board actions from VisCom

[Michael P. Gerlek]

Frank:

>From this morning's meeting, three requested actions for the board:


(1) Review VisCom's trademark usage guidelines
(http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/TrademarkGuidelines) and take one of
the following actions:

  - approve as-is to be official OSGeo policy
  - return to VisCom with minor semantic changes requested
  - return to VisCom with major semantic changes requested

Note that VisCom plans to to significantly improve the FAQ
(http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/TrademarkFAQ), but keep within the
policies in the main document (and inherited from Mozilla).


(2) Resolve the long-standing "TM" question -- specifically, should we
obtain formal trademark status for key OSGeo branding elements?  VisCom
is in favor of doing this.  This action may require moderate expense and
use of a lawyer, but it out of VisCom's scope.  We suggest three
trademark items:

  - the name "The Open Source Geospatial Foundation"
  - the name "OSGeo"
  - the compass logo

Note: it is not clear if the word "THE" is in our formal full name or
not.  VisCom needs to know this, to get our trademark guidelines
document correct.  Someone, probably a legal person, would know this.

Note: depending on the disposition of item (3) below, our actual logo
might need undergo some small changes before we formally register it.


(3) Approve our request for $7200 for logo and branding work,
http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/LogoProposal.  Note that if we are going
to do (2), then the logo rework will include addition of a (TM) to it.


Thanks.

-mpg