By Luca Marzo on 2017-06-03 14:02 in Board of Directors

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

Date: June 01, 2017

Time: 07:00 UTC - 15.30 UTC (09:00 CEST - 17:30 CEST - Krakow)

Total time of meeting: 345 minutes.

This meeting has been held in person in Krakow, one day before JandBeyond.
The Secretary attended the meeting via Hangouts.

Attendees:

Robert Jacobi (President), Aleksander Kuczek (Vice President), Luca Marzo (Secretary), Mike Demopoulos (Treasurer), Rowan Hoskyns-Abrahall (Director), Michael Babker (Director), Peter Martin (Director), Radek Suski (Director), Søren Beck Jensen (Director), Yves Hoppe (Director).

Apologies:

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Discussion outline

Session 1 - 09.20 CEST - 70 minutes

Mission & Vision Review

The board discussed the project Mission & Vision statements. The board compared the project mission to the other major CMS’ mission and vision statements. Key values need to be better detailed. The Board discussed also about the target of the project: website creators, who can be empowered by Joomla.  Joomla! The flexible platform empowering website creators.

Marketing team to work on the new statements.

Session 2 - 10.40 CEST - 50 minutes

Budget Discussion

Mike shared the status of the budget submissions. A special board meeting will be planned in order to review and approve the budget for 2017. Mike reminded that President, Treasurer and Secretary can use Legalshield service to receive legal consulting on documents and questions. Department Coordinators to submit their budget today as last deadline. The Board to review the budget on a make it happen session at JandBeyond on Saturday.

Discussion on Fiscal Year Change

Mike shared a Special Report about the legal expenses from January 2016 to April 2017 and Profit & Loss sheets (Jan 16 to Apr 17) for OSM / CLT / PLT. Mike shared also the cash flow analysis on one year basis. Departments to define all the operational expenses. Mike to share the Special OSM Report during his session at JandBeyond about the Finance of the Joomla! Project.

The Board discussed about the opportunity to invest in ethical funds a small amount of money.

Session 3 - 11.45 CEST - 50 minutes

Capital Team Mandate

Capital Team needs to receive from the Board the “authority” to make agreements in order to increase the revenue of the Joomla! Project, so the team asked the mandate to sell advertising and sponsorships that may affect various other teams’ online assets. The Board reviewed the draft of the Mandate document and discussed on several sponsorship opportunities. This mandate will be voted during the Make it Happen session on Saturday.

Session 4 - 12.55 CEST - 35 minutes

Operations Department Strategy

The Joomla Extension Directory (JED) is the source for Open Source extensions for Joomla and list information about extensions. If an extension has a vulnerability, it gets unpublished and a notice to an error page. The Vulnerability Extensions List (VEL) is a list with all extensions that have a vulnerability, including version details. Currently both are at different domains and handled by different teams. It makes more sense to put VEL as subteam under JED, so to have all 3rd party Extension related information under one team. Peter proposed a motion to move VEL Team under JED Team.

Hosting review

Mike and Michael shared some details about the current infrastructure and the Board discussed the opportunity to consolidate it.

Session 5 - 14.40 CEST - 30 minutes

Marketing Strategy

Radek shared some of the Marketing goals for 2017. The aim is to reach an higher market share. The Board discussed about the Marketing strategy, the main goal is to increase the Project awareness. Due to the recent changes in the structure and leadership of the Marketing Team, the Board will review soon the amended strategy.

Project Calendar

Peter suggested to adopt a “Project Calendar” where to track all the project events and interesting related items.

Session 6 - 15.20 CEST - 65 minutes

Production Strategy

Department is working to increase the level of the automated testing. These tests will help improving the code quality.

The Board discussed about the release plan for Joomla! 3.8 the roadmap will be published during JAB. Michael touched on the new router which is the focus point of the 3.8 release.  

Michael also presented the road to Joomla 4.  A lot of the code and architecture is being reshuffled, there is a lot of deduplication and cleaning of the libraries. Namespacing is underway to fix code reusability.  A lot of general clean up work will go into the first 4 release.  All of this with a keen eye on backward compatibility whilst at the same time evaluating the benefit of breaking our ties to end of lifed versions of MySQL and PHP.

The department is using GitHub boards to organize tasks assignments to the team members.

One click update process should be available from 3.x to Joomla! 4.

Support for 3.x series will last for two years after 4.0 is released.

Session 7 - 16.45 CEST - 45 minutes

Ombudsman

Luca reminded the related section of the Bylaws. The Board discussed about the way to find the good candidates for such an important role. Ombudsman must be “disconnected” by Community members. Aleksander to find some candidates.

Advisory Board

Rowan shared some interesting profiles to fill the Advisory Board structure. Advisory Board will have 3 to 9 members. The Board to vote for it at next board meeting.

Election

The Board discussed about the first round of elections that should be held after 6 months from the new Board election. Mike reminded the difficulties about the Treasurer role because of the legal implications and responsibilities. Most of roles will need a sort of “transition” phase in order to do a proper handover from the previous person to the next, elected, one.

Local Communities

The Board discussed about the formation of the Local Communities Department. The process to create such Department is not easy. Members of local communities needs to be active as volunteers of the project to be able to vote for their national team leader.

Motions taken during this meeting

#2017/033 - Move VEL Team as subteam of JED Team.

Proposed by Peter Martin, seconded by Robert Jacobi

The motion passed with unanimous consent.

 

#2017/034 - The Secretary proposed to adjourn the meeting.

Proposed by Luca Marzo, seconded by Søren Beck Jensen.

The motion passed with unanimous consent.