April 3 & 4, 2017 Spring Face to Face Minutes

Quorum

Quorum reached and meeting called to order at 10:27 UTC.

Attendees

Board Members

  • Patrick Masson
  • Allison Randal
  • Simon Phipps
  • Mike Milinkovich
  • Carol Smith
  • Deb Bryant
  • Paul Tagliamonte
  • Molly de Blanc
  • Josh Simmons
  • Italo Vignoli
  • Richard Fontana

Officer Reports

Board Topics

  • Retrospective/Agenda Setting
    • Fundraising effort at end of 2016 worked well, would like to repeat and Molly would like to do more this year, Carol may help.
    • Updates on FLOSS Desktop and representation at conferences have been helpful
    • Review goals for 2016-2017:
      • Increase Individual Membership (target 1000 members
      • Increase sponsorship (target increase $40k/year)
      • Engaging more with Affiliates (metric TBD)
      • Creating volunteer organization, program to recruit more volunteers
      • Newsletter
        • Patrick will stop doing regular newsletters for several month, and instead just do the yearly review.
        • Table for the communications team
        • Note, important to have push news, maybe some more lightweight emails
        • Some automation via Drupal, to bundle up summary for tweets
        • More general content from board, content follows what we’re working on
        • Can use Simon’s weekly articles freely on web site & in newsletters
        • Taiga not useful, organization and prioritization
          • How to use more effectively
          • Higher level for issues management
          • Might be applicable for Exec. Comm.
      • Collaborations, value, something to continue? e.g. Open Source survey with GitHub
        • Thank from DOD, and others for involvement
        • Having an impact in the wider sphere of open source community
        • Board should consider how such initiatives scale and how we can engage with others outside the OSI to commit resources to supliment limited resources of the board.
        • Better to grow community of responders that Board enables/manages (and intially works in) than to exclusively use Board spare time to deliver goal
      • Volunteer involvement is very time-intensive, requires a lot of hands-on management
        • Student interns have worked well for focused tasks
        • Volunteers to staff booths has worked well
        • More focused tasks for volunteers to pick up may work better than open-ended involvement
        • Still need infrastructure maintenance volunteers
        • Mission is broad and generic, which makes it tough to get involved
        • Volunteers in responding to generic questions, askbot instance
        • Linux Australia, NLNet, Renewable Freedom are potential sources of grants for a project like an Askbot instance
  • Dependency mapping for achieving outcomes [TABLED]
  • Officer Elections
    • Allison re-elected President
    • Josh elected CFO
    • Patrick re-elected Secretary
  • Team Roles
    • Teams and team membership was discussed and determined (see below)
  • Budget
  • [AFTERNOON] Plan for next year, metrics for next year, Timeline
    • Big obnoxious spectacular fail ideas
    • Think about what we want to focus on for the next couple years
    • Shut down things we don’t rate as a priority, to focus on priorities
  • Plan for evening events and Wednesday sidebar event at MIT
  • Board operations, meeting planning
    • Reduce to one Annual f2f meeting, a retreat away from home
    • In the November time-frame do remote board meeting reviewing how we’re doing on goals (possibly slightly longer than one hour)
    • Plan for the f2f, review in August/September funding and effectiveness of remote meetings and decide between f2f and a longer remote meeting (2-4 hours)
    • Consideration of holding videconferenced meeting
    • Monthly
    • Swap one face to face for video – what’s the savings
      • Jitsi doesn’t have phone dial-in, have to have a separate sip, Eclipse may be setting up a jitsi with sip. Try Jitsi:  https://meet.jit.si
      • Big Blue Button (hmm, not so much)
    • Executive meeting
      • Mid month between the board meetings
      • Set a seed agenda, then invite board to add to it
      • Planning for performance reviews
    • Time for board meeting (2nd Wednesday conflicts for FSF All Hands)
      • Second Thursday of the month, May 11th, June 8th, July 13th, August 10th, September 14th, October 12th, November 9th (or f2f, possibly Oct 26-27th or 30-31st).
    • Planning for accounting assistance
      • Pat and CFO track down a solution
    • ACTION: check on/clean up calendar

