OSI Board Meeting Minutes, Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Quorum reached and meeting called to order 8:09am PDT.

Attendees:

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

Guests/observers:

 1. Mr. Zak Greant

Expected, but Not Present:

 1. Mr. Mark Radcliffe, General Counsel
 2. Mr. Bdale Garbee
 3. Mr. Ernest Prabhakar
 4. Mr. Merrill Freund (Schwartz Communications)
 5. Mr. Andrew C. Oliver

Sent Regrets:

 1. Mr. Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, Director

Agenda:

1. Approval of minutes

Minutes for September 10, 2008 reviewed by Board. Minutes unanimously approved.

2. Officer Reports

a) President’s Report:

None.

b) Secretary’s Report:

Ms. Cooper moved that we vote to accept September 10, 2008 for public posting. Mr. Coar seconded. Passed by general consent.
Ms. Cooper noted that both she and Mr. Tiemann received formal notice from California Secretary of State concerning filing deadline of Oct 28th, 2008. Ms. Cooper has contacted accountants and we will make that deadline.

c) Treasurer’s Report:

Ms. Cooper has now paid all received expense reports from OSCON. Waiting for Mr. Greant, Mr. Coar to submit expenses.

d) General Counsel’s Report:

None.

3. Committee Reports:

Licensing Committee

Mr. Nelson reports there are no licenses up for approval vote this month. License Proliferation Committee will have revised proposal up for review at next board meeting.

Membership Committee

Ms. Cooper noted that she’s planning a renewal push for constructive work. Current work is announcement text, and concrete proposals. Ms. Cooper has had several conversations with leaders on the list and has been thinking about the need for a summit to pull proposals together.

Ms. Sharma reports that she and Mr. Oliver have been working on an educational outreach project to set up a wiki, SVN and a mailing list through OSL.

4. Old Business:

* Trademark status and discussion (Mr. Tiemann)

Mr. Tiemann reported on progress with main trademark filing. Ms. Cooper asked about enforcement activities. Mr. Tiemann will be sending out form letters per suggestion of Mr. Radcliffe. Ms. Sharma will work on a matrix of contacts for license stewards.

* Update on Open Font License and IPA–how best to support free/open source fonts (Mr. Tiemann)

Mr. Tiemann will check back with the OSL folks today and is scheduled to travel to Japan 3rd week of November.

* Update on University meetings (Mr. Souza)

Mr. Souza reported on his activities in Brasil. Mr. Greant reported that Mozilla.org is also engaged in educational outreach. Ms. Cooper reminded the board that we own the domain “teachingopensource.org” and there is some content that can be used at that domain. Mr. Tiemann reported that there is an endowment to teach open source at his local university, and he will hook them up with the outreach project.

* Update on ED fundraising (Ms. Cooper)

Ms. Cooper reported that she has made little new progress on this issue in the past 3 weeks, but has had conversations which indicate that fundsraising is still basically on track.

 * Update on OSI Beat project (Ms. Sharma)

Ms. Sharma has been working on putting together a template for the online OSI newsletter. Ms. Nwakanma has been working with Ms. Sharma to provide valuable feedback on sections for the newsletter. Next steps include reviewing the template and project timeline for monthly editorial cycle.

Mr. Souza reports that he’s been visiting several universities (before nearly 1500 students) about joining and participating on open source projects.

* Update on website cleanup (Ms. Sharma)

Ms. Sharma reported that she has completed a link checker report on opensource.org. Ms. Sharma is now in the process of updating links to new URLs and removing broken links after having gotten edit permissions from Mr. Karl Fogel. Ms. Sharma will send out a report to the board once project is completed.

5. New Business

 * The OSI Education project (Ms. Sharma)

Ms. Sharma has been working with Mr. Andrew Oliver to develop material to teach/work with high school kids and college freshmen about open source software and its strengths – code, collaboration, community. Mr. Karl Fogel has also been very helpful in providing input in our weekly IRC meetings. Ms. Sharma has been working with Mr. Zak Greant and the OSU Open Source Labs folks to setup projects.opensource.org at OSL to host a mailing list for the project, a subversion instance to be used for versioning documents produced in this effort and a mediawiki instance to document project management information. Ms. Sharma would like to thank Mr. Nelson for adding projects.opensource.org to the OSI nameserver. The objective of this project is to build initial material and make it available from opensource.org for educators from any part of the world to use and contribute back with localized versions (from language and content perspectives).

 * Where are some of our board members? (Question raised by Ms. Sharma)

The OSI misses participation from Mr. Souza, Mr. Coar and Mr. Gune. Ms. Sharma would like to know what is happening in open source/open standards in their respective domains/geographies. Ms. Sharma would like to request a brief status paragraph from each board member at least once a month on email or as a blog entry on opensource.org. Discussion of how to best gather monthly input from Board members. Ms. Cooper suggested that we set up a nag system to get board members to participate in monthly updates.

 * Backup moderator for OSI Charter Member discuss mailing list (Request by Ms. Sharma)

The OSI Charter Member discussion mailing list needs an active moderator to help the discussion towards identifying goals for the OSI in a time-bound process. Ms. Cooper, who is primary moderator of this discussion has been very busy. So Ms. Sharma requests to have a backup board member to help Ms. Cooper moderate this discussion along. Mr. Karl Fogel, one of our very active charter members has helped this process along but the list conversations (and interest) seem to have died down.

Discussion of how to pass the hat for moderation (since everybody will fall by the wayside occasionally).

 * Kudos to Ms. Sharma for keeping the ball rolling over the last month or so. (Mr. Greant)

 * Note about request for information about intended audience for opensource.org to help Mr. Steve Mallett’s associate, Robin, who has been querying.

 * Mr. Greant says we need to consider sending a donation or other thank you to OSL.

 * Comments on refocusing efforts on OSI from Mr. Greant.

 * Mr. Coar notes that he’s continuing to work on the tee-shirt project.

Meeting Adjourned 09:25 PDT.