Board of Directors Meeting 2018-07-20

The Document Foundation
Board of Directors Meeting 2018-07-20
Call Minutes

Location: Jitsi

Session chair: Jan Holešovský (Deputy Member of the Board)
Keeper of the minutes: Florian Effenberger (Executive Director)

In the call: Franklin Weng (Member of the Board), Thorsten Behrens (Member of the Board), Cor Nouws (Member of the Board), Florian Effenberger (Executive Director), Michael Meeks (Member of the Board), Jan Holešovský (Deputy Member of the Board)
Representation: Jan Holešovský represents Marina Latini

Chairwoman of the Board is represented. One of the Chairwoman or Deputy Chairman is required to be present or represented for having a quorate call.

The Board of Directors at 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 5 Board of Directors members 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 and invitation happened in time. From now on, motions can be passed with the agreement of a simple majority of those remaining present. The majority threshold is currently 3.

The meeting commences at 14:06 Berlin time.

Public agenda:

1. Discuss: Trademark license (Florian)
Review of the trademark license ahead of the annual renewal round, to agree on possible updates that are acknowledged by the board.
     + would like to get this polished up, review from eg. Simon
     + have some collected feedback; and differences in licenses.
     + prefer to move renewal time to 2 years from 1 to save admin
     + should include a sunset period too.
     + please provide just one red-line & one template (Thorsten)

2. Discuss: Public communication (Florian)
We've introduced the tdf-internal mailing list and also have board-discuss, both little used. How can we improve the public communication from board, MC and team?
     + plan to review the list traffic -> which is nearly zero.
     + list has 90 subscribers - but it is rarely used.
     + 3 mails since its incorporation in March; tdf-core in January had 55 mails; bod@ in June 100+ mails
     + planned to have more communication to the outside.
     + don't think it failed; same as core list (Thorsten)
         + discussion before list was setup - voices said more about culture (Cor)
            + and helping how people behave.
            + hard to improve our behavior, needs planning.
         + just because nothing went there is not bad (Thorsten)
            + may have gone to public list etc.
     + not the proposal to go back to tdf-core (Florian)
          + proposal is not to go back to tdf-core.
     + now sending ESC pre-agenda & invite to public dev list (Thorsten)
          + worth doing, but no spike in attendance (Michael)
              + people will always complain, not read mail, not come to calls.
     + well worth inviting interested individuals to calls (Thorsten)

The public call ends 14:20.

Jan Holešovský (Session chair)
Florian Effenberger (Keeper of the minutes)