X.org Board of Directors Meeting summary of Tuesday 2009-03-31. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Official log: https://members.x.org/minutes/xorg-board-2009-03-31.txt Location is #xf-bod@irc.oftc.net, timeframe of meeting unknown. Attending board members: Adam Jackson, Alan Coopersmith, Eric Anholt, Barton Massey, Carl Worth, Donnie Berkholz, Matthieu Herrb. Absent board members: Daniel Stone. Attending non-board members: Keith Packard. Bart starts the meeting by stating: "I have this giant agenda with 9 items on it, so there's no way we'll do them all online today." <"offline" here probably means on the board mailing list.> The first topic that Bart brings up is the Board Of Directors Wiki. "We tried doing committees last year, and that didn't work at all. We also tried having a private Board wiki, which didn't work so well either, but I want to try again." "we need a place we can work on stuff other than email and irc.". Donnie asks: "what needs to be private that we need a wiki for?", Bart replies "stuff like election committee deliberations :-)", then Carl states: "I think a public wiki would be fine too.", whereupon Bart answers: "it makes sense to have public and private sections", "every so often something comes up that we probably don't want to publish to the world; there were for example some discussions of particular applicants in the election before last...", "Anyway, private/public aside for the moment, the url is https://members.x.org/bod/", "I will start putting agenda items and some kind of summary minutes on the wiki.". Carl then corrected Bart's url to https://foundation.x.org/bod/, and everyone then works on getting their accounts and access to this content sorted. Bart summarises the further agenda for the meeting: "corporate registration, bank account, trademarks, xdc 2009, membership driver, soc 2009, voc 2009, getting more money, 2009 elections". Bart asks Keith: "any chance of a Treasurer's Report sometime soonish?", but he receives no answer. Alan then asks Keith: "stuart says I need to poke you about an invoice for Sun's purchase order to send money for XDS08", Keith answers "sure, I'm not sure I realized we were getting support from Sun for that, but that's good news", Alan then replies "I thought that was what it was for, it was some P.O . he got raised to give Sun's money to X.Org, I can doublecheck with him later". Adam asks Keith tersely about "krh's travel" , to which Keith replies immediately "in the mail!" and later on "cleared off my desk this morning, found lots of 'interesting' stuff" Bart then talks about the corporate transition: "I need to get off my behind and try again to get our new 501(c)3 registered in Delaware, which is a nightmare.", "Once that's done, keithp will move our bank account to a new bank, which will resolve the longstanding issue that our current bank sucks.". Bart brings up the topic of trademarks: "we apparently don't own a trademark on things like the X.Org swirl logo". Donnie says "there is a distinction between owning and registering", "registering just means people can't claim they infringed it *by accident* because they didn't know about it". Then Donnie asks where trademarks should be registered, to which Bart replies "US is sufficient for most legal purposes, since we're a US corporation.", Donnie mentions that he remembers that it costs "$20,000 to get registered in a usefully large subset", Bart replies "but it's only about $250 for US". Most agree that 20k usd seems excessive, and some even start talking about the swoosh logo again. Carl states "I agree on the name being wroth protecting, (and agree that the current swoosh is not a good logo)." and Bart concludes: "Let me bug SFLC this week and I'll let you know what advice I get from them." Bart moves on to Google Summer of Code 2009: "We have a very small number of applicants so far, which surprises me", as the deadline is only a few days away. Donnie mentions "most organizations have had lower than expected application counts. also apparently many come in on deadline", to which Bart remembers from the past years "we should have about 1/3 of them at this point", and then states "if anyone here wants to sign up to review apps and possibly mentor, please do!". Donnie then states that an xcb reviewer is needed and asks whether Bart will do that, to which Bart answers positively. Bart then brings up XDC 2009. It will happen "at the end of September before Linux Plumber's Conference here in Portland" "at PSU", "we have 20 rooms reserved. We need to get people to sign up for these ASAP, so that we can release any that won't be needed before they start costing us money.". Bart asks whether someone would like to take over wiki and announcement work for this and Carl volunteers. Carl digs up the dates for LPC: "Wed-Fri Sep. 23-25.", Bart states "I have the rooms booked from September 28-30, so I guess that's when we better hold it.", "If we fill less than half of the 20-room block we've reserved, we're on the hook for $890". Donnie then summarizes the situation with "linuxcon was sept 21-23, plumbers 23-25, xdc the next week". Keith confirms that he "should be able to extract funds from Intel to sponsor part of XDS" Bart concludes the meeting as time is running out: "OK, we're about out of time. I think we can table the remaining stuff. I do want to put a priority on setting up for the 2009 Board Elections, though; sounds stupid, but I'd like the elections to finish by mid-November this year, and experience shows about a 5-month lead time :-)." Bart thanks Carl for his work in the previous elections, and for documenting most of it. Carl points out that Alan, Donnie, Bart and Daniel "are the new election committee and are responsible for running things.", and mentions that he set up the mailing list, and that most things from there on should be documented, apart from some database bugs that Carl is trying to fix. No motions were presented in this meeting, no voting took place.