Committee/Meetings/2006 02 04/
From AnnodexFoundation
Annodex Foundation Committee Meeting Minutes
James Squire Brewhouse & Skype for James Purser
04th Feb 2006, opened: 13:18:37, closed: 15:43:24
Minutes by: Silvia Pfeiffer
Agenda:
0) Recording
1) Follow-up points from last committee meeting
2) Report on meeting with CSIRO
3) Constitution changes
4) Advisory Panel membership
5) Membership management software
6) Committee management: meetings, wiki
In Attendance:
Jeff Waugh, chair
Conrad Parker, vice-chair
James Purser, treasurer
Silvia Pfeiffer, secretary
Zen Kavanagh, ordinary member
Michael Smith, ordinary member
Andre Pang, ordinary member
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0) Recording
James asked if he could record the meeting and we all agreed.
1) Follow-up points from last committee meeting
Minutes of the last Committee meeting were accepted and published at http://annodex.org/wiki/Committee/Meetings/2005_12_20/ (locked).
ACTION: Silvia to distribute minutes to Advisory Panel
Follow-up action items:
DONE: Silvia protected Inaugural Meeting minutes
DONE: Silvia created advisory-panel@lists.annodex.net mailing list with all committee members subscribed and 2 CSIRO representatives
2) Report on meeting with CSIRO
Follow-up action item:
DONE: Jeff & Silvia met with CSIRO to discuss
DONE: Jeff & Silvia to discuss press release & CeBIT with CSIRO
Jeff and Silvia met with CSIRO business, commercial, and research managers to discuss about the relationship between CSIRO and the Annodex Foundation.
Outcomes:
- joint press release was prepared and published during Linux.Conf.Au
- the CSIRO will continue to support the Foundation with storage and bandwidth during its startup time, at minimum until the end of 2007
- the CSIRO supports a sign-over of the Annodex Trademark to the Foundation
- the CSIRO has offered to the Foundation to share a demonstration of the Annodex technologies at CeBIT 2006 in Sydney in May
- the CSIRO being a key benefactor of the foundation will have 2 representatives on the Advisory Panel
- the Foundation will perpetually credit the CSIRO as the originating organisation of the Annodex technology
- the Foundation will credit the CSIRO as a current benefactor of the Foundation
3) Constitution changes
We discussed the remaining open issues from the constitution wiki page and the action items from the last meeting.
Follow-up action items:
DONE: MikeS proposed a rephrase of the guiding principles on the mailing list, which served as basis for this discussion
DONE: Silvia added issues from meeting and from previous input to the wiki
Discussion points:
- Honorary Membership: decided to delete it from the constitution
- What consists a Quorum at the AGM?: decided to change to "5% of Foundation membership, but 5 people at minimum"
- Restrict committee membership to at most 40% from one organisation?: decided to keep this rule and not change it to "3 people"; also decided that a change of affiliation that breaks this rules requires the changing person to step down from their position
- Work over the statement of purpose: this was interactively changed directly in the wiki
- Include a statement to just work with open technologies?: while we will not endorse the use of proprietary formats, we felt it was still ok to provide support to developers using proprietary formats in combination with implementations of Annodex specifications, eg. to promote uptake, an uptake path, or interoperability.
As a side result of the discussion, we also realised that if Annodex becomes adopted widely, we will not be able to defend the Annodex Trademark, in particular if it is used as a verb ("annodexing"). However, we should consider registering a certification mark that permits us to certify conformance to vendors.
- Require contributor to sign over copyright?: for those people that are worried about legal protection in case their code provokes any infringements, we should enable them to sign over copyright (through a simple form); for everybody else it may mean an unnecessary barrier to entry if we require copyright hand-over. We decided the Foundation would not require copyright attribution from contributors.
ACTION: Silvia to adapt constitution in wiki with proposed changes
ACTION: Silvia to pursue legal incorporation
ACTION: All to discuss certification marks in one of the next meetings
4) Advisory Panel membership
We did a brainstorm about which organisation we should be approaching next for advisory panel membership and which might already be ready to become members. The following list can also be regarded as a list of organisations with whom it would be valuable to build up relationships.
Non-profits:
- Xiph.Org: ready to become member
- Wikipedia: have raised interest in hyperlinks in theora today; a first bridge has been created
- Apache
- Gnome
- Mozilla
- Creative Commons
- Archive.Org
Commercial:
- Fluendo: ready to become a member
- ABC
- BBC
- MS
- Yahoo
- Apple
- Canonical
- itconversations
ACTION: Mike to talk to Xiph.Org
ACTION: Jeff to talk to Fluendo
ACTION: Everyone to build relationships
We would offer each organisation 2 subscriptions to the Advisory Panel mailing list.
5) Membership management software
Follow-up action items:
DONE: James to include state/province entry
DONE: James to fix error messages from variable names to human readable names
DONE: James to include list of mailing lists to tick subscription for during application, with "foundation" to be checked by default
DONE: James to include a member list with names and motivations and no personal details
DONE: James to make phone numbers optional
Remaining:
ACTION: James to figure out a switch-over date & announce on the mailing list
James Purser has continued coding on the member management and election management system (applause!). It is now ready to be turned on. There needs to be a decision on the election systematics to use. The committee has agreed to the switch-over and an inclusion into annodex.org.
ACTION: James and Silvia to include member_man with wiki at annodex.org
ACTION: James and Silvia to move members over from mailing list
ACTION: Conrad to fix the email for the committee positions
ACTION: James to propose an election system and send it to committee mailing list for discussion
6) Committee management: meetings, wiki
- We will be meeting every 1st Monday evening every month at 7pm - in person or on irc.
- Wiki for the committee: it is desirable to have a protected area in the wiki for the committee to discuss things on
ACTION: Silvia to apply a patch to mediawiki to enable this
