Minutes for Wednesday, August 05th, 2015, 10:00 CEST

Next meeting date TBD

Attending

Shaun McCance
Ekaterina Gerasimova
Rosanna Yuen
Jeff Fortin
Allan Day
Andrea Veri

* Old board members attending:

Tobias Mueller

Regrets

Cosimo Cecchi
Christian Hergert
Old board members:
- Karen Sandler
- Marina Zhurakhinskaya
- Sriram Ramkrishna

Missing

Board meeting

Quick round of introduction for new and old members
- Motivations and what they'd like to see happening this year
- Tactical evaluation of everybody's capabilities and availability for board work (a.k.a. character profiles or "specializations & interests")
Introspection — what went well in 2014, what didn't, and understanding the constraints the board was dealing with beneath the surface
- Kat: The first part of the year has been very busy for the whole Board with the Groupon's legal matter
- Kat: In the ending part of the term a few members lost interest in Board's activities as they found a new job
- An ED kept the advisory board members in touch with the GNOME Foundation and kept them engaged with GNOME's activities
- ACTION: Jeff to get advisory board contact details from Karen. If this fails, we need to start developing our own contacts and record them on the wiki. (Once we have these, we need to discuss how to make use of them!)
- ACTION: start doing quarterly advisory board meetings again.
- ACTION: complete the 2014-15 annual report.
- ACTION: ensure that we have an ambassadorial presence at key conferences. Remind Sri to do this at the conferences he attends. Review which conferences we should be at; organise people to attend (Christian could help with this - need to identify other individuals).
- ACTION: Shaun to get in contact with Emily to have an hand off of the GNOME box she still owns
- An ED was also responsible of keeping the engagement / marketing team running
  - We should find concrete tasks contributors can take care of when on the team
  - The website needs a revamp, it's important on this side that whether we want to hire a web developer to do that we should come up with a clear design and a job description
  - We should make a list of conferences we would want to have a GNOME representative on
  - Shaun: The advisory-board list appears to be useless, we should make sure to *always* mail adboard members individually
  - Tobi mentions how the board could reinvent itself, ponders about meetings form and frequency
Preparing the GUADEC Advisory Board Meeting
- Christian will be arriving in the afternoon only, so will be an afternoon only meeting.
- Attendees: Christian Schaller at noon, Scott Reeves, current board (7), Rosanna, Tobi, Sri (?)
- ACTION: book lunch for 12:30, somewhere closer to the center, inform Christian and Scott about our lunch plan and that we'll be back at the venue for 14:00 to start the meeting.
  - VOTE: invite two representatives from Pelagicore to the GUADEC Advisory Board meeting, to invite them to present their work and entice them about joining the adboard (or sponsoring events).
    - +1 Allan, Andrea, Kat, Jeff
    - VOTE PASSED
- ACTION: Jeff and Andrea to send out the phone numbers to adboard members dialling in
Policies to agree on (derived from the 2009 agenda)
- What happens if someone goes M.I.A.? (get buy-in from everyone now before it's an issue)
  - ACTION: Jeff to check the bylaws, and if there isn't a written down rule there are probably state/fed default laws about that
- What happens if there's no quorum for a decision:
  - A majority of of the board must be present (currently 4/7) to a meeting for the board to have voting power, and this number must remain true at the time of the voting
- What do negative votes mean? What does silence mean?
  - Silence/abstaining means 0, as a person left the meeting at the time of the vote
  - A -1 is a vote against, but it doesn't "cancel out" a positive vote, so if there is a majority of positive votes it still passes
  - ACTION: update the wiki (DONE) - https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoardPrivate/NewMembersHowto
Review all pending action items/tasks in tasks.gnome.org
- Discuss our preferred methodology and tooling going forward, get buy-in for whichever we choose
- ACTION: Allan to make a proposal for a different way to use the wiki/etherpad for action items, instead of using kanboard
Getting GUADEC 2014 videos released
- videos.guadec.org/2014 actually has some videos
- Professional recording for multitrack 2-3 days is normally between 20-40k, way over budget
- a couple of us ought to approach him about that during GUADEC
GUADEC 2016 - review current state of bidding, how to stimulate additional bids
- No bids yet
- Italy is a possible bid, Andrea is waiting for Flavia's updates on this side but the proposed budget (120k) seems prohibitive
- Dublin could be a possibility, need to look into the potential of a free venue?
- Need to make it more attractive for local organisers.
  - ACTION: name releases after GUADEC locations.
- Possible places to chase:
  - Berlin - Endocode (Chris, etc), Alban,
  - Prague - Andre Klapper, John Stowers, Florian Nadge, Janac(?)
  - Seville - contact the GUADEC.es team
  - Madrid - contact the GUADEC.es team - Allan to ask Florian
  - Athens - contact the local SUSE team there
  - French Conspiracy
    - Lyon - Allan to ask Bastien, Jeff to ask Mathieu Duponchelle & Thibault Saunier
    - Bordeaux - Jeff to ask Étienne
    - Montpellier - Jeff to ask Edward
  - Manchester - Allan to ask Javier and Sam
  - Hamburg - Lasse
  - Munich - RH has offices there
  - Somewhere in Kosovo - Shaun to inquire
  - Aarhus (Denmark)? - Kat to talk to Bastian
  - Amsterdam
  - Nurnberg - talk search to Scott tomorrow
- Reuse the same location throughout the years?
