Board Meeting 2021-03-29

This board meeting is scheduled Monday 29 March 2021 at 15:00 UTC through Jitsi, a record of motions is preserved on loomio and actions on osgeo todo issue tracker.

Agenda

Current items

1. roll call
   • appoint meeting chair, meeting scribe/secretary
2. proposal to become a Participating Organisation with the Group on Earth Observation (Steven Feldman)
3. other fiscal alternatives (GDAL)
4. Review and approve past minutes
   • Board_Meeting_2021-02-22
5. Marketing Committee Astrid Contact board about communication with Partners from MOUs
6. Set up OpenCollective fiscal host for projects to facilitate donations

1. add your topic here

Minutes

• Presiding: Till
• Scribing: Till, Codrina
• Attending: Angelos, Astrid, Tom, Mike, Michele, Codrina, Helena, Vicky, Till
• Guests: Steven Feldman (for topic 1), Even Renaud and Howard Butler (for topic 2), a dog

1. proposal to become a Participating Organisation with the

• Group on Earth Observation (Steven Feldman)
• Steven reports on background. About 100 Space Agencies and ministries/governments are members.- Also, GEO has engaged with OSGeo previously, by being a partner to FOSS4G 2019 and giving a keynote.
• question to board: Do we want to become participating organsation of Group on Earth Observation (150 part. org. yet)
• fill in form of 2 pages (Steven will support us here)
• The form will be signed and submitted by Angelos.
• motion 1: Become participating organisation of GEO 9x "+1"

2. other fiscal alternatives (gdal)

• Howard reports on topic https://gist.github.com/hobu/8bdca018fe0ada0660ea3562813e46d5
• maintainer of GDAL took small jobs adding new features to the software and thus GDAL was funded, but it is not a sustainable way to go- difficult to bring in new contributors
• private funding call brought 125k US$, concentrated on bigger organisations, mainly based in US;
• There is no knowledge yet on how donations coming from Europe would be handled.
• OSGeo is not the right organisation for managing the funding because we lack paid personal to handle fiscal issues on behalf of projects
• Looking for alternative organisations to manage the funding / fiscal activity.
• The most likely alternative for getting fiscal services is NumFocuse https://numfocus.org/, but OpenCollective [1] is also a possibility.
• Question to the board, if that is okay for OSGeo if GDAL selects another organisation to manage the fiscal activities, GDAL is not leaving OSGeo (!!)
• the board is open to this kind of support, use this example as draft for other projects later- The board will also discuss in future meetings on how to recognize sponsors that support open source projects through these other organizations/foundation offering fiscal services.

3. Review and approve past minutes

• happened already on Loomio

4. Marketig Committee Astrid Contact board about communication with Partners from MOUs

• Question: Are we aware with the organisations, that we signed a MOU with?
• We could send them updates/news, if such contact is alive
• Helena went through and suggests to update connections
• Helena suggests to re-contact them one-by-one
• Marketing committee reviews all the MOU's, then reports to the board

5. Set up OpenCollective fiscal host for projects to facilitate donations

• Helena shared email about the topic, GRASS GIS is looking for a fiscal host organisation
• we had this discussion already with Alyssa Wright and decided to have PGRouting as a pilot
• we need the feedback from Daniel Kastl (PGRouting) in order to setup guidelines for other projects

6. Go through the old issues (https://git.osgeo.org/gitea/osgeo/todo/issues/)

• #108 "OSGeo projects on OSGeo website" - keep in track
• The Lexicon Committee could pick this subject up, as it has applied for a Google Season of Docs grant [2]. This grant will allow paying a technical writer to support OSGeo in implementing a cross-projects glossary with geospatial relevant terminology. Part of the working team are also volunteers from OGC and ISO/TC211. The used software is open source https://www.glossarist.org/. Results regarding the grant will be announce mid-April.
• follow up with HOT in the next meetings (TODO Angelos)

7. Vicky reported on video on "opening doors"

Actions

• https://git.osgeo.org/gitea/osgeo/todo/issues/

IRC Log

• the meeting was held via Jitsy