Board Meeting 2017-11-21

This board meeting is scheduled for 21 November 2017 (as continuation of previous meeting) at [1] through IRC and follow up voting on Loomio.

Agenda

Current items

• roll call
• appoint meeting chair, meeting scribe/secretary
• Approve previous meeting minutes
• Review action items from previous meeting
  • Jeff / Maxi volunteer to work on converting project report from google document to wiki
  • Vasile to coordinate sharing of travel calendars and establish when two board members can meet
  • Angelos to ask 4-5 projects to attend the next meeting (from those who did not attend AGM), request slide to complete AGM presentation
  • Vasile to schedule f2f meeting
  • Maria A, Jody and Angelos to coordinate direct email campaign to project officers and set up wiki pages for 2018 budget
  • Maria A schedule second meeting, using doodle poll
• Plan a F2F meeting
• Review/revise sponsors program for 2018
• Project review GDAL/OGR (2016-2017 report)
• Project review GeoTools (2017 report)
• Project review Marble
• Discuss alternative to Dropbox
• Discussion about Officer positions (President, Vice-Presidents, Secretary)
• Dissolve Geodata Committee
• Draft 2018 budget update (funds for website management need to be added, make it a funded position?)
• Relationship with AGU & possible MoU (thread)
• Request to leverage GSoC 500 USD grant for 1 student's travel to FOSDEM devroom 2018 (thread)
• Usage of OSGeo logo and name - see style guide
• Discuss possibility of a Charter Members meeting, as part of the OSGeo Code Sprint in March (thread)

Minutes

Appoint meeting chair, meeting scribe/secretary

• Attending: Angelos, Jody, Michael, Maria A, Jeff, Astrid, Vasile, Maria B, Helena.
• Presiding: Angelos
• Scribing: Michael

Initial discussion:

• Meeting to last 1h
• Report from Michael that OSGeo non profit taxes for 2016 filed with IRS and accepted

Approve previous meeting minutes

• MOT1: Motion to approve Board meeting minutes of 2017-11-02 (see motions section)

Review action items from previous meeting

Action 1: Jeff / Maxi volunteer to work on converting project report from google document to wiki

• Jeff reported no progress
• Proposal to start working on previous work as a template and update
• To be further discussed on mailing list.

Action 2: Vasile to coordinate sharing of travel calendars and establish when two board members can meet

• Proposal to merge this action with the F2F Board meeting proposal
• This would result in opening an account in Netherlands
• Treasurer would be able to sign the document

Action 3: Angelos to ask 4-5 projects to attend the next meeting (from those who did not attend AGM), request slide to complete AGM presentation

• Angelos invited 7 projects to attend the meeting
• QGIS and gvSIG did not make it this time due to traveling and officer change
• 2 did not respond (FDO, GEOS)
• 3 present in this meeting (GDAL, GeoTools, Marble)
• More invitations to go out for next meeting by Angelos
• Discussions about the need of Officer presence on a yearly basis or just asking an offline report: having attendance on a meeting is considered better than offline report for Q&A

Action 4: Vasile to schedule f2f meeting

• Vasile provided draft
• see section below

Action 5: Maria A, Jody and Angelos to coordinate direct email campaign to project officers and set up wiki pages for 2018 budget

• Not discussed in this meeting

Action 6: Maria A schedule second meeting, using doodle poll

• Done

Project review GDAL/OGR

• Welcome Even Rouault
• Report available here
• Great project report
• PSC does not hold meetings
• Project very healthy technically: frequent releases, lots of users.
• PSC uses an email process and well documented: topic discussions occur on the mailing list and are subjects to RFC and motions for big topics
• GDAL/OGR is one of those low-level libraries that Paul Ramsey identified in his keynote that are important to everyone, but hard to fund ongoing maintenance.
• No specific request from the project to the board.
• PSC chair asked for budget input from PSC, no specific request. Funding the OSGeo code sprint is a good way to support the project.
• Action: Even to add the new OSGeo logo on gdal.org
• Discussion if OSGeo can fund new features as part of a project budget: OSGeo wouldn't really fund the new features, we'd fund the project and if the project wanted to use that for new features, that would be a PSC decision.
• Feedback from Michael: we are a non profit, but donations to us are not tax exempt so its not the same situation as if donations were tax exempt. It was actually an issue in our non profit status, the IRS didn't want us to be a type that accepted tax-exempt donations so that companies could fund development without paying taxes.