  - Pro: Saves on efforts/increases experience of the local organizer team, allows doing a special deal with a free venue
  - Con: Turns it into a job/recurrent committment
- Co-locate with another conference?
  - Libreoffice?
  - GStreamer/Linuxcon?
  - FOSDEM?
  - As a fallback plan.
- ACTION: highly visible call for bids - Engagement Team to do this
- ACTION: board members to contact local contacts (see list above)
Finances
- Income down, but expenses down
- Any ED would need to be able to pay for themselves; add ~100-150k to the foundation's annual income
- Should we be encouraging people to attend hackfests & other such events? Yes, that's what the Foundation is for.
- Review Friends of GNOME
  - Works great when running targetted campaigns, but that doesn't help with general funds/operating expenses
  - ACTION: Allan and Tobi to create a list of to do items for Friends of GNOME. Then we'll do something with them, right?
- Employee compensation proposal for Rosanna:
  - New proposed salary: 52000 USD
  - One time bonus of 5000 USD
  - Make sure COLA adjustements are taken into account by future Boards, ideally have Rosanna remind next Boards to do that
  - The Board is fine with the following proposal, Rosanna will evaluate it and get back to the Board
    - Rosanna's response: https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/private/board-list/2015-August/msg00056.html
      - While Rosanna appreciates the salary adaptation to COLA, she feels her work has increased a lot in the past two years without the Foundation having an ED
      - A salary raise of 120 USD per year seems to be less than her expectations
      - She asks the Board whether it would be possible to evaluate a greater salary raise
      - She commits to have perfomance reviews in place
        Should we wait for the performance review to happen before raising the salary?
        If we do, that's surely going to take some time
        We also don't have benchmarks in place for these
        An idea would be to have Rosanna to mail board-list about her activities / accomplishments
        Kat has offered to prepare a performance review with Rosanna for the end of August, subjected to Rosanna's ack
  - 20k USD to 48K USD salary increase in 2010 when Rosanna switched to a full time position (over 100% of salary rise)
  - While we would definitely want to increase her salary we have to cope with the planned budget for the year
    - The minimum salary increase is going to be 54600 USD
  - VOTE: COLA adjustements should happen immediately (52000 USD + 5000 USD one time bonus) and COLA adjustements to happen automatically for the next years when the SS will announce new values, performance based salary raise at the beginning of the next fiscal year (1st of October), performance review to happen during this week
    - +1 unanimous
    - VOTE PASSED
Preparing the GUADEC Team Reports session & AGM (see https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoardPrivate/GUADEC/2009/Agenda to steal ideas)
- Outgoing board member to introduce the new board and officers
- President's opening, on crack
  - Achivements from the past year? Groupon, announce that we are officially recruiting an ED (hopefully), WHS agreement, balancing the books, high number of applicants for the board.
  - If it's your first GUADEC, please stand up. ? (Unless already done at the opening.)
- Team reports (5 mins each, maximum): release (fred/matthias), a11y, bugsquad (andre), engagement (oliver), sysadmin (av), design (allan), i18n (Andre/Alexandre), docs (kat), friends of gnome (tobi), travel committee (kat/emily), membership committee (fabiana), outreach (lasse)
- Finances
- Board Q&A
- Pants award (by the president)
Executive director hiring process - where are we, what next?
- Job description - https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/private/board-list/2015-July/msg00290.html
- Hiring Committee members:
  - Sriram Ramkrishna
  - Josh Triplett
  - Karen Sandler
  - Scott Reeves
  - Matthias Clasen
  - John Sullivan
  - Jonathan Blandford
- One of the recent problems have been what the hiring committee will be able to broadcast with candidates or not (i.e salary)
- Another problem that arised was whether having an european candidate is actually possible
  - Should we open an entity where the possible european ED lives?
  - The person should represent GNOME at the major FOSS conferences, many are in the EU
Filling in for the ED - how is this going, is there anything else we should be doing?
- Update from Sri - hiring committee is assembled and looks good, job description is done, interview questions are ready.
- We are close to being able to publicly announce the job.
Privacy money from 2013 campaign
- Kat has assembled a team to set bounties
- ACTION: Kat to follow up
Officers elections
- President
  - Nominees for the position
    - Shaun, +1 unanimous
    - Jeff, +1 Kat, Andrea, Allan
    - Allan, +1 Christian, Cosimo, Shaun
    - Shaun is the new president of the GNOME Foundation Board
- Secretary
  - Nominees for the position
    - Andrea, +1 Allan, Jeff, Allan, Christian, Cosimo, Shaun. Andrea abstains.
    - Andrea is confirmed as the Secretary of the GNOME Foundation Board
- Treasurer
  - Nominees for the position
    - Kat, +1 unanimous
    - Kat is confirmed as the Treasurer of the GNOME Foundation Board
- Vice-president
  - Nominees for the position
    - Christian, +1 unanimous
    - Allan, +1 Allan, Andrea, Shaun, Cosimo
    - Jeff, +1 Allan, Andrea, Cosimo
    - Christian is the new vice-president of the GNOME Foundation Board
Vice-secretary
- Nominees for the position
  - Cosimo, +1 unanimous
  - Cosimo is the new vice-secretary of the GNOME Foundation Board

