2006-12-06 SqF board notes

Hi all--

     The Squeak Foundation board meets online for one hour on the first
and third Wednesday of each month. Thanks again to those of you who have
submitted agenda item suggestions[1]. Please keep them coming!

     In particular, please submit an agenda item when you want the board
to state a position on some issue. In general, it's unlikely that
everyone on the board will see and discuss a position request in a
squeak-dev message. Also be aware that we may defer some issues to teams.

     Please note we think it's inappropriate for the board to be used as
ammunition in squeak-dev debates. Ideally, no one should need to appeal
to authority to make a point; it should stand on its merits. We realize
that occasionally we'll have to settle disputes, but we hope we can stay
focused on running the foundation.

     At the 2006-12-06 meeting, Bert, Craig, Marcus, Tim, and Yoshiki
attended; Cees was absent.

***

     This meeting had nine agenda items.

1.   Review previous action items.

          There were two action items from the previous meeting.

     1.1. Craig will get a quote from Foundation Group for incorporating
          the Squeak Foundation in the United States and obtaining
          tax-exempt status for it.

          Foundation Group[2] charges USD 250 for incorporation, not
     including possible state filing fees, and USD 950 for obtaining
     federal tax-exempt status, not including possible IRS and state
     filing feels. The Squeak Foundation currently has EUR 3000; we
     decided to allocate USD 1500 toward incorporation. I have begun a
     discussion with Foundation Group. Marcus will transfer money to me
     so that I can pay expenses.

     1.2. Craig will create a tree of passworded wiki pages for board
          meeting notes and team status reports.

          I haven't done this yet, but have started talking to Brad from
     the web team about editing squeakfoundation.org.

2.   Decide the release team membership.

     We have decided that Ralph Johnson shall lead the 3.10 release
team. We encourage him to choose two others, for a three-person team.

3.   How shall we make future contributors aware their submissions must
     be made available under the terms of the MIT license?

     We decided that the contribution mechanism shall present the
contributor with a notice that contributions must be made available
under the terms of the MIT license, and that the contributor must
acknowledge the notice. For example, SqueakMap could present a dialog
box with this information that the contributor may either accept or cancel.

     While we may suggest further action later, we suspect this will
suffice for creating awareness. Our legal licensing obligations,
however, will most likely go beyond this (e.g., written statements on
file). Stay tuned for that process.

4.   How shall we ensure reliable access to the Squeak website and our
     other servers?

     We anticipate allocating some money to Cees and the box-admins team
to make this happen. He wasn't at this meeting, though, so we deferred it.

5.   How should the community support the release and harvesting
     process? Stephane Ducasse suggests establishing test and build
     servers.
6.   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.

     We decided to delegate both of these to the release team, expecting
that the documentation issue may get delegated again to the
documentation team.

7.   What shall we do with regard to merchandising?

     The Squeak pins that Tim had made a few years ago were a big hit;
we're interested in making more. Tim will see if the company that made
them is still around and how much they charge. We're also considering
what we can get made from CafePress. And we're open to suggestions!

8.   List current action items.

     This meeting had three action items.

     8.1. Marcus will transfer USD 1500 to Craig for incorporation
          expenses.

     8.2. Craig will continue the incorporation process.

     8.3. Tim will retrieve the contact info and pricing for the company
          that made the original Squeak pins.

9.   List the next meeting's agenda items.

     Currently, the next agenda is tentatively:

     9.1. Review previous action items.

     9.2. Craig will report on relicensing progress (see [3]).

     9.3. List the current action items.

     9.4. List the next meeting's agenda items.


     thanks!

-C

[1] http://people.squeakfoundation.org/article/64.html
[2] http://501c3.org
[3] http://netjam.org/squeak/contributors

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

Hi Craig -

Thanks for the update. It's great to get to see a little of what the
board is talking about. One note:

Craig Latta wrote:
> 3.   How shall we make future contributors aware their submissions must
>      be made available under the terms of the MIT license?
>
>      We decided that the contribution mechanism shall present the
> contributor with a notice that contributions must be made available
> under the terms of the MIT license, and that the contributor must
> acknowledge the notice. For example, SqueakMap could present a dialog
> box with this information that the contributor may either accept or cancel.

One possibility is to make the cut at the (Monticello) repository level.
For example, the repository at

   http://hedgehog.software.umn.edu:8888/PublicContribs.html

says explicitly that "Code placed here must be made availalbe under the
Croquet license, and will be considered for inclusion in the main
distribution."

Cheers,
   - Andreas

Repositories are probably a better mechanism - licensing problems are
easy to prevent at development time, hard to untangle anytime later
(such as SM publication).

We would also need something like this on Mantis, since people post
fixes there.

Daniel

Andreas Raab wrote:

Hi all!

Andreas wrote:
The MC repo for base Squeak (http://source.squeakfoundation.org) should
definitely have such a display - and any other repo which hosts snapshots
intended for base Squeak inclusion should (which of course is a good
reason for keeping down the number of repos for that purpose).

Regarding SqueakMap - it needs to be more refined than the board notes
says.  If the registrator picks a non MIT license we could put up a
display explaining that it will invalidate the package for base Squeak
inclusion. Perhaps that was what the board meant.

...and as Daniel says, Mantis needs a Big Fat display since that would
proabably be the place where small, hard-to-track-and-trace-contributions
will be made.

regards, Göran