On the agenda / in the email discussion

[Jo Walsh]

dear Board, 

As I am regrettably not going to make this week's telecon, I checked
out the agenda for discussion to see what I'll be missing. 
http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Sixth_Board_Meeting
There's no new business on the agenda yet, apart from to review last
week's minutes... 

As I understand it, the telecon is a formal obligation under Delaware
law; if the Board moves to approve actions on behalf of OSGeo, that
has to be confirmed by voice "although Delaware law doesn't actually
obliged you to say, +1" :). 10-way telecons with a lot of Skype induced
echo effect are not the best environment in which to be actually
communicating. 

Someone, I think Chris, suggested, that it could make a lot more 
sense to work through what needs to be discussed via email,
and use the telecon more to confirm action with each other. 

I'd like to offer some commentary based on what came up last week, and
what's been on the Board list this week.


== Communication from the Committees ==

[[ It was resolved that the Foundation's community manager would work
to aggregate weekly written reports from each PSC highlighting
progress and issues and providing increased visibility of OSGeo
activities to the Board. ]]

* This has focused on providing "RSS feeds of Announcements" through Collabnet.
* Announcements only appear on project homepages, not sitewide.
* Collabnet doesn't provide RSS aggregation facilities anyway. 
* As a Committee chair, I haven't been approached about this yet. 

I started writing summary emails after meetings for the Public Geodata 
Committee, which are pretty informal. I'd like to suggest that all Committee 
chairs get into a practise of doing this or persuading someone else in their
Committee to. http://dev.perl.org/perl5/list-summaries/ is my model
for this, though these can get really in-depth. It makes no sense to
me to stall on communication because the tools to support it are not in place.  


== Description of OSGeo structure ==

Frank suggested on IRC that I post my attempt to summarise the 'OSGeo
Structure' discussion to the wiki. Schuyler gave it a bit of a working
over: http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/OSGeo_Constitution

This is really an ongoing attempt to provide a friendly overview of
what is expressed in the more formal governance documents at 
https://www.osgeo.org/content/foundation/about.html and also connects
to the idea of establishing a 'Social Contract' to complement the more
rigourous code contract needs that are being established in IncCom:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Proposed_Project_Submission_Process


== Exercise in sharing priorities amongst the Board ==

[[ The new members of the Board were requested to review those
priorities and further discussion was tabled until the next meeting.]]

My installation of OpenOffice is *very* uncooperative at the moment. 
For the record, here is my own sense of priorities:

* To make foundation and related software more accessible to end users
  - binary "stack" builds, cross package documentation, etc
* To encourage the implementation of open standards and
  standards-based interoperability in foundation projects.
* To provide resources for foundation projects - infrastructure,
  funding (Fundraising), legal, ...
* To promote freely available geodata - free software is useless
  without data (Public Geospatial Data Project)
* To support use and contribution to foundation projects from the
  worldwide community through internationalization of software and
  community outreach.
* To promote the use of open source software in the geospatial
  industry (not just foundation software) - PR, training, outreach,
* To encourage communication and cooperation between OSGeo communities
  on different language (ie Java/C/Python) and operating system
  (Win32, Unix, MacOS) platforms.
* To ensure a high degree of quality in foundation projects in order
  to build and preserve the foundation "brand".
* To provide support for the use of OSGeo software in education via
  curriculum development, outreach, and support (Core Curriculum
  Project).
* To operate an annual OSGeo Conference, possibly in cooperation with
  related efforts (e.g. EOGEO).
* To award the Sol Katz award for service to the OSGeo community.


My regrets again for missing the chance to talk to you all tomorrow,

best wishes,


jo