[ZF] BoD meeting minutes 2009-05-20

[Jens Vagelpohl]

The following meeting minutes are available online at:

  http://foundation.zope.org/minutes/zfbod-minutes-20090520

Jens Vagelpohl
Secretary, Zope Foundation Board of Directors

---

Minutes of a Meeting of the Board of Directors
==============================================

Date and Time: Wednesday, May 20, 2009 14:00 UTC
Location: IRC meeting, irc://irc.freenode.net/#zope-foundation
Directors Present:
- Faassen, Martijn
- Jung, Andreas
- Page, Rob
- Richter, Stephan
- Seaver, Tres
- Theune, Christian
- Vagelpohl, Jens


Agenda
------

- Call to order
- Operational issues
     - use of a CRM for committer or membership tracking
     - A ZF dedicated fax nr?
- Financial report
     - any dues not yet paid?
     - what about members who paid but had no new agreement yet?
     - Non-Profit status
- Committer members transfer
     - Transfer of existing contributor forms to secretary
     - Gathering of existing committer member data from svn.zope.org
     - Transfer of existing committer members
     - Another signover of copyright for "limbo time"?
- Repo committee
     - New committers since last meeting
     - Improvements to the procedure for new committers
     - Changing the copyright attribution in the repo to the foundation
- Membership
     - New members since last meeting
     - Sponsor member signup procedure
- Zope branding issues
- Next meeting


Call to Order
-------------
The chairman calls the meeting to order at 14:02 UTC.


Operational issues
------------------
Rob Page and Jens Vagelpohl had been looking at a hosted version of
SugarCRM for membership management and are both in favor of using
it for the Zope Foundation. After a brief discussion about the pros
and cons of using a CRM system it is decided to evaluate it for its
membership tracking abilities first and foremost. Tres Seaver and
Stephan Richter volunteer to ask personal contacts of theirs for
low-cost access to salesforce.com as a second CRM evaluation
candidate. The chairman moves that if there is no progress on
salesforce.com access the Zope Foundation will sign up for a
SugarCRM account, which is approved by the board.

Presently, the Zope Foundation and Zope Corporation share a fax
number. Rob Page suggests that the ZF sign up for their own Fax
number, feeding into the foundation-info at zope.org list. The board
votes to purchase a ZF fax-to-email account, which Rob puts into
action during the meeting. The new fax number is +1 (703) 842-8076.


Financial report
----------------
The treasurer Rob Page reports that there has not been a recent
cross-check of sponsor member applications versus incoming payments,
and promises to send out such a report before the next meeting.

The non-profit application appears to have moved forward. There has
been no official IRS notification, but they finally did accept
the ZF non-profit tax return, which they never did before. This is
seen as an indicator of positive progress for the application.


Committer members transfer
--------------------------
Rob states that the existing committer agreements have not yet
been sent to the secretary since he is in the progress of scanning
them so Zope Corporation retains a record, which they need for the
copyright transfer.

The secretary points out that he has a script ready to pull current
committer data directly from the svn.zope.org server. This list of
addresses can then be used to email every committer and ask them to
sign the new committer agreement. The process for committer transfer
is outlined as below by the chair and voted in unanimously:

- Tres Seaver will send a reminder email to the developer lists
   asking committers to ensure their membership information on the
   zope.org website is current since it feeds the LDAP backend.
   Tres actually sent this mail during the meeting.

- Jens Vagelpohl will send the actual email asking committers
   to send in a new signed committer agreement during the last
   week in May, including a cut-off date by which those who have
   not sent in a new agreement will be barred from checking code
   into the Zope Foundation repositories. The deadline for
   sending in new agreements is set to June 17. The cut-off
   date for removing write access for unresponsive committers
   is set to June 26.

- Before the cut-off date the board will compare the previous
   committer membership with the group that sent in new agreements
   to detect unresponsive members and try to reach them again.
   This is planned for June 19.

- as the last step, unresponsive members are cut off after
   June 26.

Once the transfer is complete, the Zope Foundation and Zope
Corporation will execute another copyright transfer to cover
those code contributions that came in after the first transfer
but before the committer transfer, since legally those
contributions' copyright went to Zope Corporation again.


Repo committee
--------------
Christian Theune has no new committers to report about since he
could not get the information from Jim Fulton in time.

In order to improve committer application handling, Andreas Jung
had prepared a draft approval policy document, located at
https://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dg94xjw3_54cdgrwvg5&hl=en. The
chairman moves to accept the draft, which the board approves
unanimously. Andreas will polish the document and store it on
the ZF website. He will also update the "how to become a
contributor" document on docs.zope.org to reflect the content of
this document (along with a link to it).


Membership
----------
Jens Vagelpohl reports that three new Nominated Members have
joined the Foundation since the last meeting. They are Julien
Anguenot, Eric Casteleijn, and Wolfgang Schnerring. There is a
pending sponsor member application from GFU Cyrus AG in Germany,
which the treasurer announces have paid in full. They will be
added to the membership roster as well.

Several board members note that the ZF website does not have
much information about becoming a sponsor member. Rob Page
volunteers to make improvements to the signup page.


Zope branding issues
--------------------
Following up on several discussions on Zope-related developer lists,
the chair announces the state of discussions he has had with Jim
Fulton and Stephan Richter about the perceived branding issues
regarding Zope, Zope 3 and the new Zope Toolkit. They plan on
reducing some of the confusion by announcing that the Zope 3 brand
will be mostly subsumed by the Zope Toolkit brand. In response to
concerns that the current websites need adjustments to reflect this
new policy, the chairman will round up people to help make the
necessary updates.


Adjournment
-----------
The chairman asks the vice chairman to solicit suggestions and
opinions for the next meeting date. The results will be announced
on foundation-board at zope.org once they are ready.

The chairman adjourns the meeting at 15:11 UTC.

These minutes were written by the secretary, Jens Vagelpohl,
according to the notes taken during the meeting.

These minutes were posted to the foundation-board at zope.org mailing
list and approved by all directors on May 25, 2009.

The Chairman bid the Secretary keep these minutes on file.