2006-10-04 SqF board notes

Hi all--

     Thanks to those of you who submitted agenda item suggestions! (See
[1].) We're going to start using them at the next meeting (2006-10-18).
Please keep them coming!

     The 2006-10-04 Squeak Foundation board meeting had the following
agenda:

1.   Resolve technical difficulties with meeting online.
2.   What's the current licensing status?
3.   Should we organize the community differently?
4.   How and when are release team members chosen? (It's time.)

     Bert, Craig, Marcus, Tim and Yoshiki attended, Cees was absent due
to illness.

     We had been meeting via AIM previously. While there were some
problems getting everyone together there before, it had always worked
eventually. This time, though, we were unable to get everyone in the
same conversation at once, so we had to try something else. We settled
on Skype, which seems to have the large advantages of having clients
which come from a single source and are easy to find and install.

     Unfortunately, attempting to meet via AIM, finally abandoning it,
and getting Skype downloaded, installed and working everywhere took 45
minutes of the hour that we allot to these meetings (I'm sure you all
know how that sort of thing goes :).

     Cees is currently our liaison to Dan Ravicher, the Squeak
Foundation's legal counsel. He was absent, so we deferred the licensing
item. However, as you may know, the One-Laptop-Per-Child project has
apparently received permission from Apple to use an Apache-style license
for its Squeak-derived work. We're still waiting to see some official
(and hopefully legally meaningful) announcement of this from the OLPC
project or Apple.

     I suggested that the current organizational structure (based around
teams) is probably sound, we just need to raise the priority of
community work in individuals' schedules by gently reminding team
leaders to tell us of any progress. While we reached no explicit
consensus about this (we only had a few minutes to discuss it), I as a
team/board liaison intend to ask team leaders for progress reports.

     We ran out of time before discussing the last item, and deferred it.

     The action items from this meeting were:

1.   Cees will be prepared to tell us the latest about licensing.
2.   Craig will poll the team leaders for progress reports.

     Previously-established action items are:

1.   Craig will coordinate a mapping of all author initials to people.

     Currently, the next agenda is tentatively:

1.   What's the current licensing status? How can the process be
     accelerated?
2.   How and when are release team members chosen? (It's time.)
3.   What shall we do about the upcoming loss of the Georgia Tech swiki?
4.   How shall we ensure reliable access to the Squeak website and our
     other servers?
5.   How shall we become independent from ESUG?
6.   How should the community support the release and harvesting
     process? Stef suggests establishing test and build servers.
7.   Matt asks that we consider declaring a documentation policy, in
     which each SqueakMap package has at least a minimal usage
     description, a la the TalkBack package.
8.   How shall we create an archive of board meeting notes and team
     progress reports?
9.   What shall we do with regard to merchandising?


     thanks!

-C

[1] http://people.squeakfoundation.org/article/64.html

--
Craig Latta
http://netjam.org/resume