OSI Board Meeting Minutes, Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Quorum reached and meeting called to order 08:15 am PT.

Attendees:

1. Mr. Michael Tiemann, President (joined at 8:10 am PT)
2. Ms. Danese Cooper, Treasurer
3. Mr. Ken Coar, Director
4. Mr. Harshad Gune, Director (via IRC)
5. Mr. Martin Michlmayr, Director
6. Mr. Russell Nelson, Director (via IRC)
7. Ms. Nnenna Nwakanma, Director
8. Mr. Andrew Oliver, Director
9. Ms. Alolita Sharma, Secretary

Guests/observers:

1. Mr. Bdale Garbee, Board Observer
2. Mr. Zak Greant, Board Observer
3. Mr. Karl Fogel, Invited Guest (joined at 8:25 am PT)

Expected, but Not Present

1. Mr. Merrill Freund (Schwartz Communications)
2. Mr. Ernest Prabhakar, Board Observer
3. Mr. Mark Radcliffe, General Counsel

Sent regrets

1. Mr. Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, Director

Agenda

1. Approval of minutes
2. Officer reports
3. Committee reports
4. Staff reports
5. Old business
6. New business

Detail

1. Approval of minutes

   Motion to approve April 1, 2009 minutes as edited for public posting. Motion called by Ms. Cooper, seconded by Ms. Sharma. Minutes approved unanimously.

2. Officer Reports
   President’s Report:

   Mr. Tiemann reports that he has been waiting for Mr. Radcliffe to get back to him regarding logo usage guidelines.

   General Counsel Report:

   No report.
   Secretary’s Report: (Ms. Sharma)

   * FOSDEM Face to Face meeting minutes – Once Ms. Cooper posts completed notes for the FOSDEM meetings, these can be reviewed by the board and made public after approval.
   * March 2009 meeting minutes – Minutes approved for March 4, 2009 have been posted on opensource.org.

   Treasurer’s Report: (Ms. Cooper)

   * FOSDEM reimbursements status: Most expense reports have been cleared. One report pending.
   * Non-profit filing status in California:
   In the last board meeting, Ms. Cooper reported that the initial filing of documents to support non-profit status has been completed and the California Secretary of State has requested additional documentation. The deadline for final filing is April 20. All filings have been completed and we’re waiting to hear back from the State.

3. Committee Reports
   Licensing Committee

   No report.

   Membership Committee (Ms. Cooper)

   There have to be public rules of conduct for the OSI board members. The board will work on formulating a set of rules.

   Mr. Oliver would like to restate the goals of the charter membership list back to the members. Mr. Oliver is willing to give the process a month and if nothing productive comes out of the process, then two major actions should be taken – announce the education project which will affect membership and close out the membership list. Ms. Cooper will help Mr. Oliver through this process and close this out as needed. Ms. Cooper, Ms. Oliver, Ms. Sharma will work together to help the conversation proceed on the membership list. Ms. Nwakanma states that the charter membership be clearly advised that the board cannot be dismissed all at once and they should work on the goals at hand with that in mind.

   In the next board meeting, Mr. Tiemann recommends that the membership process be re-examined after the 30 day period is over.

   Ms. Sharma mentioned that there is significant energy in Asia where open source education, policy development, open standards are hot topics. Ms. Sharma has offered to focus on that effort, make progress and report back to the board in the next meeting.

4. Staff Reports
   IT Services (Mr. Greant)

   * Have regularly been putting in 10-15 minutes per day.
   * Certificate acquired and installed for ideas.opensource.org (http://ideas.opensource.org/ticket/176)
   * Redirects in place for use of https on ideas.opensource.org (http://ideas.opensource.org/ticket/82)
   * Issue with stale license review statuses appearing on opensource.org front page fixed (http://ideas.opensource.org/ticket/177)
   * Misc. maintenance of ideas.opensource.org

