review by the GNOME legal team.
• Brian - Develop trademark usage forms for common use cases. James Vasile from legal is working with Brian on this.
• Brian - Check records of organizations with existing contracts to use the GNOME trademark. Taken over from Vincent Untz. Look at the archives in 2005 and try to determine which companies can use the GNOME trademark. Know what kind of contracts we had with them. Taken over from Jorge.
• Diego - Will send an updated "Día GNOME" article for the Annual Report.
• Germán - Will share the financial data that was provided to the advisory board to foundation-list.

• Germán - Will follow up with Shaun McCance about how the board can help with his proposal for funding developer documentation.

• Germán - Will help Paul put together the Financial Report for the Annual Report.
• Germán - To discuss with GNOME Hispano about them handling GNOME Foundation money in Euros (€).
• Germán - To track if the new method of boletos generates more or less money from Brazil.
• Germán - To have a draft Fiscal Year Budget in October for the board to review.
• Og - Update the blog and planet to highlight that people are expected to sign and follow the GNOME Code of Conduct.
  • As per Paul's recommendation, I have emailed Vincent to ask him what his idea is for doing this.
  • Still haven't heard back from vuntz

• Paul - Will send an email to the foundation-list and the gnucash list seeking someone to take over the GnuCash automation. Taken over from Behdad Esfahbod.

• Paul - Will lead putting together the GNOME Annual Report.
• Paul - Will work on 2010 Annual Report
  • Paul - To fix the annual report: remove all TM in the GNOME logos, s/GNOME Asia/GNOME.Asia/g, use right font for GNOME logo.
  • Paul - To start work on next 2011 Annual Report ASAP (due start FY2012)
  • Paul - To work with Jonathan Blandford for the pants article in the annual report.
  • Paul - Will follow up with Germán about the financial data for the Annual Report.
• Paul - Will work with Gil Forcada from guifi.net and gnome-marketing to define the best way for organizations like guifi.net to participate in the GNOME community. Not many replies from the community. Diego Urrelo will draft something more concrete for gnome-marketing to determine the best name and process for managing this. There was a discussion on the mailing list and a few good ideas, Diego will wrap them up and send them again for further comments.
• Paul - To make sure Board members have access to the Foundation blog. (Update as of August - all members who do not have blogs on blogs.gnome.org have access - working with the sysadmins to fix a bug).
• Paul - Will follow-up with Board to read the Advisory Board fees for small businesses proposal, ask for feedback and set a date to vote by.
• Paul - To finish the Privacy Policy, get review from James Vasile, etc.
• Paul - To follow up with Christer Edwards on using Bugzilla and CiviCRM to track Friends of GNOME Postcards. (Scheduled meeting with Christer on 10/14/10 to discuss Sysadmin projects)

• Paul/Germán - Automate the process of entering PayPal information into GnuCash. Taken over from Behdad Esfahbod.

• Rosanna - Research the GNOME Guidestar website and update if necessary. Rosanna sent an update about the status of Guidestar, but work is still needed. Need to find someone to keep the website up-to-date.
• Rosanna - Will apply for the GNOME credit card. Status: Filled out initial application, have appointment next Wednesday with the bank to continue process.
• Rosanna - Will handle the purchase orders with Google for GIMP/GStreamer GSoC mentor payments as she has been doing it already for GNOME.
• Stormy - To schedule a meeting with companies that do consulting work with GNOME to start discussions on how we can help (how can we work together). Sent email. Got a couple of positive responses. (Handing over to someone else.)
• Stormy - Taking over for Og. Will assist with the GNOME 3 as a Foundation goal task and to help in getting the GNOME 3 as a Foundation Goal survey topics together. (Handing over to someone else.)
• All Board Members - To review and finalize Stormy's year-end review feedback and bonus for 2010.
• All Board Members - Will help to put together a draft agenda for the Boston Summit. This involves emailing those who will be participating and collecting information about what things will be worked on.
• All Board Members - To put together a draft agenda for the Foundation IRC Meeting by Saturday, October 16th.

New Action Items

• Andreas - Is at the Ubuntu Developer Summit and is talking to people about the situation with Unity and will write up a report to the board list.

• Bastien - To mail people he is talking to about the Nokia / MeeGo call for bids about 1) what it would cost to do the work 2) whether they are interested in the project

• Brian - To contact FreeWear about moving forward with their marketing agreement.

Discussed on the mailing list

• Discussion about Stormy leaving her post as The GNOME Foundation CEO, and making transition plans.
• Events
  • Collabora is going to sponsor an intern on the Outreach Program for Women for $4500.
  • The GNOME Foundation received two travel subsidy requests for The Boston Summit for a total of $3,140 (USD).
  • litl will be sponsoring refreshments at the Boston Summit.

  • Discussion about Egencia (http://www.egencia.com/), the corporate side of Expedia.com. This might be a good service for the GNOME Travel Committee and could help with event planning.

  • Finalizing the travel costs for the WebKitGTK+ hackfest.
  • Planning for a 2011 GNOME UX Hackfest, perhaps again at the Canonical offices in London.

  • The board agreed to send Dave Neary to the KLEA (Korea LiMo Ecosystem Association) conference on November 19th in Seoul, South Korea.

  • Working with Dave Neary to settle accounts for the training at this past GUADEC.
  • Ben Konrath introduced the board to Gaël Hernández Bourlon-Buon from IICD, "a non-profit foundation that specializes in information and communication technologies (ICT) as a tool for development". Gaël works with FOSS software groups in Uganda and in Zambia and would like to help introduce GNOME to these groups. Ben asked for stickers and GNOME media to share with Gaël. The board is working to provide Gaël with these things.
  • The board rejected the request for travel subsidy from William 'from Texas' Carlson to attend the openSUSE annual international conference (October 20-23 in Nuremberg, Germany) since he did not give enough time for the board to make a decision (he made the request only 7 days before the event). The board let him know that he needs to provide more lead time with future requests.
• Meetings
  • Planning and creating an agenda for The GNOME Foundation IRC meeting on October 27th.
  • Planning for the next GNOME Foundation IRC meeting on November 3rd.
• Finance
  • Germán provided the board an updated budget for the Fiscal Year 2009 (October 2009-September 2010).
  • Planning about making an arrangement with the ASL (Associação Software Livre) Brasil to accept donations via boletos.
• Discussion about the Canonical Unity announcement and how this impacts GNOME.

  • http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/10/shuttleworth-unity-shell-will-be-default-desktop-in-ubuntu-1104.ars

• The board is discussing whether to increase Rosanna's hours from 20 to 30-35 hours per week.
• Paul highlighted that the sysadmin team needs a new server in the next fiscal year. Discussion about how to make this happen.
• Paul proposed running a GNOME Art Contest to create artwork for GNOME 3.
• Google Code-In planning.
• Discussing signing the GNOME User's Group form with the GNOME Hispano User's Group.
• Germán highlighted that he made a small change to the Travel Policy to state that whenever we ask a contributor to represent The GNOME Foundation the meals will be covered only the number of days that representation is requested, and not for additional days.
• Stormy proposed a form letter to be used to notify someone when they are not properly using the GNOME brand.