OSI Board Meeting Minutes, June 6, 2006

Attendees:

Mr. Michael Tiemann, President
Mr. Russell Nelson, acting Secretary
Mr. Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, Director
Mr. Matt Asay, Director
Mr. Ernest Prabhakar, Board Observer

Quorum reached and meeting called to order 11:15am PDT

Old Business:

May 10 meeting didn’t achieve quorum, so entire agenda held over to this meeting.

0. Committee reports

 * License discuss; no report
 * License proliferation;
 * Membership/outreach; no report
 * Communication/PR; no report
 * Fundraising; no report
 * Open Source Standards
 * Women in Open Source; no report
 * President’s report; no report

1. Compiere follow-up on using/reusing CDDL or other OSI-approved license — (Mr. Tiemann) — Discussion ongoing, action item STILL OPEN

2. License Proliferation convergence, meaning that the Board of Dirctors and License Proliferation Committee need to converge to a mutually reinforcing position that the community can follow — (Mr. Nelson)

Request for progress report sent to Ms. Laura Majerus (chair of the committee) — (Mr. Tiemann)

Mr. Prabakar will create a draft press release for 5/10 agenda, draft by 5/1 — can’t be started until Ms. Majerus’ report.

3. Launch of membership statement — has general consensus been achieved on this statement? — (Mr. Coar)

Mr. Coar is absent from this meeting, but quorum have read the statement sent in email (as entered into the record below). Mr. Tiemann motions to publish the following on the OSI website, possibly along with Mr. Coar’s membership proposal as a candidate.

(1) The OSI calls for membership proposals (dated April 2006)

The OSI is currently wholly governed by a set of
"trustees" in the form of its board of directors.
As directors have left, replacements have been selected
by the remaining directors in order to keep the board
fully staffed. This model was both necessary and
appropriate when the the organization was conceived and
formed by the original board.

However, since then the world of open source has
mushroomed far beyond what it was when the original
board formed the OSI, and what was appropriate then
is less so now. In particular, the size of the OSI
board is much too small to be representative of the
world of open source as it now exists.

The objective of moving to a membership model is to
broaden the "ownership" of the OSI to include the global
community of people who are investing their lives in open
source. Those members then become the true trustees of the
open source movement, which gives the OSI further legitimacy
as representing their collective voice.

To that end, the OSI Board is soliciting proposals for a
general membership structure, including specifics on how the
Board should be constituted and elected. Please email
your thoughts to the membership-discuss@opensource.org mailing
list, where Board Member Ken Coar will moderate and collect
feedback to present to the Board.

The proposals shall be judged in part how well they fulfill the following criteria:

  • Global — e.g., it can’t implicitly (or explicitly) limit membership to Western countries
  • Robust — shouldn’t be trivial (or undetectable) for a bad actor to "game" the system
  • Specific — should spell out the roles and responsibilities of the different entities
  • Manageable — shouldn’t create so much process that it stymies progress
  • Evolvable — needs to define a legitimate process for modifying itself over time
  • Proven — by building on the governance experience of similar organizations

Mr. Coar will, as soon as possible, decide when and how to post his proposal. When Mr. Coar starts for the Call for Proposals, Mr. Nelson will post and Mr. Tiemann will follow up with announcements at Slashdot and other usual venues. The posting will make clear how to subscribe to discussion lists, access the archives, and otherwise participate in the Call for Proposals process.

4. Open Standards — We have draft 12 of the language. We should send a draft position to select interested parties soon after this meeting. Those unable to attend should (continue to) make their voices heard as we converge.

Mr. Larry Rosen (of RosenLaw) has developed some materials on Open Standards separately from us. His presentation slides are at: www.rosenlaw.com/OpenStandards.pdf

Mr. Rosen’s paper is at: www.rosenlaw.com/DefiningOpenStandards.pdf

Mr. Nelson’s opinion: point #3 in Mr. Rosen’s paper, that open standards must be part of an inclusive process, are the hallmarks of all standards, and suggests a need for multiple levels of subclassing. Namely, there’s a class "standard" which has some properties, and then a subclass "open standard" that inherits many attributes, but overrides some.

Mr. Tiemann will post another document with competeing thoughts entitled "Reqirements for Open Standards".

New Business…

1. Scheduling primary and fallback meetings for remainder of the year. Mr. Nelson suggests that we create a calendar of meetings for the rest of 2006 as follows (for vote at next meeting):
July 7th pre-OSCON meeting and July 24th OSCON meeting (two meetings in July),
Aug 9th (fallback Aug 23rd),
Sept 13th (fallback Sept 27th),
Oct 11 (fallback Oct 25),
Nov 8th (fallback Nov 22nd),
Dec 13th (fallback Dec 27th).

General Agreement on Monday July 24th for OSCON f2f. Mr. Bruno Souza (Director) may attend Euro OSCON instead of OSCON US, but we’ll still have quorum.

2. Public Meetings:

Plans for Sri Lanka F2F at ApacheCon Asia Aug 18th (open, probably without board quorum). Also opportunities for OSI in India Aug 21-25th. Ms. Cooper is going to a series of LUG meetings in India immediately after ApacheCon Asia

EURO OSCON Sept 18th. Mr. Ghosh, Ms. Cooper, Mr. Nelson are all planning on it. Difficult for Mr. Tiemann. Other Board Members need to indicate their travel plans to Ms. Cooper.

3. Website agenda–what’s the consensus for the new website? Tabled.

Meeting Adjorned at 1:15pm EDT