Hi all--

     Thanks to those of you who have submitted agenda item suggestions!
(See [1].)  Please keep them coming!

     The Squeak Foundation board meets online for one hour on the first
and third Wednesday of each month. At the 2006-11-01 meeting, Bert,
Craig, Tim and Yoshiki attended; Cees and Marcus were absent.

***

     There were three action items from the previous meeting.

1.   Craig will prepare a tentative official contributor list and make
     it available to the community and to Viewpoints.

     I have compiled all the contributor information mentioned on
squeak-dev into a set of objects. I periodically get the objects to
print themselves on [2]. Please do check that list and let me know of
any corrections or additions. Note the intent is to mention only people
who have at least one method in any Squeak release. I intend to make the
objects themselves available soon, stay tuned.

     Special thanks to Jecel Assumpção Jr., Ken Causey, Stephane
Ducasse, Göran Krampe, Pavel Krivanek, John McIntosh, Andreas Raab, and
many other individual contributors for their help!

     I would like to emphasize that, while it is apparently the intent
of Viewpoints Research Institute to use an Apache-style license for
their OLPC project software, the Squeak Foundation board has not yet
decided the license of any future Squeak release. The current license
("Squeak-L") would seem to be the default, but we know from previous
community discussions that there is a great deal of support for an
MIT-style license, and there are other options (e.g., APSL). Personally,
I think that we ought to look at the Apache license very closely and
consider the possibilities; I haven't done this myself yet.

2.   Craig will make a call for volunteers for the release team.

     I made a call for release team volunteers on 2006-10-06. So far
there have been... zero volunteers. :)  If you've held off volunteering
because you were wondering who else might volunteer, please just
volunteer. :)  We decided that the timeout for release team volunteers
after the first call will be two months (some thought one month wasn't
long enough). So, we intend to decide who the release team is by the end
of the 2006-12-06 board meeting.

     There seems to be a very real possibility that we will still have
no volunteers at that point. We decided that, if that happens, we will
cancel the 3.10 release and move on to 4.0. Apart from being merely
pragmatic, this might motivate a few people :).

3.   Cees will make another gentle reminder to Jochen about the wiki
     move.

     Cees wasn't at the meeting, so we postponed this item.

***

     The meeting had seven agenda items.

1.   What shall we do about the upcoming loss of the Georgia Tech swiki?
2.   How shall we ensure reliable access to the Squeak website and our
     other servers?

     We deferred these items because Cees wasn't there.

3.   How shall we become independent from ESUG?

     I suggested that we incorporate the Squeak Foundation as a
non-profit corporation, so that people can make tax-free donations to
it. I mentioned that I had found a law firm that would (for about USD
1500) guide us through the process of both incorporation and obtaining
501(3)(c) status with the US IRS. Others recalled that Cees thought it
would be better to incorporate in Europe, but weren't sure of his details.

     None of us knew whether it was possible for a single corporation
(with any country of origin) to accept donations that were tax-free for
donors of all countries. I mentioned that this is probably the sort of
thing that the aforementioned law firm would know. I mentioned that we
might very end up wanting to establish multiple entities in different
regions. We agreed it would be best to have unanimous board agreement on
this issue, and that we would discuss it further via email.

4.   How should the community support the release and harvesting
     process? Stef suggests establishing test and build servers.
5.   Matt asks that we consider declaring a documentation policy, in
     which each SqueakMap package has at least a minimal usage
     description, a la the TalkBack package.

     We deferred these items because time was running short.

6.   How shall we create an archive of board meeting notes and team
     progress reports?

     We decided to just put these things on a passworded wiki page (much
like minnow operates now), and deal with whatever vandalism occurs.

7.   What shall we do with regard to merchandising?

     We ran out of time and deferred this item.

***

     The action items from this meeting were:

1.   Craig will make a second call for release team volunteers.
2.   Craig will make the contributor objects available in addition to
     the textual summary.
3.   The board will discuss incorporation further via email.
4.   Craig will create a tree of passworded wiki pages for board meeting
     notes and team status reports.
5.   Cees will make another gentle reminder to Jochen about the wiki
     move.

***

     Currently, the next agenda is tentatively:

1.   What shall we do about the upcoming loss of the Georgia Tech swiki?
2.   How shall we ensure reliable access to the Squeak website and our
     other servers?
3.   How shall we incorporate?
4.   Ken Causey suggests that someone from the board help guide
     discussion on squeak-dev (e.g., the recent Morphic/eToys threads;
     see [1]).
5.   How should the community support the release and harvesting
     process? Stephane Ducasse suggests establishing test and build
     servers.
6.   Matt asks that we consider declaring a documentation policy, in
     which each SqueakMap package has at least a minimal usage
     description, a la the TalkBack package.
7.   What shall we do with regard to merchandising?


     thanks!

-C

[1] http://people.squeakfoundation.org/article/64.html
[2] http://netjam.org/squeak/contributors

--
Craig Latta
http://netjam.org/resume