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 community to help.
* '''ACTION:''' Nuritzi to write an email to the community about help
for LAS.
* '''ACTION:''' Allan to supply Neil with information about researching
interest for GINA.
* Sri Ramkrishna's email about investing in documentation
* Philip: Sri asks on the board mailing list: can we work towards
getting someone fulltime writing developer documentation? The Purism Librem
5 phone which releases this year has a possibility to drive a lot of
interest to our platform.
* Neil: There has been some progress on the GTK side of things. Google
are doing a Season of Docs; this could help. Season of Docs can encompass
infrastructure as well as documentation. Kristi Progri is working on
setting up Season of Docs. There's also a thread in Discourse:
https://discourse.gnome.org/t/google-season-of-docs/243
* Allan: I'm not convinced the internship route is necessarily the best
one. I've been part of these efforts several times.
* '''ACTION:''' Philip to reply to Sri mentioning the Google Season of
Docs program.
* Travel sponsorship policy
* Deferred
* Guidelines on meeting minutes, approvals, and confidentiality
* Philip: Everyone please read this, we'll discuss it again in the next
meeting. As suggested in Allan's comments, I can split the parts that are
more of interest to Foundation members into a wiki page.
* Allan: Do we really need to approve the minutes of each meeting?
* Neil: It is an accepted best practice. After all, it's the minutes
of the board meeting, not the minutes of the secretary.
* Request to act as a fiscal agent for Mallard
* We received this request on the board mailing list. Forward it to Neil
and Rosanna, we don't need to vote on this or approve it.
== Actions ==
* '''Nuritzi:''' write an email to the community about help for LAS
* '''Allan:''' supply Neil with information about researching interest
for GINA
* '''Philip:''' reply to Sri Ramkrishna mentioning the Google Season of
Docs program
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