The Document Foundation
Board of Directors Meeting 2016-04-04
Call Minutes
Location: Phone Conference Room
Session chair: Marina Latini
Keeper of the minutes: Michael Meeks
In the call: Marina Latini (Chairwoman), Michael Meeks (Deputy Chairman), Jan Holesovsky (Board), Osvaldo Gervasi (Board), Simon Phipps (Board), Eike Rathke (Board), Thorsten Behrens (Board, from 17:50 on) Norbert Thiebaud (Deputy), Björn Michaelsen (Deputy), Florian Effenberger (Executive Director), Italo Vignoli
Representation: Norbert Thiebaud for Thorsten Behrens
Chairwoman of the Board is in the call. One of the Chairman or Deputy is required to be present or represented for having a quorate call.
The Board of Directors at the time of the call consists of 7 seat holders without deputies. In order to be quorate, the call needs to have 1/2 of the Board of Directors members, which gives 4. A total of 7 Board of Directors members or their representatives are attending the call.
The board waives all formal statutory requirements, or requirements in the foundations articles, or other requirements regarding form and invitation, time limits, and for the topics discussed in this meeting.
The call is quorate. From now on, motions can be passed with the agreement of a simple majority of those remaining present. The majority threshold is currently 4.
The meeting commences at 17:08 Berlin time.
Public agenda:
1. Discussion: 2015 activity and 2013-2015 fiscal report, 2016 budget (Florian Effenberger)
+ sent a chunk of documents & some details on them
+ needs to include recurring 2016 costs + project costs
+ goal is to clearly show what we plan to do with the money (Norbert)
+ ie. prove we have a reasonable plan to meet the spending goals.
+ need to review previous spending commitments & file the things we plan to do in 2016
+ next steps: (Florian)
+ go through the 2016 draft
+ go through the recurring costs.
+ go through the projects sheet.
+ 6 projects last year - 50% of costs spent already.
+ which of these will be continued.
+ what can be funded from community projects.
+ build something out of community proposals - to build a list.
+ some of community request - redundant wrt. already planned budget (Norbert)
+ many fall in marketing / community budgets.
+ prefer to bucket it all.
+ concerned that there should be a clear plan for big buckets (Michael)
+ plan community & marketing buckets (Bjoern)
+ hand line-items to them.
AI: + re-organize proposals into bigger buckets (Norbert/Florian)
AI: + create a new sheet for ranking of community/travel/marketing based on the above.
+ can we include and re-rank non-spent items (Michael)
+ activity report:
+ Italo has shared a couple of pages; of 40 / 28 done already.
+ will share with core-list as it gets done.
+ Same design as last year, with scribus & inkscape this year.
+ Mike, Cloph + doing translations with some polish.
+ Risk of triumphlism (Michael)
+ Donors a large part of audience.
+ text should drip with - emphasising gratitude to donors & contributors
+ people jump to the bits they are about (Norbert)
+ need to see that emphasis there.
* Features for bitergia / MC dashboard (Gabriele)
+ wants way for evangelists to up-load slides, log their talks.
+ getting data from pootle
+ have a written list -> post it to tdf-core.
+ do we have a cost for the budget ? (Michael)
+ annual fee with Bitergia currently (Bjoern)
+ question of prioritizing dashboard features
+ product mgmt prioritization issue.
+ need to finalize bitergia first (Norbert)
+ contract signed 3 weeks ago / is in-progress (Florian)
+ waiting for results to be delivered.
+ already cash left in the budget for this.
* infra budget: should just be hardware & DNS / service (Norbert)
+ not ideal to have big S/W projects disappear into infra budget (Michael)
1a. Discussion: Pootle proposal (Florian Effenberger)
-> AI: Norbert and Florian to turn this into a budget approval
1b. Discussion: MozTrap proposal (Florian Effenberger)
-> AI: Norbert and Florian to turn this into a budget approval
The public call ends at 17:47 Berlin time
Marina Latini (Session chair)
Michael Meeks (Keeper of the minutes)