OSI Board Meeting Minutes, Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Quorum

Quorum reached and meeting called to order at 15:04 UTC.

Attendees

Board Members

  1. Deborah Bryant, Director
  2. Karl Fogel, Treasurer
  3. Jim Jagielski, Director
  4. Martin Michlmayr, Secretary
  5. Mike Milinkovich, Director
  6. Simon Phipps, President
  7. Tony Wasserman, Director

Guests

None.

Expected, but Not Present

  1. Harshad Gune, Director
  2. Mark Radcliffe, General Counsel

Sent Regrets

  1. Bruno Souza, Director
  2. Luis Villa, Director

Agenda

  1. Minutes Review and Approval
  2. Officer Reports
  3. Committee Reports
  4. Old Business
  5. New Business
  6. Next Board Meeting

Minutes Review and Approval

The Board reviewed the minutes of the May 1, May 7, May 8 and June 12 meetings. Bryant moved that the Board approve the minutes. Fogel seconded. Minutes approved by general consent.

Officer Reports

President’s Report (Phipps)

Simon Phipps reports:

As renewals flow in from individual members, I’m reminded that our plans for making OSI a membership organisation have now been active for over a year. Real-world progress is always slower than imagination but we’re on the verge of fundamental change with the appointment of a General Manager and the consequent release of member and board abilities. Let’s press on!

Secretary’s Report (Michlmayr)

  • The following minutes have to be reviewed by the Board for approval:

    • May 1, 2013
    • May 7, 2013
    • May 8, 2013
    • June 12, 2013

Treasurer’s Report (Fogel)

Karl Fogel gave an overview of the financial position of OSI and of outstanding payments we expect to receive in the near future. He still has to post the e-postcard on our web site.

Simon Phipps noted that it has been a year since we launched the Individual Membership program and that renewals have started to come in. There should be more renewals in the next week.

General Counsel’s Report (Radcliffe)

No report submitted.

Committee Reports

(Listed in alphabetical order)

Outreach and Learning (Jagielski)

The charter is being worked on. Tony Wasserman sent an alternative proposal to the charter discussed last meeting. Bryant had some questions regarding Wasserman’s charter related to delegated powers. Wasserman and Jagielski will work on the charter together and bring it to the board for approval in the August meeting.

Licensing (Villa)

Luis Villa reports:

  • CeCILL approved and publish on the web site
  • NASA has submitted an update of their license, and it is being discussed
  • EUPL update remains on hold, pending their final draft
  • Objective license data: I have restarted the conversation with Dr. Daniel German about creating objective, replicable license popularity data to supplement the license categories; he hopes to have some information for me later this week to start a board-level conversation with.
  • License presentation improvement: have put out another call for volunteers on this; no luck so far.
  • Documentation: I asked for some new volunteers to start writing/updating the pages listed here: http://wiki.opensource.org/website_improvements One person has started writing; two others have said they will write. Slow progress, but progress. Would love to hand this off to non-license committee volunteers if they want to start herding those particular cats.
  • IRS: I have had some interesting conversations with a variety of people, but nothing concrete to report at the moment.

Phipps believes OSI can play an important role in helping IRS get their policy regarding open source foundations right. We could coordinate between projects and lend our credentials to tackling this problem. Milinkovich agreed that this is a great opportunity to show leadership that cuts across all foundations and organization in the open source community.

Individual Members (Souza)

No report submitted.

We published a member newsletter in June.

Phipps would like to renew the focus on the Individual Members program now that it has reached its first anniversary. It should be a key task of the general manager to finalize and activate the working group idea.

Affiliate Members (Jagielski)

Jagielski reported that he had welcomed the new affiliates and requested official logos for use on the Affiliates page. He had also queried Affiliates for news for the newsletter.

Corporate Relations (Milinkovich)

Milinkovich gave an overview of his recruitment activities of corporate donors.

Administrative Committees

Communications (Phipps)

Phipps represented OSI at FISL in Brazil. Phipps and Souza ran an Open Source track at TDC in Brazil.

Phipps met with CTIA, the Wireless Association, in Washington D.C. to discuss their plans with open source. Milinkovich reported that he’s working with ETSI, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute.

IT Infrastructure Committee (Souza)

Karl Fogel reported:

  • Set up election for Individual Member vote.
    • 60 voters have voted so far; deadline is Friday.
    • If some of the problem-ballot voters need more time, is that okay?
  • Handle the 10 or so voters who didn’t get their ballot email.
  • TODO: set up reverse DNS for “elections.opensource.org” so future elections have fewer voters who don’t receive the ballot email.

Staffing Committee (Bryant)

The staffing committee is please to report we have received ten applications for the GM position, all applicants with serious interest. Of that group, the committee has reached consensus that we have several strong candidates who should be interviewed in a first round. The committee then plans to return to the board with the top two candidates for consideration and the option of a second round final interviews which any board members with interest and availability could then participate.

The committee thanks Karl Fogel for his work in creating the infrastructure and jump starting the review process.

The committee is currently finalizing a set of standard interview questions for the first round interviews.

We plan to begin scheduling first round interviews for this week.

Old Business

Review of Action Items

  • Bryant and recruitment committee: post job ad for general manager. Status: done.
  • Bryant: organize membership committee meeting to plan for OSCON. Status: done.
  • Fogel: publish financial information from e-postcard (990-N) on web site
  • Jagielski: summarize IM election method on wiki. Status: obsolete action item; election is now described on wiki.
  • Michlmayr: update logo on trademark and license pages. Status: done.
  • Milinkovich and Karl Fogel: add corporate contacts to CiviCRM.
  • Phipps: create table cards for OSCON. Status: Phipps is working on it.
  • Souza: write blog post regarding IM election. Status: done.
  • Villa: publish CeCILL 2.1 on our web site. Status: done.
  • Villa: provide feedback on privacy statement.
  • Villa: update FAQ to explain the importance of licensing your code correctly.
  • Wasserman: propose charter for Outreach and Learning.
  • All Committees Chairs: propose charter for board approval.

New Business

  • OSCON planning
    • Phipps canceled the table in the exhibition area since not enough board members are attending OSCON this year.
    • We can use the DocumentFoundation stand as a meeting point.
    • Phipps is planning a tutorial at OSCON about open source non-profits and he has recruited high quality speakers. About 30 delegates have signed up so far.
    • Phipps will attend Community Leadership Summit, as will Bryant and Michlmayr.
    • Phipps will arrange for the remaining OSI t-shirts to be given away at OSCON with a “join OSI” card.

Next Board Meeting

The next OSI board meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, August 7, 2013.

Meeting adjourned at 15:59 UTC.