By Luca Marzo on 2023-10-30 21:15 in Board of Directors

Open Source Matters, Inc.
Full Board of Directors and Officers Meeting

Date: October 19, 2023
Time: 17:00 UTC
Total time of meeting: 1 hour minutes

Attendees:

Crystal Dionysopoulos (President), Philip Walton (Vice President), Nadja Lamisch (Treasurer), Sigrid Gramlinger (Director), Louise Hawkins (Director).

Apologies:

Luca Marzo (Secretary), Harald Leithner (Director)

Proxies:

-

Discussion outline

Treasurer

• Nadja updated the board on the status of tax filings and payments at the request of the Secretary.

• Citibank sent us a debit card with an incorrect name. The bank confirmed the name is not actually connected to the account and the card was sent in error.

• Google AdWords September payment missing, need to investigate why.

Production Department

• Releases

  • Joomla 5.0.0 and 4.4.0 successfully released.

  • Joomla 4.3 retired.

  • Thanks to everybody involved on all levels!

• Still trying to catch up with all teams.

• Maintenance team and release managers started a process/documentation to improve the workflow and reduce open PRs.

• The Documentation team started to prepare the decision process for the future docs plattform.

• Internship started successfully. The board discussed starting a program for students to gain work experience while contributing to Joomla. The board also touched on starting a self-sustained “seasons of code” program.

• We started late for Hacktoberfest, but started. Thanks Crystal for the reminder. 

Outreach Department

• Teams - now that J5 release is done I will focus on making team appointments.

• Holopin - Successful meeting with Elena, I now have access to the Joomla administrator account. I will liaise with Marketing to start creating some proposed badge designs.

• Communication Strategy - In progress, however we did successfully manage the reinstalling core files issue with a simple strategy of: Acknowledge and apologize, state who is affected and why, and then point them to a resolution. We also have a standard non alarming information graphic so it's a start to formalizing a proper policy.

• Joomla 5 Release Debrief - what could marketing do better next time

• Joomla 5 Feedback - discuss online feedback, there's a bit of noise online surrounding certain hosting providers not offering  MySQL 8 which is stopping people from upgrading?

• Joomla 5 Adoption - For discussion -  adoption of Joomla 5 for existing customers relies on them being on Joomla 4, many are still on 3.10? Social media chatter suggests people are stuck on 3 because of third party plugins etc. Should we, can we, how do we facilitate getting users off of joomla3?

  • The board discussed a migration workshop series to help people understand how to migrate from 3 to 4 and then 4 to 5, covering aspects like old extensions and their alternatives, replacing a content-only extension with custom fields, and finding a new template or fixing the existing template. Or, possibly an organized Migration Day, coordinated with local JUGs.

• J5 Landing page - updates and improvements, access from main navigation, redirects for 3 and 4 pages. 

• Analytics - What analytics do we have available and how can I view them please. 

• Subdomains - so we finally were able to receive the requests. Tried with JUG NJ/Laura but it is still not working. Need a meeting with Luca, Harald, and Laura to go through the flow.

• Hacktoberfest - Marketing will push out that Hacktoberfest is available for the Joomla project.

Vice President

• Represented OSM and Joomla at CPC AI Roundtable

• Releases - Articles added for J5 and J4.4

• Newsletter sent : 

  • 5575 Recipients 32.29% opened 5.51% click through rate for comparison J4 

  • 4545 Recipients 34.19% opened 6.23%

Secretary

• [Filings] Annual Filing for Charitable Corporations (CHAR500) is due as of October 14, 2023. 

• [Filings] U.S. Corporation income tax (Form 1120) is due as of October 14, 2023. 

• [Correspondence] Citibank sent a credit card to our PO Box named after a previous Treasurer. This is not the first time in which Citibank sends a card with the name of someone who is not on the account since months. We need to talk to our account manager to report this inconvenience. I’ll give the shred command so that the card will be destroyed.

• [Correspondence] Received a document related to the taxes

• [Meeting Time] Find below a motion to move the meeting time in order to reflect the timeshift in Europe.

President

• [Cultural Improvement Project] - updated timeline and next steps

• [FOSDEM] - Dev room application submitted with other CMS projects. Stand application due in December but we should be working on it: FOSDEM Stand Application 2024

• [Quarterly reports] - Worth the time and effort? Will discuss with the community what they would ideally like to see or if they don’t care.

Motions taken during this meeting

#2023/047 - The Secretary proposes to move the Board Meeting time to 18:00 UTC to reflect timeshift in Europe.
Proposed by Luca Marzo, seconded by Philip Walton.
The motion passed with unanimous consent.

#2023/048 - The President proposes to adjourn the meeting.
Proposed by Crystal Dionysopoulos, seconded by Nadja Lamisch
The motion passed with unanimous consent.

Motions taken offline before this meeting

#2023/046 - Approve and publish the Board Meeting Minutes.
Proposed by Luca Marzo, seconded by Crystal Dionysopoulos.
The motion passed with unanimous consent.