OSI Board Meeting Minutes, Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Quorum reached and meeting called to order 8:05am PDT.

Attendees:

1. Mr. Ken Coar, Director
2. Mr. Harshad Gune, Director (via IRC)
3. Mr. Michael Tiemann, President
4. Mr. Russell Nelson, Director
5. Ms. Alolita Sharma, Director
6. Ms. Danese Cooper, Secretary and Treasurer
7. Ms. Nnenna Nwakanma, Director (via IRC)
8. Mr. Martin Michlmayr, Director
9. Mr. Mark Radcliffe, General Counsel

Guests/observers:

1. Mr. Ernest Prabhakar, Board Observer (left 9:05am PDT)
2. Mr. Zak Greant, Board Observer (left 9:31am PDT)

Expected, but Not Present:

1. Mr. Bruno Souza, Director
2. Mr. Bdale Garbee, Board Observer

Sent regrets:

1. Mr. Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, Director
2. Mr. Andrew C. Oliver, Board Observer
3. Mr. Merrill Freund (Schwartz Communications)

Agenda:

1. Approval of minutes

Mr. Tiemann moves that we vote to approve minutes as edited for public posting. Ms. Sharma seconds. Passed by general consent.

2. Officer Reports

a) President's Report:

In addition to my usual blogging and osinews tagging, I was fairly active in working with Mark Radcliffe on legal issues. One topic was a GPL-related case, and another was to secure a 3rd extension to the OSI Approved License trademark. We secured the extension (thanks to outstanding followup by DLA Piper), and since I have tasked myself with the job, I will focus real energy in the next month about how we can demonstrate the use of the mark in the class for which the mark is being sought (Class 35). I was quite pleased to see Danese follow through on the invitations to the initial candidates for our proto-membership class, and believe that we have at least something to discuss at OSCON related to this progress.

Last month a proposal was made to reimburse travel expenses based upon concrete progress against goals (or at least concrete reports of work effort), and this was rejected. Yet the most activity we have seen from the board this month has been around getting pre-approval for OSCON travel expenses, but few (if any) reports of concrete work. I fear this is not sustainable.

b) Secretary's Report:

Discussion of need to complete posting of public minutes. Mr. Coar will post 100% of existing approved minutes on public wiki.

I spent the month working with Engleman Accountancy and Larry Rosen our former Secretary to straighten out our records. Made very good progress, and expect everything to be correctly filed and recorded by the end of August.

I had a dozen conversations with invitees to our charter membership to increase their comfort level or to answer questions. We've had a phenomenal success rate in acceptances to this program, and there is much excitement building about this. We need to come up with very compelling content for the meeting at OSCON.

I also spent quite a bit of time on our OSCON presence. We used all of our hotel block, so thanks for responding as you did to requests to register. I personally have five sessions to lead or participate this year, so will be very busy until Friday morning. 100% of our board members from outside the USA will appear together on my panel "Open Source / Open World" on Thursday morning at 11:35am in one of the Portland rooms. We will also have tee-shirts to sell in the expo, so we need to work out a schedule for that to cover all expo hours.

Lastly we need to work on the Agenda for our F2F meeting after OSCON. We've invited the Charter Members to attend if they can, and we expect several to do so.

Martin Michlmayr's email about his progress so far in joining OSI in a meaningful way has pointed out to me that we need to develop a new board member orientation. I will commit to doing so for OSCON, but in future I think we should try to do this between election results announcement and installation board meeting.

c) Treasurer's Report:

Cash levels: same as last month. I notice that increasingly employers seem to be unwilling to underwrite OSI travel, so requests for reimbursement are on the rise. I agree with Mr. Tiemann that we need to come up with a better way to match reimbursements against actual participation to we don't deplete our reserves.

Fundsraising: No new donations. I did discuss our PayPal account with Larry Rosen. He will send whatever letter we draft to retrieve the account and turn it over to us.

d) General Counsel's Report:

Update on Jacobsen Case (working on proposed Settlement Counsel). Wiki set up for Legal Advisory Council. Pro Bono setup: is lagging, but slow progress is being made. Tracking legislation: meeting with SFLC to see if they want to track it.

3. Committee Reports

Licensing Committee

None filed.

Membership Committee

Charter Membership needs a mail list. Mr. Greant is working on setting that up. Discussion of decision not to automatically add existing BOD members to Charter Membership. Ms. Cooper will file reports back to the board. Mr. Nelson reminds that postmaster may need info from that list on an ongoing basis.

Mr. Tiemann says the questions Charter Membership must answer are:

-Who are you? -What do you do? -How do you do it?

Mr. Prabhakar suggests election of a foreman. Ms. Cooper and Mr. Prabhakar will meet to draw up process doc for first Charter Member meeting and annoucement.

Mr. Coar says early agenda should include decision about access and archiving of [email protected] mail list.

4. Old Business

None.

5. New Business

• Clarifying our trademark usage policy and logo usage guidelines (Mr. Tiemann)

Discussion of confusion about our trademark usage instructions. Mr. Prabhakar proposes that we remove references to use of our mark without "License Approved". Mr. Prabhakar will work on cleaning up that language.

• Update on website cleanup (Mr. Greant)

Discussion for F2F: How to get more interaction on cleanup.

• Status of new sysadmin / hyperreal migration (Mr. Greant)

Discussion of progress with SysAdmin. Trying to get the following running before OSCON: Member's Mailing list, TRAC. Trying for fairly secure and well-thought-out underpinnings. Discussion of needs for Member voting. Mr. Michlmayr says SPI has a voting mechanism that might work. Mr. Coar says Apache system is designed with legal checks and balances in mind.

• OSCON OSI Activities:

1. Pre-OSCON Trac training sessions (7/21-7/22) 2. OSCON Open Source/ Open World Panel (7/24) 3. Other OSI speaker talks at OSCON - announce OSCON agenda on opensource.org 4. OSI 10th anniversary announcement at OSCON, celebration 5. Special Face-to-face meeting agenda (7/26-7/27) 6. OSI booth duty and t-shirts

• Update on OSI's Charter Membership drive

Discussion of message for booth and in general for OSCON this year. Charter Membership announcement process discussed.

Meeting Adjourned 09:43am PDT.