Project review GeoTools

• Welcome Jody Garnett
• Report available here
• Reports looks good.
• Project officer: We use the OSGeo CLA to enable us to donate some code to the JTS Topology Suite project. This is a good example of why CLAs are useful in the open source world.
• Project officer: We are waiting on the board for CLA requested by some US government department. We need to work on a time to coordinate with legal on the open questions.
• Discussion on the marlin renderer (scheduled to be included in Java 9), note this is a component of Java and is not a a JAI open source alternative.
• Project hoping to join the Bonn Code sprint to work on JAI replacement.

Plan a F2F meeting

• Vasile provided draft
• Jeroen confirmed that we can use the house for meeting.
• Discussion to do the F2F meeting just before Bonn Code Sprint, since lots of Board members will be there.
• Proposal to do a video F2F meeting for the "OSGeo leadership meeting" on January and plan 2 extra days on Bonn Code Sprint for F2F meeting (end of March)
• saturday 17 and Sunday March 18 or even start on friday
• Discussion to continue on mailing list

Project review Marble

• Welcome Torsten Rahn
• Report not available, project will compile a report and send it to the board
• Marble had a new release with the latest KDE release and also got releases for mobile
• Marble had a decline in terms of contributions recently partially due to the core contributors facing private challenges. Chair working on getting more people involved again.
• Officer: I'd definitely consider Marble a healthy project
• PSC status still described in the incubation process
• Torsten asked to add the new OSGeo logo to the project page

Dissolve Geodata Committee

• MOT2: Disband the geodata committee (see motions section bellow)
• There is a report from committee chair that the committee is inactive
• Jeff asked for an alternative plan
• Discussion about foundation goals and open data
• Open geospatial data is more than Openstreetmap, a lot of other interesting open data are around (like satellite data)
• Open Data is kind of lateral to us, when there are fully open data organizations focusing on it
• Plan to reach out for more volunteers from the community before disbanding.
• Action: Jeff, Maria B and Vasile to call for volunteers

Usage of OSGeo logo and name - see style guide

• Maria B: in my opinion we have to define (or the market committee) has to define when and who can resuse the osgeo logo.
• OSGeo logo guidelines
• Discussion about OSGeo logo guidelines apply to GeoForAll
• Recommendation for the GeoForAll committee to write a sentence saying "Please use GeoForAll brand in accordance with OSGeo style guide" and we can update the Trademark page to note GeoForAll logo.

Actions

• Jeff McKenna to send the Project Review document to the Board (pending from previous meetings) - Angelos to move the discussion to the mailing list
• Face to face meeting planning - To be combined with European bank account opening - Angelos to move discussion to mailing list
• Angelos to ask more projects to report to the next Board meeting
• Even to add new OSGeo logo to gdal.org
• Torsten to compile a project report for Marble and send to the board
• Torsten to add new OSGeo logo to Marble page
• Jeff, Maria B and Vasile to call for volunteers for the Geodata Committee.

Motions

MOT1: Motion to approve Board meeting minutes of 2017-11-02.

• Motion by Angelos
• Seconded by Michael
• Approve: Michael, Jody, Maria A, Angelos, Astrid, Jeff, Maria B
• Abstain:
• Block:
• Moved to Loomio: https://www.loomio.org/p/jqyMnrvR/approve-board-meeting-minutes-2017-11-02
• Outcome: Passed.

MOT2: Disband the geodata committee

• Motion by Jody
• Seconded by Michael
• Approve: Angelos, Michael, Astrid
• Abstain: Maria A, Vasile, Jeff, Helena, Maria B
• Block:
• Outcome: Not passed.

MOT3: Next board meeting on 2017-12-07 14:00 UTC

• Motion by Angelos
• Seconded by Maria A
• Approve: Vasile, Maria A, Angelos, Michael, Jeff, Astrid, Jody, Helena,
• Abstain:
• Block:
• Outcome: Passed.

IRC Log

• http://irclogs.geoapt.com/osgeo/%23osgeo.2017-11-21.log