Board meeting, July 10th, 2001

Attending:

  • Branden Robinson
  • Ean Schuessler
  • Manoj Srivastava
  • Martin 'Joey' Schulze
  • Nils Lohner

Absent:

  • Ian Jackson

Absent with regrets:

  • Wichert Akkerman

Invitees present:

  • Christoph Lameter

Agenda:

  1. approve meeting minutes from May 16 meeting (Ean, Wichert)
  2. OS ctte report (Ean)
    • discussion of response to Russell Nelson's email (2001-06-18)
  3. SPI legal counsel offer (Ben)
  4. treasurer report (Scott)
    • transfer of materials from Darren
    • accounts status
    • looking into insurance for SPI (?)
  5. LinuxPPC update (Wichert)
  6. membership report (Nils)
  7. Board membership voting discussion and/or vote (if needed) (Nils)
  8. set date for next meeting
  9. miscellaneous
  10. discuss powers of the President

Recorder: Nils Lohner

Advisors present:

  • Ben Collins

Approval of May 16 meeting minutes

Nils proposed a few minor changes to the minutes which were accepted. The minutes were then approved by the Board.

OSI committee report from Ean

OSI has been asking for the opensource.org domain to be transferred to them from SPI. Russell Nelson from the OSI Board has written a mail asking for the transfer, and the SPI Board has rejected a resolution to transfer the domains in email voting.

Nils proposes to simply respond to Russell by pointing him to the resolution that was voted down.

Ean has not had much time to look at the issue. He is writing a short paper that outlines the current state of affairs for the uninitiated. It discusses the origin of the Open Source mark and its definition and tries to outline what we might see as some reasonable requirements for its ongoing management. One of the main interests of SPI is to ensure that Open Source does not stray too far from Free Software, and SPI wants to see how to best accomplish this.

Ean will commit to getting a white paper and an invitation draft submitted to the Board list no later than the 21st of July, then we can review it.

Nils suggested releasing incomplete versions early ('release early, release often') so that the rest of the Board can comment on the paper and help Ean write it.

SPI Legal Counsel

The Board discussed the letter to be sent to Chris Rourk to invite him to be SPI's legal counsel. Some of the wording was changed after the discussion, and the letter was approved and sent to Mr. Rourk.

Treasurer Report

Scott McNeil is absent. So is Darren Benham. Therefore there is no treasurer report. This issue is to be addressed in email.

LinuxPPC

Wichert has done work on this issue and has talked to Jeff Carr. Since Wichert is absent most of the discussion will have to take place on email.

Joey provides some details on the issue:

  • head of LinuxPPC is unhappy with the company running the LinuxPPC site, etc.
  • LinuxPPC consists of two things:
    1. community and linuxppc.org site
    2. sales, etc. from which companies make donations to LinuxPPC
  • the request is for SPI to handle donations, etc.

Wichert needs to be involved in this discussion to enable SPI to decide how to act.

Membership report

Nils says that not much has happened since the last meeting. Craig Small has received comments on the site, but has been on vacation and not able to do much with it. He said that he should have time to work on it in the next week. Martin Michlmayr has also been helping with the site (feeding patches and comments to Craig and testing) and is also interested in helping to administer it.

Powers of the President

The Board had a discussion about what the powers of the President should be. The intent was to define these powers so that the President can act quickly in certain situations where such action is needed.

The President and other officers of SPI are responsible for the day to day operations of the organization and can delegate issues to other members of the organization as needed. The Board of directors oversees the actions of the President. Major decisions on SPI policies should be Board decisions. Issues involving larger sums of money (greater than ~$US 250.00) and other SPI assets should be discussed with the Board before being decided on.

Board Membership Voting discussion

Nils had posted some thoughts of how Board elections should work, etc. after the last meeting.

Two questions Nils raised were already answered in the bylaws:

The directors to be chosen for the ensuing year shall be chosen at the annual meeting of this organization in the same manner and style as the officers of this organization and they shall serve for a term of three years. ...

Two-thirds of the members of the Board of Directors shall constitute a quorum and the meetings of the Board of Directors shall be held regularly on the first of July each year. ...

Branden mentioned that he thought that an attendance policy would be a good idea to implement. Others agreed. Manoj noted that it should not be too strict since everyone has other engagements as well.

After a discussion, it was decided that the voting discussion is better tabled until SPI has a membership. Shareholder voting systems could serve as good examples for SPI Board membership voting.

Set date for next meeting

Most people are available on Mondays. The consensus was to try having monthly meetings and to keep them short if possible.

The next SPI Board meeting is set for Monday August 6 2001 at 18:00 UTC

Meeting ended Tue Jul 10 20:18:18 UTC 2001