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Luca Marzo

OSM, Inc. - Full Board Meeting - May 24, 2018

By Luca Marzo on 2018-06-01 11:24 in Board of Directors

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

Date: May 24, 2018

Time: 18:00 UTC

Total time of meeting: 1 hour 10 minutes

Attendees:

Rowan Hoskyns Abrahall (President), Luca Marzo (Secretary), Mike Demopoulos (Treasurer), George Wilson (Director), Yves Hoppe (Director), Søren Beck Jensen (Director), Sandra Decoux (Director), Hugh Douglas Smith (Director).

Apologies:

Carlos Cámara Mora (Director)

Proxies:

Discussion outline

Statements from the President

  • Local Communities Department

    • The team lead of the Local Communities Working Group was provided with a document in May 2017, but this was never shared with the rest of the team or the board. At Joomla World Conference in November 2017, Jenn Gress and Luca Marzo had long discussions regarding the LC department and a Pro’s and Con’s document was produced as a result of them.

    • These documents have now finally been shared with the board and I have arranged for Jenn Gress to join us at our next board meeting to discuss the LC department so that we can make an informed decision moving forwards.

  • Joomla! World Conference (JWC)

    • With the end of JandBeyond 2018 we’d like to remind people that there will not be a Joomla World Conference this year (this was agreed in a motion in October 2017 which passed with majority consent and only one abstention).

    • JWC required a substantial amount of our income, without any funds going back to the project as a result. This combined with the large amount of volunteer hours needed to make the event happen, made the event unsustainable in our current climate.

    • The reasoning for putting it on hold was to refocus those funds and volunteer hours into the project and to support all our events, not just one.

    • The Global Event Sponsorship concept mentioned in those minutes is currently being actively worked on by the Capital Team and events should expect to see the results of this over the second half of 2018.

    • The board would also like to clarify that a suggestion to piggyback JWC with another event brand was not made as a caveat for the motion.  The first mention of this suggestion was made to the events department coordinator 10 days later on the 22nd of October. Much as this suggestion was an attractive one on paper, the locations and timings of many of these events are either too close location and date wise to other events (i.e. JAB) or in locations where we have next to no community.  

  • Voting for Officers

    • I thoroughly stand by the proposal mentioned in last board meeting minutes.  Currently Officers make up 40% of the vote and this I believe is unfair and biased (always have - nothing new here).  Much as votes for DC are cast by all teams under them, I truly believe that votes for Officers should be cast and counted by all Team Leads, Department Coordinators and Officers equally. If Officer position votes are to be truly democratic, they should be tallied from all votes cast.

  • Advisory Board

    • I have asked Ken Crowder to join the Advisory Board for institutional memory purposes and he has accepted he is also happy to onboard the other members and get the board formed and off the ground.  

  • 501(c)(3)

    • Full 501(c)(3) will take 6 or more months to complete. This is something I strongly believe will benefit the project and given our seriously constrained budget will go a long way to helping with our operational costs through NFP discounts alongside giving us the benefits of programs like Google’s NFP initiative for example and finally by being a 501c3.  We will also be able to accept donations which has been a barrier to income with our current incorporation.

  • Work Packages and Task Management

    • Work is already underway in Production to create work packages to make it easier for tasks to be found and taken up.  Once this has been rolled out in Production I would like to see it rolled out into other departments. Once of the most common issues with volunteering I hear is “I don’t know where to start or what needs to be done” creating a place where people can see clear set tasks and pieces of work will go a long way to removing this as a barrier to entry within the project.

Treasurer

  • Mike suggested to start earlier the Call for Nomination for the Treasurer role given the complexity of the position, to ensure a complete transition.

  • Mike shared the current status of the Bank accounts as of this morning.

  • Rowan prepared the final budget for next fiscal year incorporating the round of cuts done previously.  The Board reviewed and approved the budget plan.

Production Department

  • Joomla 4 work ongoing - we’ve had a few replies to calls for action at JAB on the frontend template and Elisa has done a great job writing up tasks for people here: https://github.com/joomla/40-backend-template/issues

  • Production Meeting Minutes from February finally published from February. https://volunteers.joomla.org/departments/production/reports/785-production-meeting-february-2018 and we had a meeting on Wednesday 23rd

  • Joomla 3.8.8 released with various security fixes

  • Good work done at both accessibility sprint and JSST sprints (write-ups of sprints in the volunteer portal)

  • George introduced a question about license compatibility between GPL and BSD. Further research will be done on that.

  • Production Split: This got discussed in our meeting yesterday. We liked the fact production got given a bit more say in the direction of the project but disliked an artificial split. Options discussed included having two people as department lead or a more official deputy d/c who sits on the board. People also believe the existing DC is overloaded - but want to manage that internally for now.

  • The Board discussed the various options to ensure a balanced workload to DCs and enough power to the Production Department within the organization.

Marketing & Communication Department

Operations Department

  • JED4 Sprint Update from JaB

    • Jaz Parkyn, Anibal Sanchez and Hugh attended a 1.5 day sprint at JaB looking at JED4 and the current Review checking / fake review processes. Overall we made some great progress which included:

    • A build of an initial proof of concept JED4 component built with component creator to evaluate and test the overall specification for JED4. This is now being installed on a test server for further refinement which once complete development will be split into discreet packages and farmed out for final development.

    • We made significant progress with the automated detective tools used to monitor reviews, there are a couple of issues remaining which are being worked on remotely.

  • A further days meetup between Jaz and I is planned for next month to finalise the JED4 concept component.

Programs Department

  • Certification Team had a very productive sprint at JandBeyond.

  • Certification Team aims to make the Joomla! Developer Exam available at JoomlaDay Germany, in November.

Secretary

  • Election Process for the Vice President replacement is ongoing. Ballots closure planned for May 25, 2018 at 23.59 GMT or at the voting operation completion, if sooner. Results Announcement within 24 hours from the ballot closure.

Other business

  • The Board discussed the long outage had a week ago due to hosting issues.

Motions taken during this meeting

#2018/046 - Approve the budget for 2018/19 as per Budget Proposal
Proposed by Mike Demopoulos, seconded by Rowan Hoskyns Abrahall.
The motion passed with unanimous consent.

#2018/047 - The Secretary proposes to adjourn the meeting
Proposed by Luca Marzo, seconded by Søren Beck Jensen.
The motion passed with unanimous consent.

Motions taken offline before this meeting

#2018/045 - Approve and publish the Board Meeting Minutes.
Proposed by Luca Marzo, seconded by George Wilson.
The motion passed with unanimous consent.