Membership Topics

UPDATE: 

  • Website 200,000 unique visitors and 350,000 page views per month.
  • Twitter audience, reaching 19,000 followers,
    • 9.3M impressions, 
    • 14K link clicks, 
    • 11.6K retweets, 
    • 14.4K likes and 630 replies.
  • Community currently numbers 9,927, including:
    • 786 current & past members, 
    • 808 donations,
    • 1,324 contributors, 
    • 3,427 media contacts,
    • 269 corporate or open source organizations.
  • ACTION: Get Josh access to Google Analytics and Adwords (COMPLETE)
  • International membership, representation at international events
    • International affiliates, free membership for one year
    • Discount codes at international conferences
    • Potential communication channels, Telegram, MatterMost, etc
    • Membership team will talk about potential change in rates
  • Where could we go with Affiliates, how to create value for Affiliates (rather than just amplify existing value) e.g. branding for conferences by Affiliates, OSI presence and badging for all Affiliates at events
    • Concrete proposal for activity with Affiliates before reaching out
    • What value would be motivate donations from Affiliates
      • Success Criteria 1: willingness to do free cross-membership
      • Success Criteria 2: do we provide enough value to be willing to donate, but acknowledge that their mission may not be to donate to our mission
  • FLOSS United membership campaign
    • Membership drive for FSF, Conservancy and OSI.
    • Share common communities
    • Membership/participation is not restrictive: based on philosophy, all organizations are compatible
    • Run pilot at OSCON
    • Looking into payment plans
    • What are the payment amounts?
  • Is it time to change the bylaws yet? (“No” is also a good answer…)
  • ACTION: Provide an alternate contact on the Affiliate membership form, in case something fails in the application process. (COMPLETED-moved to discussion on Membership Committee)

Communications Topics

  • Doing more in communication [Italo], be more proactive in doing announcements
    • Italo to draft a short communication plan
    • Target a quarterly media outreach effort, based on a news announcement
    • Leveraging Reddit as a communication channel (creating a subreddit, organizing AMAs)
    • Creating a smaller journalist mailing list with regular contacts about OSI topics
    • Reach out to affiliates to do joint communication projects
    • Organize a annual survey about OSS using our member/affiliates base? OSS Observatory? Raise the profile of OSI as a source of information on open source?survey
      • More of a poll than a full survey
  • Communications plan, align communication channels we have with achieving our goals, use social media and mailing lists more strategically with our objectives
  • 20th Anniversary planning https://opensource.org/20years
    • Italo has poked FOSDEM to get a keynote during 2017 opening session, and to get a booth
    • Open Source Award
    • OSCON as one potential celebration
    • FOSSAsia? (Italo to poke Mario Behling?)
    • FOSDEM party
    • How do we handle OSI’s rich pool of alumni in this activity?
      • 3 minute videos, spaced out over a year
    • Promotional swag – commemorative book?
    • Specific targeted fundraising for an event or events
    • Any public speaking around 20th anniversary?
    • Plan out activity on the timeline
  • Conference targets for 2017-2018, submitting talks? ACTION: Patrick will share the list
  • Shift Communications Team to bi-weekly meetings, directed to a specific outcome

Fundraising Topics

  • Consultant: Nick Vidal
  • Sponsoring opportunities: (updated list: https://wiki.opensource.org/bin/Main/OSI+Operations/Development+%26+Fund-raising/)
    • Amazon [Italo & Nick]
    • Orange [Mike & Nick]
    • Comcast [Nick]
    • Verizon [Nick]
    • Samsung [Nick]
    • CapitalOne [Nick]
    • Walmart [Nick, Deb will look for lead]
    • look at other openstack, etc sponsors
    • Auto industry [Nick]
    • Speaker schedule at OSCON [Nick]
  • Potential membership fees or at least regular donations from Affiliates (dependent on creating value)
  • Fundraising for specific projects, such as askbot instance – possibly via grant-maker such as:
    • Linux Australia (Josh)
    • NL.Net
    • Renewable Freedom Foundation
  • Memberhip Drive / Fundraising Drive, yes great always!

