X.org Board of Directors Meeting summary of Tuesday 2009-04-14. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Official log: https://members.x.org/minutes/xorg-board-2009-04-14.txt Location is #xf-bod@irc.oftc.net, timeframe of meeting unknown. Attending board members: Adam Jackson, Alan Coopersmith, Eric Anholt, Bart Massey, Carl Worth, Daniel Stone (inactive), Matthieu Herrb. Absent board members: Donnie Berkholz. Attending non-board members: Keith Packard (inactive). The meeting starts with Bart talking about being unable to access the wiki: "I've got meeting minutes and logs from last meeting ready to put up." Carl thanks Bart for the minutes, and adds "I posted a bunch of election-committee updates". Carl tries to help Bart but Bart then states "can't find my password anyplace". Bart then moves on: "Corporate reg, new bank: I haven't done anything on these yet." Carl asks "Were we blocking on something else before being able to do new bank, etc.? Did that get resolved?", to which Bart replies "that's the corporate reg. no, not yet.". Carl then states "OK. So what does the corporate reg. effort entail?" to which Bart answers "plowing through a horrible IRS web form. about 1.5 hours, I would guess. if you want to help me with it this week, that would be great." Carl answers "yes. It's been on our TODO list for a long time, so will be great to have it completed." Bart then brings up Google Summer of Code: "we have 4 slots and 4 good applicants." and then goes on to X.org's Endless Vacation Of Code: "I've been putting off starting this until soc is established. We have one possible candidate in the soc pool that I will pursue with the mentor as needed." Bart then asks Carl about the status for XDC: "you were going to get the webpage up so that we could do an announcement", to which Carl replies "I haven't done a thing. :-/ Thanks for the reminder." Bart then asks for ideas and suggestions for fundraising: "i'd like to see us take in about $20K/year outside of conference support. That's a little more than our current outgoing, but I think we could spend it usefully if we had it. Maybe $5-10K is a good goal for this year?". Matthieu suggests to create some flyers and a pressbook to present to possible sponsors, to which Bart replies "I'm not sure we need flyers and a pressbook, but I haven't done this much. Maybe we could get some Foundation that regularly raises money to give us some help. Any obvious candidates?". Adam suggests the gnome foundation, and volunteers to go talk to them. Bart brings up the topic of Xorg Foundation membership: "we need to establish a reasonably credible and reasonably large base of X.Org members", "Stage 1, already done, is to triage the membership apps and establish regular review." , "Stage 2 is to make sure that everyone we can get who is part of the X community is an X.Org member.", "Stage 3 is to purge the membership rolls of folks who are *not* part of the X community." Bart then reveals "we had some bad troubles election before last with stale members". Matthieu then states "I did build a list of committers who were not members and send them spam to propose to become members", but he did not yet check how that worked out. Carl then brings up the current action taken to scrub the members list: "We do retire inactive participants annually, (those who don't come in and click "renew" at election time)." He then asks if more than that is needed and then asks if "our checks on incoming members are insufficient". Bart answers: "I think our checks are fine now." "I'm just concerned that a lot of folks who joined long ago for maybe less than noble reasons (ahem) are hanging on." "because they were friends of [someone] who probably shouldn't have given their lack of X-connectedness. In the election before last, one of those people put someone up for election who wasn't a member, and we ultimately had to deny them membership. It was uncomfortable for all concerned." Carl states "Election eligibility is really the only advantage, and I don't think anyone has ever claimed that any elections have been gamed in any sense." Alan then wonders: "what's the benefit to X.Org of having more members, and the benefit to people of becoming members? is there anything other than just voting in the annual board elections?" to which Matthieu answers "I think most people don't see a benefit.". Bart replies "The benefits to X.Org of having its membership reflect the contributor pool are IMHO large. It helps us credibly raise money and awareness.", "The benefits to the members are maybe smaller, but OTOH it's free and not really a burden." Eric then wants verification of "the criteria for membership"; "has contributed in some way to X" "(with "X" pretty broadly defined)", which Bart ammends with "in a reasonably recent timeframe". Adam then contributes "i dunno. if allen akin said he wanted to be a foundation member i'd probably be willing to let the timeframe slide...", to which Eric replies "that's part of "X pretty broadly defined" -- if I know the name and they're doing good things for us (such as glean), I press "Yes"", "if I don't know the name, I'll google them a little." "but most apps outright say they haven't done anything yet. those get the stock reply.", Bart replies " obviously we reserve broad discretion on this kind of thing. i'd really rather avoid too-formal a process or too-hard a distinction." Alan asks "do people really ask how many members the foundation has? I would think number of active developers would be more interesting to people who understand open source communities & their associated foundations", to which Bart replies "My experience has been that for most communities most folks believe (rightly or wrongly) that there's a strong correlation between org membership and developer/user base.", Alan then says "perhaps explaining that becoming a member helps show the strength of the organization might help get people to sign up who don't really care about voting and don't see any other reason to fill out the form", which Bart agrees with. Bart then states "We also generally require membership if we're going to give someone money, but that's not really an incentive until you're ready to ask for some.". Alan then remembers: "aren't there also some docs from VESA we're allowed to share with members but not non-members? though the 5 people who care about reading those are probably already members", which Bart confirms and to which he adds "There may be other docs like this, but I don't recall. :-)" Bart then concludes the discussion with "Anyway, I'm not sure what, if anything, the Board wants to do about membership. I'd love to have somebody (other than cworth :-) take the lead in thinking about this and doing what needs to be done. I probably won't bring it up again otherwise.". Carl then replies "the only membership concern I have is if getting an election quorum becomes difficult. We made it this last year, but not as comfortably as I would have liked.", ""more membership" isn't useful unless it's also "more active" membership than what we currently have." and " The forced annual renewal definitely helps that. What didn't help this year was a long lag between telling people to renew and allowing them to vote." Carl concludes with "I'd recommend to the election committee to tell the members to renew and to vote simultaneously. That should help the voting turnout (as a percentage of active members) nicely.", which Bart calls a "good plan." Bart changes the topic over to the mailing list: "the xorg email list" "leave well enough alone, or try to do something with it?". Eric asks "what specifically are you thinking about" to which Bart replies "the volume of our single list is quite high, and has the occasional mostly-nonproductive noise discussion. we've talked before about various splits and schemes to make it more manageable". Matthieu answers "I don't think there's a way to fix the mailing list" "you cannot stop people whining and trolling", Eric states "the mailing list system we have right now is the right thing". Adam then brings up the fact that there are currently two mailing lists, Alan adds "-devel is much less flamey than xorg@", "it's where all the patch reviews have been lately". Eric is dissapointed at xorg-devel still existing, and Adam concurs "i wish it didn't, yes." "lists are hard. i don't think there's winning to be had", Matthieu forsees Xorg@ becoming "a kind of trash bin for uninformed people only". At this point, Bart tries to bring up his original point again, to which Adam replies "i have ideas, but they require hacking mailman" "to actively throttle message delivery of 'hot' threads" "once you get past three messages in a thread", to which Matthieu adds "throttling trolls sounds like an idea yes." At the end of the meeting, Bart statesthat he will not be able to make the meeting in two weeks time, and asks for someone to replace him, Adam states that he "should be around", to which Bart replies "you're it, then.". No motions were presented in this meeting, no voting took place.