Face to Face Meeting Denver 2011

Meeting

As many board members as possible (and potentially others contributing to OSGeo) are planning to meet all day September 18 in Denver after FOSS4G.

When and Where

• Post FOSS4G 2011 in Denver, 18th Sept. 2011, full day (9AM to 5PM).

Ubisense office, 
1701 Wynkoop St, Unit #306, 
Denver, CO 80202

• In Union Station - OSM - streetview from Wynkoop pub a block away
• Venue includes projector, screen, wireless internet access
• Lots of food and drink places nearby.

Planning to Attend

1. Frank Warmerdam
2. Arnulf Christl
3. Jeff McKenna
4. mpg
5. Tim Schaub
6. Daniel Morissette
7. Peter Batty
8. Mark Lucas (via Skype)

Regrets: Jo, Tyler

Agenda

Meeting time: 09:00 to 17:00

• welcome, intros
• non-contentious business items
  • [done] Set the number of Charter Members that will be added this year.
  • [done] Review and hopefully approve MOU with ICA and SIGTE (Tyler)
    • MOU ICA
    • MOU SIGTE
  • [done] Accept resignation of Howard Butler as SAC chair and Alex Mandel as incoming SAC chair
  • [done] Accept resignation of FrankW as Incubation chair and DanielM as incoming Incubation chair
• [done] 10:00 Invited speaker Peter ter Haar on sponsorship opportunities with the public administration
• [done] Review officer/exec positions:
  • Treasurer, Secretary, President, others?
• [done] executive session
• [done] Talk about the idea to backup Code Sprint funding in general and specifically (see mpg's mails).
• review of prior finances
  • revenue per quarter for the 5 years of our existence
  • expenses per quarter for the 5 years of our existence
  • pie-chart breakdown of where our revenue comes from (by fiscal year)
  • pie-chart breakdown of where our expenses go to (by fiscal year)
• discussion of OSGeo mission, goals, go through the Forward list
• discussion of funding model, revenue sources
• Discuss uniting OSGeo and FOSS4G sponsorships
• Media Sponsorship - very draft outline of idea (Tyler)
• Develop a 2012 budget (see OSGeo Budget 2010)
• Confirm place and date for next F2F meeting: April/May 2012
• MOU with Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development (RCMRD)
• Discuss SAC management: pending Wiki LDAP migration (Wiki spammed to death = bad outreach) and complex system administration issues
• other major topics, as time permits
• Add items

Note: the "non-contentious business items" item is to quickly get out of the way any items that aren't expected to devolve existential or financial questions. If they do start to devolve into serious discussion, we should cut off debate and move them to end of meeting in hopes that the larger discussions during the day will shed light on them.

Note: as part of the mission/goals discussion, we should keep in mind topics like media sponsorship and code sprint funding as test cases. That is, have we stated our aims and intents for OSGeo such that the answers to the media sponsorship and code sprint funding questions can be readily determined? If so, then we have a good set of aims and intents.

Minutes

• Meeting starts at 9:20

• Attendance:
  • Arnulf Christl (meeting chair)
  • Frank Warmerdam
  • Jeff McKenna
  • Michael P Gerlek
  • Tim Schaub
  • Daniel Morissette
  • Peter Batty
  • Mark Lucas (via Skype)
• Regrets: Jo, Tyler

• Next F2F meeting March/April ?
  • Discussed the idea of having two F2F board meetings per year with flight & accomodation funded by OSGeo
  • We should try to find a location/date around another event
  • Mitigated support: some board members can hardly do one a year
  • Let's get back to this at a later time

• New charter members election for 2011
  • Some want 10 new members per year, some want much more
  • Discussion of various options...
  • Motion to go with 20% new charter members for this year
    • All +1

• Motion to approve the MOU with the International Cartographic Association (ICA).
  • All +1

• Motion to approve the MOU with The GIS and Remote Sensing Centre, The University of Girona, Spain. (SIGTE)
  • Note that it is reported that the spanish chapter people are in favor
  • All +1

• Motion to accept Alex Mandel as new SAC chair replacing Howard Butler.
  • All +1

• Motion to accept Daniel Morissette as new Incubator chair replacing Frank Warmerdam
  • All +1

• Discussion with Peter ter Haar, Ordnance Survey on sponsorship opportunities with the public administration and the needs of sponsors

• Review of officers/exec positions
  • President:
    • Arnulf remains president, +1 from all
  • Secretary:
    • Tyler remains secretary, +1 from all
  • Treasurer:
    • Motion: Daniel as new treasurer and chair of the finance committee, +1 from all

• Finances:
  • Review and discussion of the past year's financial report
  • Income coming from a few direct OSGeo sponsors and indirectly from FOSS4G sponsors
  • Lack of a current budget
  • ED Salary is large vs revenues
  • Major loss in 2010 and 2011 - living off money from 3+ years ago
  • First tasks for the new treasurer:
    • TODO: Prepare budget for 2012
    • TODO: Research/find external book keeper/accountant
    • TODO: Move invoicing from Tyler to book keeper/accountant
    • TODO: Revive finance committee, clean up members list
    • TODO: Signing authority fix/update

