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.

***

     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.

***

     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.

***

     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