As one of its tasks, the current board is looking into decisions and meeting minutes taken in the past that were not yet published according to our statutes. What follows are previously private minutes from the 2023-05-15 meeting of the previous board, which are now made public. Some elements in the minutes might be redacted as there is a need for confidentiality, or as individuals are mentioned in specific contexts.
Disclaimer: The following private minutes from the previous board are published as is. They have not necessarily been confirmed by the respective session’s chairperson or keeper of the minutes, nor approved by the respective board.
1. Status Report: Organize next in-person BoD meeting (Gabor Kelemen, Florian Effenberger, 5 mins)
Proposal: Gabor would like to organize the next in-person BoD meeting to make progress on various legal/budget/etc. issues sometime between April-June in Budapest. Invite interested MC members as well, as they have expressed motivation to help; also for a bit of transparency. Location would be Budapest, one or the other co-working space.
Questions to discuss: what would be some potentially important topics and their deadlines? We can then choose an exact date a bit before those.
Potential result: timely resolution of urgent, important issues where external factors put us into time pressure.
Status from last call: Gabor setup a poll with Florian (with weekends that work locally)
Poll: [REDACTED: link for board and MC only]
- where we are there? (Thorsten)
- form was filled - two possible dates
- 5 votes for June 17th/18th - but Gabriel has a hard conflict
- 5 votes for July 8/9 too - with issues for Ayhan - perhaps he can join remotely?
- let’s try July 8/9, gives most in-person attendance
- difficult for Ayhan to travel (Cor)
- can’t change for 17/18 june (Gabriel)
- can start to look into venues tomorrow (Gabor)
- should we declare that the formal board meeting? (Thorsten)
- formal meeting better for LibOCon (Florian)
- not a good idea to meet before pressing things solved (Paolo)
- I see no members of the MC invited, so what is the point of it?
- If there is anything urgent…
- happy to invite MC, some have beeing interested (Thorsten)
- AI thorsten invite MC members
- not even an agenda for the meeting, where is the point? (Paolo)
- have to start somewhere - find the date, then decide on agenda (Thorsten)
- no doubt that we can fill that weekend with useful agenda items
- certainly we have any lack facetime for bandwith to sort things out
- all conventional wisdom tells if you have difficult problems, meet in person
- so I’d like to proceed - of course that’s a board decision
- really my experience, also with this board, that when you meet in person it helps to understand and make progress (Cor)
- huge pile of things to work on, either procedural or how we come along as board team members
- having MC there is fine
- this week I want again to dive into details of the consultant report
- I’m sure they propose to have some face time with us
- and looking at procedural stuff and how we can learn together is amazingly important
- in favor for a in person meeting with as much people as possible including you, Paolo, so I hope you can think about it again
- most valuable if all opinions are present (Thorsten)
- the point is there is something items been discussed before, I don’t see the point (Paolo)
- then there is experience from LiboCon Fosdem that is not encouraging
- there is a lot of talk, I even read the minutes from Berlin, but actually in the end the things went the opposite way
- would like focusing on fixing the urgent things we have
- in regards to [REDACTED: name of external communication consultant] waiting for full answers
- which could allow us to actually learn something from it
- because at the moment it is not worth the money of the paper you can print it on
- each of us can interpret things in the way they want
- I like to have things clear this is exactly what went wrong, this is exactly why we thing that the results or in a way the board sought their way and this is how we understand the decision was taken because all the evidence I see actually doesn’t inspire me to trust how things went
- let me propose to have now a fixed the date for meeting, next: budget, travel booking (Thorsten)
- to handle with Gabor and Florian
- let’s have a quick vote, to agree on time and location
- motion: meet in budapest, July 8/9 - 5 out of six, approved
- lets vote on budget once sum is known
2. Status Report, Discuss: TDF 2023 Budget Planning (tdf-board, 50 mins)
Update on budget, new items, continue planning from FOSDEM in-person meeting
