Minutes of the board meeting of April 8, 2019
= Foundation Board Minutes for Monday 8 April 2019, 15:30 UTC = == Attending == * RosannaYuen * PhilipChimento * NuritziSanchez * AllanDay * FedericoMenaQuintero * RobMcQueen == Regrets == * NeilMcGovern * KatGerasimova * CarlosSoriano == Agenda == * Board initiatives check in * Travel committee status == Minutes == * Board initiatives check in * This is a short check in for initatives that the board members have been working on, in order to determine what we should work on during the hacking session next week. * Allan has been working on the GNOME software definition. * Going back and forth with the release team for ideas. * Next step is to brainstorm ideas for what to call the collection of apps and libraries. * Nuritzi has been working on the compensation committee report with Rob and Carlos. * Will take another week or two to come up with a recommendation, which will be presented at a board-only meeting to get the board's input. * Nuritzi has been working on GNOME Foundation goals with Philip. * We took the goals that we came up with at the Foundation hackfest in October, and have been reorganizing and prioritizing them. * Still a lot of work to be done. It's quite late in the board term, so we would like to get this set up for the next board can easily jump into it. * Since this is a 10-year plan, maybe the Board doesn't need to do much more than to ensure that these are valid goals for GNOME. * Federico: Do we give out the goals to the staff, and have them figure out how to accomplish them? * Philip: It's Neil's job to direct the staff with actionable tasks. * Nuritzi: It's important to ensure good continuity for Neil, even across board terms. * Rob: The board needs to own the goals, but not change them all the time. * Nuritzi: This is something we need to cover in the board handover meeting at GUADEC, and make sure we have enough time to discuss it thoroughly. * Federico: We should leave this well-documented in a place such as GitLab. * Nuritzi: We are going to work on operationalizing the 10 and 5-year goals into 1-year goals. * Nuritzi: Are we overstepping into Neil's work? * Philip: Neil has said we haven't; he expects us to provide the operational plan. * Rob: Please keep me in the loop on that conversation. It's one of my regrets from the Foundation hackfest that we didn't complete this at the time. Neil should be a participant in this conversation and can help provide the continuity. * Federico: It's easy for the board to fall into a trap of discussing things but without being sure how to put them into action. Neil and Rosanna play an invaluable role in providing context. * Nuritzi: We should recommend that next year's board tries to prioritize this during the handoff. * Philip is working on the travel sponsorship policy. There are still some open questions, which he posed in a thread on Discourse. There was a legal notice in the application form that from the Discourse discussion, sounds like it needs to be preserved, which needs to be reincorporated into the draft. People are welcome to read it and give feedback; the plan is to vote on it during the next meeting. Not expecting much feedback from the travel committee at this point; already sent a draft and got very little response. * Philip is writing guidelines on meeting minutes. Working on splitting the draft into information for the foundation, and procedures for the board. * https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Board/issues/95 * Travel committee status * There is a big backlog of unreplied requests. * Rosanna talked to Adelia Rahim (travel committee member); Adelia said she needed an updated spreadsheet of how much the travel committee has spent, and how much budget is left. * Philip mailed Adelia asking about what needed to happen with the spreadsheet on Sunday. * We may have to approve requests ourselves, especially for hackfests that already happened. * Allan: What would it look like if we started approving requests? * Philip: This already happened last GUADEC, so there is a precedent for it. * Federico: Guillame Gomez has also expressed interest in helping the travel committee. * Allan: Would we need to allowing the travel committee some particular amount of money to spend while the spreadsheet is being reconstructed? * Nuritzi: Will we need to have a meeting next week to vote on this? If so, let me know by Thursday to announce it. * Rosanna: I have the information to reconstruct the spreadsheet, but I need the time. * '''ACTION:''' Nuritzi, Rob - Ask Neil to allocate time for Rosanna to reconstruct the travel committee's spreadsheet. * '''ACTION:''' Philip - Figure out from Adelia what the travel committee needs, and figure out a plan for how to proceed. * Nuritzi: should we ask committees to produce status reports for May? * Will start a discussion on
