Minutes, November 8, 2007

Present: Jon Stahl, Darci Hanning, Geir Baekholt, Steve McMahon, Alex Limi, Nate Aune, Joel Burton

Absent: Toby Roberts

 

Darci called the meeting to order at 12:05 PST.

Jon reported that he has not received meeting minutes from the previous meeting from Joel yet; we'll deal with approving those minutes in the future.

 

Officer reports

President: nothing to report.

Secretary: Foundation section re-updated.  Planning to do a bit more work on re-writing core docs/FAQ.

Treasurer: none

 

Committee reports

 

Membership (Geir)

Got in touch with Godefroid, was suprised (and excited) about the board's new "hands-on" approach.  Godefroid expressed his commitment to re-jumpstarting the membership approval process.  He has promised a recommendation list of prospective members for the next board meeting, and has presented the current queue & his personal current recommendations.

Reminder: member approval process - membership committee should present a list to the board for approval of each member.

SteveM: make sure we check "non-members" to make sure they aren't in that state accidentally and that all communication loops have been closed.

Darci and Geir will work to further clarify the membership approval process we expect, and to present a process to the membership committee in for discussion in two weeks.


Trademark/IP Committee (Geir)

Question: Any outstanding tasks, any funding needed?

Geir has spoken to Xavier, who has emailed the board with the current state of trademark status.  Most countries are now secured; we are waiting on China, will likely be pending until 2009.  We have an outstanding invoice from Zea Partners for their work on the trademark process.  Eventually, we will likely have to pay ~EUR1000 for China trademark approval when it comes.

Alex & Joel reported on a potential trademark infringement from a commercial software company.  We will soon need to decide what action to take, we are awaiting legal advice on our options.

 

Marketing Committee

Doesn't exist yet (again).  Needs to be restarted.
 

 

Old Business

Bylaws workteam (Joel)

No action yet.  Expect to move forward for next meeting

 

Invoices (Toby)

1) Trademark transfer invoice from ZEA Partners

Darci moved to approve payment

Joel seconded

Approved unanimously


2) Transfer donated funds from Soros to Abstract Open Systems for conference sponsorship

Jon moved to approve payment

Darci seconded

Approved unanimously

Jon will notify Toby about both of these decisions

 

 

New Business

Clarification of foundation mission (Jon)

Jon made a motion to reaffirm that the mission of the Plone Foundation is to protect and promote Plone.

Darci seconded.

Approved unanimously.

 

Zope 2 on Python 2.5 (Nate + Geir)

Zope Foundation, via Martijn Faassen approached us expressing their general desire to work in closer collaboration with us.   Geir reported that we haven't been able to figure out what the proejct/nexus of such a collaboration would be.   Martijn was interested in exploring the idea of working together to get Zope 2 running on Python 2.5.

Geir & Jon reported that Geir, Wichert, Martin & Jon has done some preliminary work on a process for administering a community-driven bounty process.

Joel suggested that we could try to test-drive the community bounty process around a Zope-on-Python 2.5 project.

Cost of such a Zope-2-on-Python-2.5 project is at this point unknown, but there is a person who has done this for Zope 3 during Google Summer of Code 2007, and has expressed interest in doing so for Zope 2.

We agreed that Zope 2 on Python 2.5 is a strategic outcome we'd be interested in pursuing collaboratively with the Zope Foundation, and that Geir/Nate would communicate that to Martijn.  We will discuss the state of our bounty program proposal at the next board meeting, and how it might be adapted to serve such a project.  (Nate, Geir, Jon)

 

Plone.net Sponsorship Plan (Jon)

Jon presented the outline of Paul Everitt's draft sponsorship plan for Plone.net.

The board discussed informally, offered some input to Jon, who agreed to write up a more formal draft for the next board meeting. 

 

Marketing (Nate)

Deferred to next meeting because we ran out of time, and this topic deserves to not be rushed.
 

 

Next meeting

Next scheduled meeting is Thanksgiving Day in US (11/22).  Next meeting will be Thursday 11/29 and subsequent meetings will shift from there.

Meeting adjourned at 1:01pm.