Current budget draft:
- [REDACTED: board-ony link]
Current budget process & howto:
-
[REDACTED: board-ony link]
-
sent last week document early 2020 (Florian)
- have to file to Berlin
- have to give it to auditor
- audit is due end Aug
- do not desperatley big budget
recording started now (16:21 UTC / !8:21)
- explaining budget sheet ‘Cost Overview 2023 as of Jan 1st’ (Florian)
- doing some adjustement pro rata for 2023
- some backlog to tackle around procedures etc (Cor)
- so some more budget seems wise
- jump to projects (Florian)
- budget for more that we need
- 1 million free reserve
- collect more ‘last minute’ items within the next week
- good to have some headlines in the budget, break down in detail to show that information where needed (Cor)
- let’s aim for next week (Florian)
- we are massively late, lets get this finished (Thorsten)
- still waiting for ESC
- ten more days needed (end of May) for ideas collection
- let’s see with what ESC comes up (Florian)
- wrt the decidim project: if we want to continue with that we would need a complete new design (Emiliano)
- we now not that decidim is not right for us
- not sure if we should continues, maybe put it again in the pool…
- would like to continue, maybe on a different name (Thorsten)
- let’s call it community tooling (Emiliano)
- point is find people that can be responsible for the project
- personally not sure I have the time
- team able to take decidim topic over? (Thorsten)
- will ask Sophie (Florian)
- proposing some merge into one item (Emiliano)
- we’re actually fixing stuff would be a nice story to tell that we are actually investing in that (Florian)
- [REDACTED: two lines of sensitive discussion]
- the votes to get the external consultancy actually tell a different story, so that we would tell the auditor another story, so that is not the truth (Paolo)
- not my decision to make what to put in the budget (florian)
- there is not at all an issue if you write that you have external consultancy for topics that you want support with as a board (Cor)
- that is only normal and something that you ought to do as a board if things are difficult
- and if you look at situation in why we ended up with external expert at a certain issue, it is apparently that explaining five, six times how things actually were, wasn’t enough.
- and in that situation we decided to learn to continue as a board to find external communication expertise and happily extended that what we can learn more to more generic what can we learn…
- think we have sufficiently discussed that (Thorsten)
- [REDACTED: sensitive statement]
- I disagree (Paolo)
- that’s fine; absolutely OK to agree to disagree (Thorsten)
- budget could be ready by next week? (Thorsten)
- clean up old projects, have a clear cut
- merge a bit proposals (Florian)
- can’t predict what auditor will ask for
- could to prepare upfront (Thorsten)
- merge hardware, infra (Florian)
- legal items too
- deadline May 28
- wrt. ESC, if there are no eligible new proposals (Thorsten)
- ESC could then make a quick decision end of May
- but let’s plan with early June in any case
- q. wrt to vote to change permissions and so on (Paolo)
- [REDACTED: name of lawyer or law firm] said things should change
- Cor seems to say these things would have to change after the vote in October?
- what I wrote is that with the proposal that is out now we would immediately proceed after the vote with items 1 and 2 (Cor)
- was also discussed earlier
- so no blocker in the proposal to move forward with budget
- to say it very clear; I hope that helps
- need to specify and have a clear answer, 1 and 2 will be implemented after this current vote (in 72 hours) not the vote planned in October (Paolo)
- answer is: Yes (Cor)
- sth in the existing projects that make no more sense? (Florian)
- ok to go on with [REDACTED: name of lawyer or law firm]'s procedure? (Thorsten)
- seems fine & reviewed (Florian)
- let’s have it in tomorrow’s team call (Florian)
- will report back then
- ESC tends to happening regardless of public holidays (Thorsten)
- would be great to have answer by Wednesday, which projects are stale
- emergency procedure mentioned (Paolo)
- following [REDACTED: name of lawyer or law firm]: time for proposals could be shortened (Thorsten)
- fine with 15 days period (Florian)
- fine by me for the moment
3. Discuss: Last minute item(s) (tdf-board, 5 mins)
Rationale: if there is time left, and anything is popping up after sending the agenda
- some urgent last minute matter? (Thorsten)
- none, meeting is adjourned
The private meeting ends at 17:03 UTC / 19:03 Berlin time.