Legal Topics

[TABLED from January meeting] Several people on license-review request guidance from Board on the following issue:

  • Is  “asymmetry” in a license (in how classes of licensors/licensees are  treated) in conflict with the Open Source Definition (notably OSD 5 – no  discrimination against persons or groups)?
  • If it is not in conflict with the OSD (some say that is a ‘stretch’), is it nonetheless a  feature that will or may justify OSI rejection on policy grounds?
  • Specific recent example: Upstream Compatibility License (UCL)
  • Consists  of copyleft OSL 3.0 with the following change: Creators of derivative  works must license a copy of the derivative work to upstream authors  under the Apache License 2.0. That is: upstream authors get a special  permissive license that no one else gets (like a built in CLA)
  • Nigel  Tzeng (license submitter) is willing to consider revising it so that  all modifications are made under the Apache License (everyone gets  modifications under the Apache License, not just a privileged category  of upstream licensors) [this is the Upstream Compatibility License 1.0]
  • Trademarks

Infrastructure Topics

  • Mailserver bounces (move to Gandi?)
    • General approval to move to Gandi
    • ACTION: [Paul] will reach out to Gandi about free service
  • OSI API go/nogo
    • Machine readable license git repo with API
    • Interest in keeping it and using it to generate list of links on each license page on opensource.org
    • GitHub potential to add “OSI approved” icon to licenses, based on data pull from API
    • Volunteers
  • Have offloaded a lot of things to “as a service” pieces at Gandi
  • Move mailing list(s) to web forum
    • Hosting, potential free hosted version from the company behind it
    • Building a volunteer community to moderate it and respond to questions
    • Replace links to general public facing question lists with links to askbot instance, eliminate moderation tasks
    • Seek sponsorship for open source FAQ (collaboration with GitHub around their Open Source Guide)
    • Smaller, more elite version replacing license-discuss mailing list. Caution around long-term contributors who may not contribute to a web forum.
    • ACTION: [Simon] will talk to potential sponsors

Incubator/Project Topics (https://wiki.opensource.org/bin/Main/Projects/)

  • Rebooting working groups, keeping them moving forward
  • Public Policy WG, moving forward again
  • Beyond Licensing WG
  • Entities WG (IRS)
  • Education –
    • getting open source into cirriculum (initiated by LH)
    • Fogel’s book Coursepack
    • Floss Desktop for Kids
  • Open Hatch – must close off on official stautus
    • Not really a Incubator / Working Group, was a fiscal sponsor.
  • Communicate better about what the incubator is to get involved
  • Update the Projets page with current, expired project

Review of Timeline

  • Planning Timeline

==========For Tuesday:

  • Vote on meeting minutes from January and board appointments in March.
  • Candidates for top priorities for 2017-2018 year
    • License review process, establish project manager role, document playbook of how the process works. Goal: clear consise timelines and tracking, regular checkins.
    • Create sustainable internal capacity for managing/leading volunteers, that enables volunteers to become self-sufficient. OSI be a place to answer “how to get involved in open source”.
      • What kind of contribututor onboarding.
      • Develop recruitment material, for volunteer coordinator
      • Define resources that volunteer coordinator would need
      • Not blocked on finding a volunteer coordinator) Small tasks for volunteers, better support/coordination for volunteers so they aren’t disappointed
      • For now, focus volunteers around existing incubator projects or working groups. Have working groups identify byte-sized tasks. Publish those in a centralized location.
  • Efficiency/automation to scale, make us more effective
    • Replace mailing lists with askbot instance
    • Automating communications: e.g. automated newsletter from blog posts, collecting links from board members. Include in communications plan for the year.
    • How do we want to go about sharing OSI membership to members of affiliates. Experiment with discount codes, reference implementation with Linux Australia.
  • Not adopted
    • Collaborative partnerships, impact on the wider open source community

