OSI Board Meeting Minutes, Sunday, May 20, 2012

Quorum

Quorum reached and meeting called to order at 8:15.

Attendees

Board Members

1. Ms. Deborah Bryant, Director
2. Mr. Karl Fogel, Director
3. Mr. Fabio Kon, Director
4. Mr. Martin Michlmayr, Secretary
5. Mr. Mike Milinkovich, Director
6. Mr. Simon Phipps, President
7. Ms. Alolita Sharma, Treasurer
8. Mr. Luis Villa, Director
9. Mr. Tony Wasserman, Director

Sent Regrets

1. Mr. Harshad Gune, Director
2. Mr. Jim Jagielski, Director

Trademarks

• Discussion of Open Source Hardware Association’s use of an unlicensed derivative of the OSI logo
• Mr. Phipps will contact OSHWA

Infrastructure

• Unify infrastructure as much as possible — try to avoid multiplying entities.
  • Unify around Drupal site, but make sure that whatever we do supports incremental involvement of external parties and our new membership system.
  • If Membership/CRM can be combined with D7 upgrade, do that for discount.
  • Publishing needs to be intentional — in current interface, accidental publication is too easy. Fix this.
• OSI owns/rents its infrastructure, and OSI always controls it as an institution (i.e., not as individual board members)
• We will document what we do, what invoices are coming in regularly, etc.
• Design any new systems such that they either use or can be moved to externally paid hosting. Hosting should use open source software.
• Migration away from Mailman is okay, as long as requirements are met: email should work, digest mode should work, archives (searchable), access control, ideally web-accessible forum view, etc. Look at external hosting such as GroupServer, Riseup, etc.
• We need a membership system and CRM by OSCON.
• Finish looking into SparkleShare, which seems to be working well for Mr. Phipps and in theory could work well for everyone.
• Will check with Mr. Oliver if he’d agree to be an assistant-chair of the infrastructure WG, working together with Mr. Fogel.
• Can Drupal be configured with the modules necessary to support Internationalization/Localization of content for major languages (contributions by community for opensource.org)
• Ms. Sharma has Google Analytics password. We should get metrics on site visits. (Should this be part of the regular monthly Board infrastructure report? Probably yes.)

Working groups as electorates

• Mr. Wasserman gave overview of what we’d planned for WGs as electorates.
• Mr. Milinkovich asked why we ever had this plan? Why not just elect the board via regular Membership channels?
• Mr. Wasserman explained historical thinking.
• Discussion on whether a Board “Membership Committee” that can hand out memberships sometimes (to address Mr. Oliver’s concern that as an active volunteer on Infra, he shouldn’t have to also pay cash to be a Member).
• Former Board members are IMs for Life.
• Topic of Board composition and term lengths should be on the next meeting agenda.
• Membership terms are (understanding that this will require a revision of the Bylaws):
  • Affiliate Members
  • Corporate Members
  • Individual Members
• We’re not going to create a category of electorate specific to WGs. Instead, we’ll increase the number of board seats elected by individual members.
• We may sometimes hand out IMs to certain people active in WGs, at the Board’s discretion.
• General consensus of the Board that we’d like to move to a composition that is representative of the (future) members (of all classes), and that we will need to propose a concrete structure for this, and a transition plan (e.g., “natural turnover” vs “forced turnover”), TBD in the near future. We will update the Bylaws over time as needed to reflect this.

License Review and Approval

• General discussion of how OSD doesn’t address the concerns that came up in the CC0 process.
• If License Review policies are going to be reiterated or changed, this should happen in a more formal and clearly recorded and publicized way.
• Mr. Milinkovich will mock up and describe the licenses landing solution we agreed on. The current licenses-draft page will not be our solution.
• Education Committee will produce a “What License Should I Choose?” guidance document (and/or AJAX selector), and we will link to it prominently from the “Open Source Licenses” link on the front page (exact positioning TBD in relation to Mr. Milinkovich’s new mockup in the previous item, but it will be at or near the top).
• Existing URLs will never go away, but will just redirect to the appropriate place.
• Mr. Michlmayr asked about the status of the Legal Affairs Committee, but Mr. Villa pointed out it was never really active.

Messaging

• Mr. Wasserman will produce a “Talking Points” guideline document.

FISL

• OSI to send Ms. Bryant if she can coordinate with conference organizers to make it a real membership-gathering opportunity.

Annual Plan

Month-by-month (starting in 2012):

• May
  • Affiliates Program information on web site by end of May
• June
  • Revisit the OSD
  • Change bank, make improvements to financial reporting
  • Create plan for outreach and consultation with former board members
  • Finalize individual members program
  • Review readiness for July individual members launch
  • Annual Budget
• July
  • Membership launch at OSCON
    • Membership management system
    • Have e-commerce solution up by now.
  • Ms. Sharma will give us an update regarding accountant at July meeting.
• August
  • New Working Group Charters presented at Board Meeting
• September
  • Launch Corporate campaign
  • Begin bylaw changes draft
• October
  • Working groups first reports including expectations
• November
  • Face to Face will (probably) be a Fri-Sat meeting in early November, like 9-10, and in SF.
    • Discuss annual report generation
• December
• January (2013)
• February
  • Review 990 from accountant
• March
  • Review status of board
    • one member will term limit out
    • three terms will expire but are eligible for reelection
• April
  • new members installed
  • election of officers
• May
  • Face to Face meeting (possible D.C. location)

Adjourned: 14:30