• ED Position
  • Discussion...
  • Three roles needed (to be filled by 1 person, or more?)
    • Administrative tasks
    • Project work (SAC, code sprints, etc.)
    • ED / ambassador:
      • Outreach
      • Fundraising
  • Proposed Plan:
    • Terminate current ED position over ~2 months
    • Board members to fill ambassador (OSGeo outreach) role with compensation TBD
    • This is short term (~6 months?, definitely less than 1 yr),
    • Actively look to fill ambassador role in coming months
  • Motion to terminate Tyler Mitchell's contract as of 2 months today (or as soon after based on legal considerations)
    • 6 x +1, 2 x zero
  • Motion: Allocate up to 6,000$USD for the rest of 2011, for travel and expenses for the ambassador (OSGeo outreach) role, to be approved at the discretion of the President and Treasurer jointly
    • All +1

• Code Sprint Support
  • The February 2012 Seattle sprint needs 12k$ backup
  • MPG discusses a proposal for code sprint policy / guidelines
  • TODO: MPG to write policy in wiki to be reviewed at next meeting
  • Motion: To provide 12k$ financial guarantees to Feb 2012 Seattle Sprint, with any profit coming back to OSGeo to be used for a future NA sprint
    • All +1

• Lunch time. Mark Lucas is gone for the rest of the day.

• Future direction for OSGeo
  • Review Mission Statement + Goals at http://osgeo.org/content/foundation/about.html
  • TODO: mission text not exactly the same in all pages. Need to fix to be consistent

• MOU with Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development (RCMRD / Africa)
  • They spoke to Frank and want someone to go on site in November to represent OSGeo and start discussions
  • Motion: Jeff and Tim to lead the RCMRD MOU effort and bring in other interested parties.
    • +1 from all

• Motion to formally approve the Beijing FOSS4G 2012 recommendation from the conference committee
  • +1 from all

• 3:30pm: Michael and Tim have to leave.

• General discussions...
  • TODO: Peter to get in touch with GITA about administrative support (book keeping++)

• GeoTools naming conflict
  • Motion: Board requests that the GeoTools project take reasonable action to meet the request of the other GeoTools product even though we do not know if we need to legally in order to avoid unnecessary bad feelings or conflict.
    • +1 from all

• Motion to close the meeting at 16:55.
  • +1 from all

Summary Report

This is a report from the OSGeo board meeting originally sent to the Discuss Mailing List. Please follow the board mailing list [2] if you are interested in understanding and contributing to the development of the OSGeo Foundation. Feel free to join us there and chime in if you are interested in helping to shape the future of OSGeo. The full minutes of the meeting are detailed above, the following bullets give a short overview of the most important items.

• We have reconsidered the way the organization is run and came to the conclusion that it is time for a change.
• We would like to diversify our outreach and fundraising and address a wider range of activities.
• As a result we have decided that the existing role of a single Executive Director is no longer the best use of our funds and we will discontinue this role.
• We thank Tyler Mitchell for his great contribution in launching and bringing OSGeo into operation over the last five years. We look forward to his continued contributions in coming years.
• We will make supporting code sprints a higher priority of our goals and draft guidelines [3] to that effect.
• As a first step we decided to financially back-up the Islandwood Code Sprint (sign up here [4]).
• Beijing has been confirmed as the venue for FOSS4G 2012
• FOSS4G 2011 in Denver was such a great success that we will consider hosting more regional events, including options for an ongoing North American conference and a Central and East European FOSS4G.
• The Conference Committee list [5] will be a hot place for talking about how to organize this.
• We adopted two Memoranda of Understanding with the International Cartographic Association (ICA) [6] and The GIS and Remote Sensing Centre, The University of Girona, Spain (SIGTE) [7].
• Our new treasurer is Daniel Morissette. We thank Frank Warmerdam for the good work he has provided in this position beforehand.
• We welcome Alex Mandel as the new chair of the System Administration Committee and thank Howard Butler for chairing the committee so far and welcome his continued support in the System Administration Committee.
• The board confirmed Daniel Morissette as chair of the Incubation Committee and thank our outgoing chair Frank Warmerdam for launching and running the Incubator for more than 5 years.
• The nomination and election of up to 20 new OSGeo Charter Members are going to take place in the coming weeks.
• We thank Peter ter Haar, product manager from Ordnance Survey and sponsor of OSGeo [8] for sharing his insight on the adoption of Open Source by public administrations in Europe during the board meeting.

We appreciate the momentum that has carried over from the many talks we had with OSGeo members and friends at the conference and look forward to a productive coming year.

On behalf of the OSGeo board of directors,
Arnulf Christl (President, OSGeo)

[1] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Face_to_Face_Meeting_Denver_2011#Agenda
[2] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/board
[3] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Code_Sprint_Guidelines
[4] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/IslandWood_Code_Sprint_2012
[5] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/conference_dev
[6] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/MOU_ICA
[7] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/MOU_SIGTE
[8] http://www.osgeo.org/sponsors