Hi all--

Thanks again to those of you who have submitted agenda item suggestions[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 2006-11-15 meeting, Bert, Cees, Craig, Marcus, and Yoshiki attended; Tim was absent.

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There were five action items from the previous meeting.

1. Craig will make a second call for release team volunteers.

I did this on 2006-11-03 (see [2]). We actually have some volunteers now! Thanks to those of you who have responded. Again, the board would like to make a decision about the release team during the 2006-12-06 meeting, so if you'd like to volunteer for the release team and haven't contacted us, please do.

2. Craig will make the contributor objects available in addition to the textual summary.

I did this on 2006-11-03 (see [3]). Since then, I've incorporated updates from Yoshiki, Kim Rose, and others. Viewpoints has prepared a contributor agreement letter; Kim is now sending it out via email to each known contributor. Watch for it!

3. The board will discuss incorporation further via email.

We didn't get to this before the meeting, but we did discuss it during the meeting. There was mention before (when Cees wasn't present) that Cees preferred incorporation in Europe for some reason. At this meeting Cees said he actually prefers US incorporation, as it provides the greatest access to tax-free donations. There was consensus on this point amongst the board. I had previously mentioned a company, Foundation Group[4] that will hold one's hand through the incorporation and US IRS 501(c)(3) processes.

We decided that I would get a quote from Foundation Group, then decide whether to engage their services. From reading their website, I expect the cost to be about USD 1500 for both incorporation and the granting of tax-exempt status. We noted that we may want to incorporate in other countries in the future (this is something I would bring up during the US incorporation process).

4. Craig will create a tree of passworded wiki pages for board meeting notes and team status reports.

I haven't done this yet.

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

Cees did this, and passed along word from Jochen that the situation will be resolved by 2006-12-31.

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The meeting had seven agenda items.

1. What shall we do about the upcoming loss of the Georgia Tech swiki?

Cees and Jochen are handling this.

2. How shall we ensure reliable access to the Squeak website and our other servers?

Cees says he can set up a fallback system in a different datacenter for about EUR 30 per month. We did not make a decision as to whether and when to go ahead with this; it's on the next agenda.

3. How shall we incorporate?

See previous action item 3 above.

4. Ken Causey suggests that someone from the board help guide discussion on squeak-dev (e.g., the recent Morphic/eToys threads; see [1]).

While we think this could be a good idea, no one on the current board has time to do this right now. We may have more to say about this later, though.

5. How should the community support the release and harvesting process? Stephane Ducasse suggests establishing test and build servers.

Cees thought this was a good idea and pointed out that we have ample server capacity for this. I suggested that coordinating this could be the responsibility of the release team. Time ran out during this discussion; we did not make a formal decision.

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?

We deferred these items.

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The action items from this meeting were:

1. Craig will get a quote from Foundation Group for incorporating the Squeak Foundation in the United States and obtaining tax-exempt status for it.

2. Craig will create a tree of passworded wiki pages for board meeting notes and team status reports.

***

Currently, the next agenda is tentatively:

1. discussion of previous action items

2. How shall we make future contributors aware their submissions must be made available under the terms of the MIT license?

3. How shall we ensure reliable access to the Squeak website and our other servers?

4. How should the community support the release and harvesting process? Stephane Ducasse 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.

6. What shall we do with regard to merchandising?

thanks!

-C

[1] http://people.squeakfoundation.org/article/64.html [2] http://tinyurl.com/y2porp (lists.squeakfoundation.org) [3] http://netjam.org/squeak/contributors [4] http://501c3.org

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