Minutes of the board meeting of March 13, 2019
Wiki location: https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20190318 = Foundation Board Minutes for Monday 18 March 2019, 15:30 UTC = == Attending == * AllanDay * NeilMcGovern * RosannaYuen * PhilipChimento * NuritziSanchez * RobMcQueen * FedericoMenaQuintero * CarlosSoriano == Regrets == * KatGerasimova == Agenda == * GINA 2019 * Sri's email about investing in documentation * Travel sponsorship policy * Guidelines on meeting minutes, approvals, and confidentiality * Request to act as a fiscal agent for Mallard == Minutes == * GINA (GNOME In North America) 2019 * This is a general poll of directors on the relative importance of organizing a GINA conference this year, especially relative to LAS (Linux Application Summit). * It is also desirable regarding our nonprofit status to maintain active events in the United States. * Allan: It's important to me that GINA happens organically, that there isn't an event organized that no-one is interested in going to. Maybe we should research what interest there is in North America. * Rosanna: When we first organized GNOME.Asia, there was no interest in it; we created interest by having an event that started and grew a community, as opposed to GUADEC where we invite an existing community. For GINA we should figure out what mix we need in order to make it successful. * Rob: The question before the board now is whether that's something we want to prioritize this year. * Allan: Do we prioritize LAS or GINA? * Federico: LAS is primarily a conference for developers, we can see the GINA proposal as jump-starting a community including non-developers. * Allan: We also have to think of maintaining what we already have; if we don't do an event, does this make the North American community wither away? Do we need some investment in the short term to maintain interest? What if instead of thinking of "an event for the whole continent", we try for local communities, i.e. the Boston Summit helped form a community in the East Coast. * Federico: I know someone who organized a Linux conference in Mexico for several years, stopped, and now wants to start again. If I ask him about organizing a GNOME conference, the first question will be if he can get sponsorship. What would be our budget for such an event? * Neil: Yes, we would need a proposal for what is being organized. There are a number of options. * Nuritzi: Neil, what's your feeling on the resources for this? If we allocate resources to a GINA conference, then will that take resources away from LAS? * Neil: It really depends on the scope of the two events. If GINA is a more hackfest-like event, or if LAS basically organizes itself without too much input from Foundation staff, then it's quite feasible with the resources we have. It's also possible that it won't be. * Rob: It sounds like we want to give resources to LAS, and then ask for proposals from elsewhere in the USA. For example, have a smaller scale regional event, another "East Coast summit" for example. * Rosanna: There hasn't been any push from the community on this; people in the USA are happy to travel. But while advisory board members can offer us space, it's not space that we are lacking, just people power to organize things. * Allan: That's why I'd like to do some research on the amount of interest in such an event. Maybe we'll find out that there are people interested. * Nuritzi: This year LAS would need a lot more input from the Foundation, because of the co-hosting. * Carlos: We are talking of organizing conferences, but that seems like the last step in community building. We should start small, with hackfests. * Nuritzi: That relates to what Rosanna said about the Foundation fostering a community in Asia partly by organizing a conference there. * Rosanna: If you're trying to target users as well as developers, then a hackfest isn't the right way to do that. * Carlos: Release parties or such might work for users. * Federico: Maybe we should make it easier for people to have smaller gatherings. For example, Meetup allows people to do that. Could we have a section in Discourse for people to announce local gatherings? * Nuritzi: Summarizing, it sounds like we are not planning to prioritize having a large North American event this year, but we will encourage fostering a community through smaller events with a future GINA in mind. We'll try to gauge interest with a survey. * Neil: If we have a bit more information about what we want to research with the survey, then the Foundation may be able to help put it together. * Carlos: Nuritzi, you mentioned that you need more resources for LAS right now. What exactly? * Nuritzi: Keeping the conversations around logistics going with KDE, right now I'm the only one in these conversations. * Rob: Have we stated our intention publicly around LAS? Maybe we can publicize it and get someone from the
