Wednesday, Feburary 5th, 2014

Agenda

Quorum

Quorum reached and meeting called to order at 16:05 a.m. (UTC).

Attendees

Board Members

  1. Deborah Bryant, Director - Present
  2. Karl Fogel, Treasurer - Present
  3. Richard Fontana, Director - Present (until 17:00 UTC)
  4. Harshad Gune, Director - Present
  5. Patrick Masson, General Manager, Director and Secretary - Present
  6. Martin Michlmayr, Director - Present (until 16:30 UTC)
  7. Mike Milinkovich, Director - Present
  8. Simon Phipps, President - Present
  9. Bruno Souza, Director - Present
  10. Luis Villa, Director - Present
  11. Tony Wasserman, Director - Present

Guests

  1. Eben Moglen, professor of law and legal history at Columbia University, and is the founder, Director-Counsel and Chairman of Software Freedom Law Center
  2. Mark Radcliffe, OSI General Counsel

Expected, but Not Present

Sent Regrets

None

Guest Presentation

Eben Moglen provided a presentation, and responded to questions, on the current status of the CLS Bank v. Alice Software case in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, and invited the OSI to review and to join SFLC's amicus brief.

Mr. Moglen exited the meeting at 16:40 a.m. (UTC)

Meeting Called to Order

After the presentation the meeting was called to order at 16:45 a.m. UTC

Minutes Review and Approval

The January 8th 2014 Draft Minutes were introduced and reviewed.

Simon moved that the Board approve the minutes. Karl seconded. Minutes approved by general consent.

Officer Reports

President's Report (Simon)

We're making slow, steady progress as our new GM gets his feet under the desk. Our membership is responding well to our gradually increasing energy, the newsletter has produced a modest but pleasing response and we're receiving the funds we need to keep going. More of the same, please!

Secretary's Report (Patrick)

Minutes review and approval

The Nov. 12th & 13th notes were reviewed for completeness. Deb agreed that all of her questions were satisfactorily answered/responded to.

Simon moved that these notes be published as minutes after conversion to a public format. Patrick seconded. Minutes approved by general consent.

Treasurer's Report (Karl)

January 2014 Financial Report:

  • Total assets at end of January 2014: $149,460.46 (+25.7%, from $118,900.66 in December)
  • Income: Total OSI income: $30564.00
    • Memberships: $400.00
    • Misc contributions: $164.00
    • Corporate sponsorship: $30,000.00
  • Income receivable: $75,000.00
  • Expenses:   Total expenses: $12366.63
  • Fiscal sponsorship program
    • OpenHatch income: $446.13
    • Disbursement to OpenHatch: $8127.27 ($8833.99 - $706.72; see below)
      • OSI overhead charge (8%): $706.72

General Counsel's Report (Mark)

No report

General Manager Report (Patrick)

Operations

January '14 Newsletter Published

  • Intended Recipients: 1695
  • Successful Deliveries: 1695
  • Tracked Opens: 230
  • Click-throughs: 87
  • Direct responses: 9
  • Unsubscribe Requests (those choosing not to receive further Newsletters) : 0
  • Opt-out Requests (those choosing not to receive any communications from the OSI): 2

Elections

Patrick and Karl committed to undertake the elections in time for seamless transition of Board Members.

AmazonSmile

New channel for donations through Amazon was established

Logo Page Update

The various versions of the logo available on the site have been unified and simplified.

Member Benefits

Membership cards are well received with many requests coming after they were promoted in the Jan. '14 newsletter. membership cards are also distributed when new members join.

Linux Voice Advert

Linux Voice Magazine has offered to provide a free advert. Artwork was generated and forwarded on for print.

Open Source Survey

The OSI has joined as a "Collaborator" with the 2014 Future of Open Source Survey

Face 2 Face Meeting

An update was provided regarding the status of the F2F meeting in Boston. DLA Piper has donated the use of a conference room to hold the meetings.

XWiki

  • 90 users have joined the forum
  • Jan. '14 saw 30K hits to wiki front page, 5,000-7,500 hits/day across the entire wiki
  • New functionality has been added
  • Monitoring/moderation is in place (still evolving)
  • Developing documentation on how the OSI will use and interact with the wiki

Redmine

  • Adding "to do's" from BoD meetings as tasks assigned to appropriate Directors/contractors
  • Adding requests, ideas, issues from OSI mail lists as tasks assigned to appropriate Directors/contractors
  • Email notifications have been enabled

Committee Reports

Affiliate Members (Richard)

No report.

Corporate Relations (Mike)

Happy with current sponsor relationships and ongoing commitments/donations. Would like to solicit others and would appreciate any introductions and contacts.

Individual Members (Bruno)

  • Glad to see newsletter is back in production and is hopeful it will lead to greater community.
  • Happy to see CiviCRM in greater use and more functional/stable.
  • As the OSI infrastructure has become more robust, would like to start with new membership campaigns.
    • Several Directors offered suggestions on ways to get new members
    • Would like to revisist previous ideas, specifically around exisitng user groups in various open source communities

Licensing (Luis)

NASA license is outstanding

There has been some minor developments with various tools lists. These should be open source tools.