Next Board MeetingThe next OSI board meeting is scheduled for May 11, 2017

Meeting adjourned at 16:41 EDT / 22:41 EDT

Motions

  • Motion (Molly): Appoint Allison Randal as the 2017 – 2018 President
    Second: (Paul)    .
    Discussion:
    Vote:     11 Yes; 0 No; 0 Abstain
  • Motion (Mike): Appoint Josh Simmons as the 2017 – 2018 Chief Financial Officer/Treasurer
    Second (Patrick).
    Discussion:     Logistics around account access
    Vote:     11 Yes; 0 No; 0 Abstain
  • Motion (Josh): Appoint Mike Milinkovitch as the 2017 – 2018 Assistant Treasurer  
    Second (Simon).
    Discussion:
    Vote:     11 Yes; 0 No; 0 Abstain
  • Motion (Allison): Appoint Patrick Masson the 2017 – 2018 Secretary
    Second (Deb).
    Discussion:
    Vote:     11 Yes; 0 No; 0 Abstain
  • Motion (Mike): Motion to approve the BSD+Patent license
    Second (Deb).
    Discussion:
    Vote:     11 Yes; 0 No; 0 Abstain
  • Motion (Deb): Motion to approve the Upstream Compatability License 1.0
    Second (Simon).
    Discussion:
    Vote:     11 Yes; 0 No; 0 Abstain
  • Motion (Patrick): Motion to approve minutes of 1/11/17
    Second (Josh).
    Discussion:
    Vote:     6 Yes; 0 No; 5 Abstain
  • Motion (Patrick): Motion to approve minutes of 3/29/17
    Second (Josh).
    Discussion:
    Vote:     5 Yes; 0 No; 6 Abstain
  • Motion (Allison): Motion to approve the proposed 2017 budget as presented.
    Second (Mike).
    Discussion:
    Vote:     11 Yes; 0 No; 6 Abstain

Appendix A – Treasurer’s Reports
Treasurer’s Report For the Month Ending January 31, 2017
Total Assets at Beginning of Period: $ 60647.30 
Income or Sources of Funds:

  • Contributions: $ 6336.79
  • Memberships: $ 400.00 (10x $40)
  • Open Hatch: 99.49 Received $99.49 paid $0
  • Snowdrift $ 0
  • Interest: $ 0.81
  • Commissions $ 0

Total Income or Sources of Funds: $ 6837.09

Expenses or Uses of Funds for Operations:

  • Payroll $ 9212.00
  • Professional $ 942.00
  • Bank Fees $ 97.07
  • Supplies $ 0
  • Postage, Shipping $ 26.23
  • Software $ 0
  • Conferences/Conv $ 0
  • Meetings $ 0
  • Website Hosting $ 0
  • Paypal $ 33.77

Total Expenses or Uses of Funds for Operations: $ 10311.07

Total Assets at End of Period $ 57173.32

Major Contributions 2017: Invoiced not received in bold

  • Previous Sponsor (2016: $25000)
  • Previous Sponsor (2016: $20000)
  • Previous Sponsor (2016: $20000)
  • Previous Sponsor (2016: $5000)
  • Previous Sponsor (2016: $7500)
  • Previous Sponsor (2016: $20000)
  • Previous Sponsor (2016: $25000)
  • Previous Sponsor (2016: $5000)
  • New Sponsor $ 1000 Invoiced 6/20/16
  • Previous Sponsor, 2017: $4000  contribution invoiced 11/28/16 paid 12/06/16
  • Previous Sponsor (2016: $20000)
  • Previous Sponsor (2016: $1000)
  • New Sponsor (2016: $10000 Unsolicited contribution received 7/27/16, one time)
  • New Sponsor (2016: $1000)
  • New Sponsor (2016: $1000 Unsolicited contribution received 11/29/16 as part of 1st Annual Fundraiser)
  • Previous Sponsor, 2017: $5000 invoiced 12/28/16 received 1/19/16
  • New Sponsor (2016, $1000 Unsolicited received 12/25/16 as part of 1st Annual Fundraiser)

