[Board] Board of Directors meeting minutes

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

Folks,
the OSGeo Board of Directors meets once a month in a public meeting on
IRC. We then discuss the agenda which has been prepared on the OSGeo
Wiki [1]. Thanks to Gary Sherman the meetings are logged [2]. We hold
the meetings openly and every now and then somebody outside of the board
has an interjection - which can be very helpful indeed. At the last
meeting Gary Sherman suggested that we should circulate the results from
our meetings because not that many people follow the board mailing list
[3] read the minutes [4] or even the logs [5].

Currently we meet every second Thursday of a month at 17:00 UTC on IRC.
We also aim at meeting in person at least once each year, usually during
the FOSS4G conference.

One item I was explicitly asked to highlight to the broader community
relates to FOSS4G 2012 in Beijing [6]. There has been a lot of talk
about the challenges of this next edition of FOSS4G, these include
language and cultural differences, sheer physical distance of the venue
for many active OSGeo members, competing regional FOSS4G events,
including a new one very likely in North America and that we are already
very late in planning (we never had this little time to prepare).
Therefore in a mail from September [7] I voted against having FOSS4G in
Beijing but at the same time proposed a motion to hire Jeff McKenna for
money to help organize the FOSS4G 2012 in Beijing. Jeff is the chair of
the conference committee and helped organize every single FOSS4G we
have celebrated so far, so he is a perfect fit. But he cannot spend as
much time as will be required for FOSS4G in Beijing as a volunteer. The
motion was not accepted by the board and so there was no decision but
it started some thinking.

Jeff is a member of the board of directors and to avoid a conflict of
interest he will abstain from any decision as suggested here [8]. The
next step will be a proposal from Jeff describing the required work load
and budget to get going. Then the board of directors will have to decide
how to go forward – and all of this must happen asap.

You can see, this is a long ongoing process and all of it is openly
available but, as Gary pointed out, many will probably not know anything
about this.

So what do you think in general. Is this type of informative mail
enough, or should we blog about the meetings in more detail, make a
video or fully socialmedialize them? (...please bear in mind that we
will then not be able to do other stuff, so it should better be
important, not just a nice to have).  Suggestions are welcome.

Thanks,
Arnulf

[1] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Board
[2] http://irclogs.geoapt.com/osgeo/   ...starting at 17:03:02
[3] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/board
[4] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Board_Meeting_2011-11-10#Minutes
[5] http://irclogs.geoapt.com/osgeo/%23osgeo.2011-11-10.log
[6] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G_2012
[7] http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/board/2011-September/008872.html
[8] http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/board/2011-September/008894.html

-- 
The Open Source Geospatial Foundation
Arnulf Christl, President
http://www.osgeo.org