Minutes for the Board meeting of November 26th, 2013

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

[apologies for the late publishing of minutes; the last minutes of
2013 and early 2014 were delayed by me being sick, and then not
catching up with the latest batch]

wiki: https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20131126

= Minutes for Tuesday, November 26th, 2013, 16:00 UTC =

== Next Meeting ==
 * Tuesday, December 10th, 2013, 16:00 UTC

== Attending ==
 * Andreas Nilsson
 * Marina Zhurakhinskaya
 * Emmanuele Bassi
 * Tobias Mueller
 * Ekaterina Gerasimova
 * Joanmarie Diggs

=== Regrets ===
 * Rosanna Yuen
 * Karen Sandler (travelling)

=== Missing ===
 * Sriram Ramkrishna

== Board Meeting Agenda ==
 * Status and plan for the security and privacy campaign's money
  * We raised a good deal of money from the Privacy campaign
   * USD 20,000
  * We need a good plan for getting these to use
  * Ideas on the wiki: https://wiki.gnome.org/Foundation/PrivacyCampaign2013
  * Should we start a call for bids?
   * Need to identify projects
  * Fund interns?
  * Design team
  * Clear deliverables
  * Companies (bids) and people (bounties)
  * '''ACTION''': Emmanuele to contact Stef Walter and the design team
for ideas for the Privacy campaign actions

 * Implement a Foundation employee policy for COLA (Cost of Living Adjustment)
  * Still in progress and blocking on budget

 * Proposed Hackfests
  * There are at least three hackfests being planned which will require funding.
   * US West Coast hackfest (systemd, wayland, graphics stack); no
budget or set dates yet
   * WebKit hackfest (Igalia offices), 30 people (5 from GNOME); EUR
5050, mid-December
   * Documentation hackfest in January
  * We are still blocked by the missing budget
   * We came under budget in terms of hackfests last year
   * We really need a budget to have a clear idea of how much expenses
we can take
  * '''VOTE''': Fund WebKit hackfest attendance for GNOME Foundation
members to the amount of EUR 5050 (USD ~6800): +1 Emmanuele, Tobi,
Marina, Andreas; abstained: Kat, Joanie
  * '''ACTION''': Joanie to contact the WebKit hackfest organisers to
communicate the decision of the board

 * Reimbursements
  * Some reimbursement for GIMP and GUADEC sponsored travel are late
and we need to look into what happened.
  * Payment was sent 20 days ago
  * Kat to check with the people asking for reimbursement

 * GUADEC sponsorship brochure.
  * In preparation for next years conference, we need to be out in
good time with the sponsorship brochure in order to make it easier for
companies interested in sponsoring the event be able to plan their
budget for 2014 properly.
  * What is the status of this?
  * GUADEC 2014 local team is organising a meeting to discuss the
state of the brochure, among other things
  * '''ACTION''': Andreas to attend the GUADEC 2014 team meeting and
check the state of the sponsorship brochure

 * Go through action items and their status.
  * We have a number of ongoing action items for Foundation IRC
meeting, photography policy etc.
  * Check the status of those.

 * Upcoming Advisory Board Agenda
  * Karen sent an email to the adboard with the proposed date and time
  * Waiting for feedback
  * To be discussed on board-list and adboard-list

== Discussed on the mailing list ==
 * OPW funding. Marina asked if we could sponsor 2 slots +1 extra in
case we didn't find a sponsor to fund the 3rd one.
  * +1 from Emmanuele, Joanie, Andreas, Sri, Marina, to sponsor the 2
slots from the Foundation.
  * -1 from Kat because we cannot allocate the money without a budget
for 2013-2014, the programme discriminates against a group based on
gender (which may discourage participation from that group) and the
organisation process is not documented, which is not sustainable
  * +1 from Marina, Sri, Emmanuele
  * -1 from Andreas, Joanie, Kat due to budget for the coming year
being unknown at this moment and because 5500 usd could be spent
elsewhere.
  * Tie due to the fact that we're missing the ruling vote. In the end
we got corporate backing for the 3rd spot.
  * Marina responded to Kat that providing opportunities for
under-represented, disadvantaged groups is not discrimination. There
are many paid opportunities for all types of work in free software and
people who already have these positions or are applying for them are
mostly men. Google Code-In for 13-18 year olds has coding, quality
assurance, design, documentation, and outreach tasks, but among last
year's 20 grand prize winners, there was only one girl. GNOME should
make an effort to participate in Google Code-In next year, because we
should have many ways of encouraging all new contributors. We can also
have an Outreach Program for Documentation Writers, and any such
similar program that raises awareness about contributing to free
software among people with certain skills, but doesn't reach out to a
disadvantaged group specifically. On the subject of documentation,
there is a lot of documentation on the wiki, and Marina will document
what one needs to do in the yearly cycle of running the program.

 * Update from Behnam Esfahbod (volunteering) and Andrea Veri's latest
work for the foundation.

== Completed Actions ==
 * Joanie to ask Karen to report on board-list about the World of GNOME Forums
 * Joanie to ask Karen to report on board-list about handling the Pitivi funds
 * Joanie to ask Karen to report on board-list about the Upcoming
Adboard meeting
 * Joanie and Kat to draft a new travel assistance form to replace the
current one (Kat, Joanie and Zana to discuss and come up with a
solution)
 * Rosanna to set up an account for Kat to access the Foundation's PayPal
 * Marina to ask Behnam to (regularly) report on his state and work

== Pending action items ==
 * Andreas to put together a GNOME supporter card for our donors
 * Andreas to attend the GUADEC 2014 team meeting and check the state
of the sponsorship brochure
 * 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 contact Stef Walter and the design team for ideas for
the Privacy campaign actions
 * 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
 * Joanie to contact the WebKit hackfest organisers to communicate the
decision of the board
 * 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
 * Karen to write the Privacy policy for GNOME services
 * Karen to contact Tor, EFF, OTI for feedback and eventual funding
for privacy work
 * Karen to "call for ideas" for privacy work related bids at GUADEC
and by blog/email to foundation-announce
 * Karen and Tobi to continue pursuing the fund collection in Europe
 * Karen to circulate a new draft of the OPW mentor/student contracts
 * Sri to investigate better uses of adwords on the GNOME websites
 * Tobi to talk to Andrea to move the PayPal data extraction scripts
over to the GNOME infrastructure
 * Rosanna to check if the reimbursement for Sindhu has been returned

-- 
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.name
B: http://blogs.gnome.org/ebassi/