OpenID Foundation/Board/Minutes/2007-12-20
Present:
- Bill Washburn
- David Recordon
- Scott Kveton
- Martin Atkins
- Drummond Reed
- Dick Hardt
Apologies:
- Artur Bergman
- Johannes Ernst
Contents |
Agenda
- General business (minutes, finance update, etc)
- Vote on final IPR policy
- Committee reports - Finance, trademark and
- Vote on conflict of interest and anti-trust policies
General Business
The minutes of the previous meeting were approved on the condition that the subsequent edits are incorporated.
There was nothing of interest to report on the financial front.
Board Member Resumes
Scott reminded everyone that the board members need to submit a brief resume as part of the incorporation of the foundation.
These are to be sent to Bill.
Final IPR Policy
It was agreed that although the content of the IPR policies is good, there may still be some work to do to improve the clarity of the documents. With that in mind, the following motion was proposed:
Motion 1: We approve the IPR document as they are now. We will continue in the IPR commitee to improve the clarity and ease of understanding of the document and put that document up for a vote by the membership at the first membership vote.
Proposed by Dick. Seconded by Martin.
Motion passed unanimously. Several people said "Woohoo".
Voting
It was proposed by Dick that there be a set schedule for voting -- for example, quarterly -- which will give people a timeline to work to when they are making proposals that will require a vote. It was acknowledged that the board would still be able to call ad-hoc votes when necessary, should an issue be considered too important to wait until the next general voting period.
It is expected that this would caused people to join and thus renew their memberships on a roughly quarterly basis, which may make the foundation's income more predictable.
There was some agreement on this issue, but the board did not feel that it was ready to vote on this issue yet.
Finance/Membership
It was noted that we are unlikely to be able to get assistance with the membership system on the website until mid-January. In the mean time, we are likely to need a manual process to get started, using invoices for corporate members and PayPal (or a similar system) for individuals.
In mid- to late-January we will move to streamline this with an online, automated system.
There was some concern that the overhead of running this manually might dwarf the income it produces, especially with the smaller contributions expected from individuals. Bill expressed confidence that it should only take a few minutes to process each application, which reassured the board.
Scott and Bill took on the action item to persue possible additional suppliers for work relating to the OpenID and the foundation websites, to enable work to move faster.
Year End
Motion 2: Make our Year End March 31st.
Motion passed unanimously.
Membership Calendar
It was proposed that when someone joins for a year they get the quarter in which they join plus the following three quarters. There was some discussion about a grace period for renewals, though since this is not going to come up for at least a year it was decided to leave this discussion for later.
The implication of this arrangement is that anyone who joins this month would be a member until March 31st 2009. Renewal invoices for these members will ideally be sent out in Jan 2009, so that they have a whole quarter to pay to retain their membership.
Motion 3: Membership runs on a quarterly basis.
Proposed by Dick. Seconded by Scott. Passed unanimously.
Trademark Policy
Johannes' absense from this meeting meant that a detailed report was not possible. However, the following motion was made.
Motion 4: We must finish the Trademark policy ASAP.
Proposed by Dick. Seconded by Drummond. Passed unanimously.
Johannes will be asked to to lead this effort.
Marketing
The board acknowledged that while the website is better than it once was, it could still stand to be improved.
Following on from the earlier membership discussion, there was agreement that we should persue suppliers that will be able to help us to implement the website-related proposals that will ultimately arise from the Marketing committee.
Conflict of Interest/Anti-trust Policies
Motion 5: Approve the Conflict of Interest and Anti-trust Policies that were sent to the board-private list by Bill
Proposed by Scott. Seconded by Drummond. Passed unanimously.
Press Release for CES
There was a discussion about the possibility of making an announcement about the membership of several large companies in the foundation at the forthcoming Consumer Electronics Show.
Rather than rushing into this, there was some agreement that it would be better to wait until we're ready to make an annoucement properly. For the moment, the aim is to make an announcement in February, which has the advantage that the list of new members will hopefully be larger by then.
Initial Members and Corporate Board Seats
The board feels that it is now appropriate to solicit the memberships with corporate board seats.
Motion 6: Bill has permission to go out and close such a deal with up to five organisations. If there's any individual conditions to them joining they will be reviewed with either Scott or Dick.
Proposed by Dick. Seconded by Drummond. Passed unanimously.
Next Meeting
The next meeting will be on 17th Jan at 19:00 UTC (11:00am Pacific Time).
This meeting will involve round-up reports for all of the active committees.