Treasurer’s Report For the Month Ending February 28, 2017

Total Assets at Beginning of Period: $ 57173.32 

Income or Sources of Funds:

  • Contributions: $ 270.72
  • Memberships: $ 2640,00 (66x $40)
  • Open Hatch: -38.02 Received $99.49 paid $137.51
  • Interest: $ 0.79
  • Commissions $ 16.92

Total Income or Sources of Funds: $ 2890.41

Expenses or Uses of Funds for Operations:

  • Payroll $ 9157.05
  • Professional $ 1131.00
  • Bank Fees $ 10.78
  • Supplies $ 72.97
  • Postage, Shipping $ 25.32
  • Software $ 243.95
  • Conferences/Conv $ 408.52
  • Meetings $ 1612.75
  • Website Hosting $ 0
  • Paypal $ 91.28

Total Expenses or Uses of Funds for Operations: $ 12,751.62

Total Assets at End of Period $ 47,312.11

Major Contributions 2017: Invoiced not received in bold

  • Previous Sponsor $ unsolicited
  • Previous Sponsor $
  • Previous Sponsor $
  • Previous Sponsor $
  • Previous Sponsor $
  • Previous Sponsor $
  • Previous Sponsor $
  • Previous Sponsor $
  • New Sponsor $ 1000 Invoiced 6/20/16
  • Previous Sponsor $ 4000 2017 contribution invoiced 11/28/16 paid 12/06/16
  • Previous Sponsor $
  • Previous Sponsor $
  • New Sponsor $ Unsolicited contribution received 7/27/16
  • New Sponsor $
  • Previous Sponsor $ 5000 invoiced 12/28/16 received 1/19/16

Appendix B – Team Reports
Communications TeamMembership TeamFundraising TeamInfrastructure TeamLegal TeamIncubator/Projects Team
Appendix C – Updates to Team membership, 2017-2018

  • Communications Team
    • Team lead: Italo
    • Members: Italo, Josh, Simon, interns
    • Responsible for: branding, marketing, newsletters, annual reports, Twitter, membership drives, work with PR Firm, press releases, more responsive to requests for public comment
  • Membership Team
    • Team lead: Patrick
    • Team Members: Italo, Molly, Josh, Carol
    • Responsible for:  individual (Molly), affiliate (Italo), election communication and membership drive
  • Infrastructure Team
    • Team lead: Paul
    • Members: Paul, Allison, Simon, volunteers
    • Responsible for: websites, wiki, mailing lists, election voting system
  • Legal Team
    • Team lead: Richard
    • Members: Paul, Allison, Patrick, Simon
    • Responsible for: license review (Richard, Paul, Allison) , trademark stewardship (Italo, Patrick)
  • Incubator/Projects Team (https://wiki.opensource.org/bin/Main/Projects/) (is missing Public Policy group)
    • Team lead: Deb
    • Members: Deb, Molly, Carol, all board sponsors for working groups
    • Responsible for: incubated projects/working groups, promoting working groups to membership. Add: updates from projects; better define board member obligation/role. OpenHatch (Paul) (discussed needs to be sunsetted), public sector (Deb), education-related working groups including FLOSS Desktops and Open Education Summit (Patrick, Molly, Italo [Europe, global strategy]), TLDR:legal (Richard), FLOSS Entities WG (Allison), Beyond Licensing WG (Allison), Snowdrift.coop Incubator (Molly)
  • Fundraising Team
    • Team lead: Molly
    • Members: Patrick, Mike, Italo, Josh, Carol
    • Responsible for: overall view of all channels of fundraising (individual, affiliate, corporate, crowdfunding, etc), annual plan, new ideas for fundraising, corporate memberships