Meeting agenda for Monday 12th November, 2018

This is the proposed agenda for the SPI board meeting of Monday, November 12th, 2018, to be held at 20:00 UTC in #spi on irc.spi-inc.org.

  1. Opening
  2. Roll Call
  3. President's report (Jimmy Kaplowitz)
  4. Treasurer's report (Michael Schultheiss)
  5. Secretary's report (Tim Potter)
  6. Outstanding minutes
    1. Monday, 10th September 2018
  7. Items up for discussion
    1. Follow-up and action items from face-to-face meeting
    2. Spring face-to-face meeting
  8. Any other business
  9. Next board meeting: December 10th, 2018, 20:00 UTC

President's report

Thanks everyone for a productive face-to-face meeting in New York last month.

After that meeting, three of us attended the Debian cloud sprint in Seattle.
The main resulting work specifically for SPI will be to follow up with the
major cloud providers and SPI legal counsel in order to review their terms of
service and negotiate any specific wording we need in order to create accounts
to will hold legal ownership of Debian's resources and images there. There will
also be some IT team work, but mainly in an facilitative role as Debian's
sysadmin team integrates with each cloud.

I've been following up with two projects on three issues, which I'll report
anonymously here since none are public yet (this will change):

One SPI associated project is considering switching to Software Freedom
Conservancy. They held a conference call last week with Conservancy and me, and
I agree that for the way they see their needs evolving in the near future, they
will want a level of handholding and governance structure that is more in line
with their model than ours. They've been happy with our services so far and
they intend to say so publicly soon, as part of their own public consideration
of this switch.

Unrelated to their potential switch of organizational home, they noticed a
malware distributor squatting on a domain name using their trademark. Resolving
this should be a pretty straightforward ICANN UDRP dispute procedure, but
because they're considering the Conservancy switch, we'll discuss further with
them on whether they want to handle that process within SPI or after switching
to Conservancy.

Another SPI project has shifted staff to mostly be run by a for-profit entity,
although still as a legitimate free software project, and without any contact
with the current SPI liaisons. They've asked me privately about possibly ending
the relationship, merely due to disuse and lack of need and not due to any
problem. I'm working on getting them answers on what we can or can't do given
their lack of 501(c)(3) status, and on contacting one of our old liaisons for
the project to see if they're properly authorized to take over.

Otherwise, I've been busy dealing with a complicated several weeks of personal
life, as per my recent board email, and therefore haven't done the monthly
treasurer report work that I hoped for. I'll be discussing status and feasible
next steps with Tim Potter immediately following this meeting. I will be
starting a new job on December 4, at Plotly, but this should not cause a
conflict with SPI.

If like me you haven't yet, please submit your reimbursement request ASAP for
the recent face to face meeting. See you at the next one early next year!

Treasurer's report

pending

Secretary's report

Minutes for the face-to-face board meeting have been started but could
not be completed in time to give enough notice for board review before
the meeting.

Due to personal commitments the bylaw vote was unable to be scheduled
in time to avoid the holiday period and instead will be planned for
January. The time between now and then will be used to figure out (and
document) how to operate the voting infrastructure. tpot, jimmy and
noodles(?) to collaborate on this.

Secretary's TODO list for the next meeting:

* Complete minutes for face-to-face board meeting for December IRC
  meeting.

* Update resolutions votes on during face-to-face board meeting.

  * Vote to replace systemd resolution with intended one
  * Resolution 2018-10-05.mcs.1
  * Vote on authority to open and operate HSBC bank accounts