  • License chooser (help identify appropriate licenses)
  • License compatibility (compare licenses of different software packages)
  • open source compliance (how orgs/companies manage their own open source licensing)

Would like to work with other/existing efforts and communities to undertake the above.

Outreach and Learning (Tony)

The scope of the committee has increased beyond education to include marketing/outreach/promotion/etc. Deb and Tony have developed a working group charter to develop a communications road map. They will circulate to the Board for consideration.

Administrative Committees

Communications (Simon)

No report.

Bruno reported SouJava participated in Campus Party Brazil. They conducted several presentations on open source, mentioning and promoting the OSI.

IT Infrastructure Committee (Bruno)

Most of the Infrastructure issues are migrating to Redmine. The transition has been informal and we will need to communicate new methods (both the use of Redmine and how we are using Redmine) to our broader community.

Will be working on the email interface with Redmine.

The OSI has identified a consultant for additional support with Redmine.

Old Business

Review of Action Items

  1. Please review the current list of open issues, tasks, requests on Redmine (https://osi.toolscloud.net/redmine/issues). Redmine will now be used to manage issues/tasks/requests created during the BoD meeting and generated on the OSI mail lists.
  2. The idea of an OSI-hosted DCO (http://elinux.org/Developer_Certificate_Of_Origin) management for open source projects was raised
    • Suggestion that this could this be a WG?
    • Directors sees value in the OSI to help manage developer contributions (record / book-keeping) to projects/software. 
    • Questions were raised related to administration requirements.
    • A sponsor for the WG would need to be identified.

New Business

  • Conference planing:
    Considering recent email activity related to invitations to speak/attend/sponsor conferences (LinuxFest, National Human Services Data Consortium, Open Source Systems, OpenSym, Open Source Think Tank, etc.), The GM suggested taking a bit of time to identify (and rationalize) which events we want to participate in--either as a sponsor, presenter or even coordinator so we can plan and budget accordingly. Considering OSI's reputation, it was offered event planners should consider contributing a stipend to the OSI for our support and participation.
    • It was suggested of establishing a tiered system to assess and then support conferences. This might look like:
      • Tier 3: Events outside the open source software sector (e.g. conference on software).
        • Investment: promote in official OSI communications
      • Tier 2: Local/Regional events dedicated to a specific/narrow audience or specific group (e.g. conference for an open source project).
        • Investment: All of the above, plus: sponsor local representation
        • ROI: publicity of OSI and our good will.
      • Tier 1: Events with international interest covering open source specifically (e.g. conference on open source).
        • Investment: All of the above, plus: direct monetary contribution; send GM & Director(s)
        • ROI: Participate in planning (dedicated sessions/tracks/presentations)
    • It was suggested such a model could provide resources to be organized and accessed on demand based on tiers.
    • The above will be included in the proposed Working Group to develop a communications road map.
    • Sponsorship request: OSS 2014
      • Based on historical precedent of the OSI not sponsoring conferences, the lack of criteria to assess the value of sponsorships and our lack of finances/budget the Board determined it could not provide funding for the OSS 2014 event. However it was recommended that the OSI help promote the event and make available other resources that do not incur a financial burden (e.g. newsletter, web page, emails, etc.). It was recognized that such opportunities will continue and the OSI should develop a rubric for assessing these (see above).
  • POSTPONED: Introduction to Working Group Process
    Based on the experiences of our first working group the following process was defined to help create, promote and support OSI Working Groups: http://osi.xwiki.com/bin/Projects/Characteristics+of+OSI+Working+Groups This model will be introduced with an expectation that the board can review, comment, refine for approval at the March BoD meeting. As we do not currently provide any information related to OSI Working Groups on the OSI website, it is hoped that this page can be used to develop our practices to post publicly.
  • POSTPONED: Review of Free/Libre/Open Works (FLOW) Management Education Working Group
    Would like the Board to review the proposal for vote.
  • POSTPONED: Elections
    Issues around setting up and managing elections
  • Guests at Board Meetings
    Based on recent discussions the Board should determine rules for attending/participating meetings.
    • A motion was introduced by Simon that, until formally discussed/altered, only directors and invited guests shall attend BoD meetings. Seconded by Karl. Passed with general consent.
  • POSTPONED: Treasurer role moving forward
    Shift some of the day to day / administrative work to GM with treasurer serving in an approval role.
  • POSTPONED: Business continuity through elections
    Many of those serving as Directors have tremendous institutional knowledge and memories, how can the OSI ensure continued access to this information?
  • POSTPONED: Introduction of Marketing Working Group

Action Items

Please review the current list of open issues, tasks, requests on Redmine (https://osi.toolscloud.net/redmine/issues).

Next Board Meeting

The next OSI board meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, March 5th, 2014.

Meeting adjourned at 18:05 p.m. (UTC).

To promote and protect open source software and communities...

For over 20 years the Open Source Initiative (OSI) has worked to raise awareness and adoption of open source software, and build bridges between open source communities of practice. As a global non-profit, the OSI champions software freedom in society through education, collaboration, and infrastructure, stewarding the Open Source Definition (OSD), and preventing abuse of the ideals and ethos inherent to the open source movement.

Open source software is made by many people and distributed under an OSD-compliant license which grants all the rights to use, study, change, and share the software in modified and unmodified form. Software freedom is essential to enabling community development of open source software.