deferred

European funds collection

Legalese galore (if time allows)
- Trademarks galore
  - New standard trademark agreement for swag
    - Hellotux variant (with details filled in to sign)
  - Trademark request for the GNOME foot in a menu on a website
  - Trademark-infringing swag (mousepads)
  - New Ubuntu GNOME logotype
  - Registered mark vs TM symbol, and worldwide jurisdictions, oh my!
    - The question of international trademark registrations
  - Should we extend the trademarks to cover promotional goods?
- Standardized contract for organizations for which we handle money
- NDA for sysadmins
- Photography policy

Discussed on the mailing list

GNOME Summit 2015
- Allan reached out to Colin for organizing the event in Boston
- Colin confirmed the bookings for the venue, thanks to Walter Bender for the
  - help on this!
- The event will take place in Boston and will be hosted at MIT
New Ubuntu GNOME logo
- The current logo is not compliant to the GNOME licensing guidelines as the GNOME foot is represented on its own
The Ubuntu GNOME Design team come up with a different logo which should address the issue
The Board is currently evaluating Ubuntu GNOME's proposal

Completed actions

Sri to forward the HELLOTUX brand use agreement to Pam for a first review
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
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 (obsolete)
Sri to investigate better uses of adsense/adwords on the GNOME websites (dropped)
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

Pending action items

Allan to make a proposal for a different way to use the wiki/etherpad for action items, instead of using kanboard
Jeff to get advisory board contact details from Karen. If this fails, we need to start developing our own contacts and record them on the wiki.
Create a webpage for prior pants winners (Shaun and Allan)
Advisory Board meeting at GUADEC: Jeff to contact advisory board members by phone about joining the call on the 4th
Allan to follow up with Oliver Propst on Annual Report
Trademark-infringing swag (mousepads): Cosimo to follow up about possible future actions and send a proposal to the board
Cosimo to follow up in the upcoming meetings and prepare a version of the CoC to be finally considered final over all the GNOME yearly events
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
Kat to propose privacy bounty T&C/rules for review
Andrea to write the Privacy policy for GNOME services
Allan will look at gnome-software privacy issues from a legal standpoint
Cosimo to draft a proposal for the photography policy at GNOME conferences to discuss on foundation-list
Christian to investigate the GNOME gifts situation
Sri to coordinate with engagement team to better standardize the licensing of GNOME artwork
Jeff to find existing fundraising brochure/proposal documents and come up with one for fundraising for a sysadmin