5. Old Business
   • Trademark status and next steps (Mr. Tiemann)
     o The OSI needs to assemble the artwork for the keyhole with “Open Source Initiative” so that it can be made available for use on www.opensource.org. Mr. Coar has the fonts as well as the original artwork in several formats. This needs to be collated and posted on the website. Mr. Tiemann requests Mr. Coar to provide the necessary artwork. Mr. Coar will do the needful by the next board meeting.
   • Guidelines for OSI affiliates to use OSI logo to promote open source events (Mr. Tiemann)
     o Awaiting feedback from general counsel Mr. Radcliffe’s team.
   • OSI’s Education project status (Ms. Sharma)
     o OSI’s education mailing list continues its discussions. New members are joining in steadily especially from Asia (primarily India, Singapore, Malaysia, Korea) where Ms. Sharma has been working with various education organizations to use the mailing list to discuss any issues or questions. Ms. Nwakanma reports that she has been working on an e-learning initiative in Africa specifically focused on open source education and forming FOSS school clubs in middle and high schools.
   • OSI website maintenance status (Ms. Sharma)
     o Ms. Sharma worked on organizing the information which was linked from the main page of the OSI’s internal wiki. She put together a easy-to-use design which was further enhanced by Mr. Greant, reviewed by other interested board members. The final design was a result of Mr. Greant, Ms. Nwakanma and Ms. Sharma’s input. Some Drupal security updates are pending which Mr. Monks needs to look at and upgrade as needed. Mr. Monks reports that he has completed the upgrades as needed.
   • Memorandum of Understanding between the Korea Software Copyright Committee of the Republic of Korea and OSI (Ms. Sharma/ Mr. Michlmayr)
     o Mr. Michlmayr was in Seoul on April 16-17 to sign the MOU between the OSI and SOCOP for knowledge transfer and expertise exchange on open source licensing and education. Ms. Sharma is pleased to report that our team effort to put together the MOU, review the final versions and sign the MOU with SOCOP has been very successful. Ms. Sharma thanks Ms. Nwakanma and Mr. Michlmayr for working closely with her to complete this process.
6. New Business
   • OSCON F2F Agenda, Funding, Deliverables (Discussion)
     Ms. Cooper suggests that the OSI participates in some of the events happening before OSCON such as Community Days, FLOSS Foundation meetings etc. Ms. Cooper suggests we could use Thursday-Friday the week before OSCON for the OSI Face to Face meetings or Saturday-Sunday after OSCON. Saturday-Sunday after OSCON will not work for most folks.
   • Mr. Tiemann’s presence at FISL, Brazil
     Mr. Tiemann is in the process of working out details with the organizers for participating at FISL. Mr. Souza has also offered to help.
   • Letter of support for Aneesh Chopra for Federal CTO
     Mr. Tiemann would like the OSI to send a letter of support to the new US CTO Mr. Chopra. Mr. Tiemann will send the letter via email to the board for signatures. Refer to (http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/04/aneesh-chopra-great-federal-cto.html)
   • Response to Alex Brown re: ISO standards documentation licensing
     Mr. Tiemann suggests that we work with ISO and coordinate with the OSI legal advisory board to move this effort forward.
   • Microsoft Strategy / Conversation (Mr. Oliver)
     Mr. Oliver reports having a conversation with Sam Ramji of Microsoft at the Open Source Business Conference and about how OSI should approach Microsoft in regard to its Open Source activities, legal activities and Open Source-related marketing.
   • OSI Affiliate program status (Ms. Cooper)
     Deferred to next meeting.
   • Mission of OSI wrt advocacy vs. antagonism (Mr. Oliver)
     Deferred to next meeting.
   • OSBC 2009 – “Open Core” and other messaging (Mr. Oliver)
     Deferred to next meeting.
   • Approved Licenses status on opensource.org (Ms. Sharma)
     o Can we set a policy to ensure that all approved licenses are posted on the OSI website (opensource.org) within 48 hours of a board meeting. E.g. The EUPL is still listed as a license being reviewed. Either we should remove the license status posting from the website or we should update the information regularly. The OSI is picking up criticism in the blogosphere for not maintaining an up-to-date status for the most important function it performs today – licensing.
     Deferred to next meeting.