Minutes, July 9th 2009

Minutes of the Plone Foundation Board of Directors

Jon called the meeting to order at 12:10pm PDT

Housekeeping

Attendance

Attending: Nate, Jon, Alex, Matt
Absent: Darci,  Steve (excused), Geir (excused)
Advisory Members Attending: Roberto, Mark, Xavier

Minutes for June 25, 2009

Jon moved, Matt seconded.
Unanimously approved

Business items

Welcoming new advisory board member Xavier Heymans

No action

Conference Update - Logo

Alex: Logo issue (compliance with branding) is under control, he is communicating with Balasz

Conference Update - Programme Committee (Matt)

Matt to lead this, several people already confirmed, several others to be invited. Need to get site up and running to accept proposals for talks.
Jon: Noted not to waste too much time getting software setup
Matt: Balasz has suggested a couple of ideas, including re-using pycon system.

 

Grants Commitee (Jon)

Team to be formed to deal with this, currently going to be Jon, Balasz, Eva Foldari.  Need some other people, esp people who know Europeans a bit more.
Jon: asked if anyone else from the Board wanted to be involved in this.
Alex: voluneered to help out.
Nate: provisionally said he could be involved if necessary, but quite busy right now
Jon: to approach some more people.

Call will be going out in the next couple of weeks. Hope to review applications end of August, start of Sept.

 

Update on EU work (Xavier)


ZEA started 2002 to focus on large opportunities to fund the development of the technology and have impact on whole ecosystem. The goal of the proposal is to fund evolution of the community and to help with 'sub-committees' such as CommunesPlone.

This particular call happens every 2 years. Xavier started work on it about 2 years ago. Has been very difficult to get attention and move forward. Xavier had to just start on the proposal to get things started. The call is in two phases: first phase we got a very high rating on. This week Xavier got notification we failed to be accepted on the second phase, which means we won't get funding this year, but may do next year. Xavier says that those that evaluated the proposal did not fully understand Open Source, and that some of the feedback from them reflected this. They also had only short time for improvement from Universities on the project who only had a few hours, rather than a few weeks to look at it prior to submission.

Xavier thinks we have a better chance at dealing with this call, versus some other calls. Xavier says we need to work as a team and we need to get more people involved, as Xavier was main person on last project and did most of the work. Xavier will find out about the next call and should find out about it in September, and will then start to contact people to get together a team.

Discussion about ideas to get people together to work on this. Matt suggested sprints on it. Jon suggested it as an Open Space session at the Plone Conference, then maybe sprint on it afterwards. Matt suggested inviting experts in doing these proposals to the conference for Open Space session. Xavier will ask them. Xavier says we need some help with funding for the proposals, maybe not the PF itself, but maybe other organisations. Jon suggested maybe the OSI could help. Xavier wants introduction to people in Budapest, Jon suggested he contacted Balasz directly. Matt suggested we get an area on plone.org to put all the info on this.

Month in Plone

Mark: called for any more material for next issue
All: last issue was great

 

Adjourned at 12:55pm PDT