Annual meeting 2019-02-10

Locked
Pretorian
Site Admin
Posts: 214
Joined: 21 Jul 2009, 10:21

Annual meeting 2019-02-10

Post by Pretorian » 10 Feb 2019, 15:30

The following items have gone in for the annual meeting at 2019-02-10.
  1. Change bylaws (https://www.dcbase.org/bylaws) to state the correct municipality in Sweden (since I have moved). This is basically just a formality but needs to be done.
    Current phrasing: The organization is located in Sollentuna, Sweden.
    Proposed phrasing: The organization is located in Hässleholm, Sweden.
    To change bylaws there need to be two separate annual meetings (or extra meetings) so it won't take into effect immediately.
  2. ADC protocol specification and associated documents, collectively herein referred as "specification", (https://adc.sourceforge.io/) needs to be updated or the migration to dcbase.org needs to be finalized ASAP, because:
    • Both the landing page and the old (yet still the authoritative as far as I know) documents refer places that no longer exists or have been relocated (e.g. wiki and SF svn repository).
    • Judging from recent discussion on the public hub there seems to be a distinct lack of known formal protocol or process for working on the ADC specification (specifically extension proposals, from the point of view of an outsider)
    • Informal: I went through the markdown files currently on adc.dcbase.org and I need someone to check for consistency with the last official copies, after that the release PRD file needs to be updated and some dead references need to be fixed at least (mostly in the "preface" sections of the document, my current chances aimed to be markup related for now)
    • Informal: the issue with git commits not reflecting immediately/correctly on subdomains (e.g. adc.dcbase.org, nmdc.dcbase.org and hublist.dcbase.org) should now be fixed.
  3. Informal organization meetings: I still believe that in general the idea of having a time slot reserved once a month is a good practice, however, experience has taught me that this doesn't seem to work.
    • If there is no visible progress people understandably don't feel like showing up, which means meetings get skipped (this in and of itself isn't a problem, if people knew when there is a meeting and when there isn't)
    • Again a point based on some recent comments on the hub: how to raise points for discussion and what are appropriate topics in organization meetings (both formal and informal) seems to be unclear.
    • Proposal: create a well defined process for submitting discussion items for monthly meetings (assuming we keep up with them) if none are submitted during the previous month then the current months meeting will effectively be cancelled. Additionally, I would suggest that if/when a meeting is cancelled due to no submitted discussion items any member of the board who is available could simply post a canned message about there being no meeting for this reason on the hub (the cancellation should happen e.g. 24 hours prior, if we stick to weekends when at least one person is likely to be online during that 48 hour period).
      • I am well aware that this is effectively turning what was originally intended as a completely informal process to keep people engaged with the organization into a more formal one with more structure. However, at this point I believe it might be necessary and it would also avoid stating that there has been no progress if it isn't needed.
      • Submission of discussion points could be through email, or alternatively the fate of the next months meeting could be decided at the end of the previous one (i.e. if nothing is likely to change over the next month then we can schedule accordingly), with the exception that items may still be submitted through email later if needed.
  4. This is from last year's monthly meetings: I brought up the possibility of signing the organization up for Google for Nonprofits
    • Unfortunately my attempts to register for it is stopped by the need to "get validated" by TechSoup Sverige.
      While I could probably get through the form on my own, I haven't used Swedish in any capacity since 09, and even then my skills could be considered elementary at best, so I really can't check any of the fine print or deal with any direct email correspondence if that is involved.
    • The motivation for this is generally to get access to G-Suite for Nonprofits to have real @dcbase.org emails without the overhead of maintaining and securing (against spam) a mail server, but here are all the benefits anyway.
      • Currently the organization mails getting forwarded to personal emails is inconvenient at best and a privacy concern in the worst case scenario (e.g. if someone decides to leave the organization they should also loose access to historical record of the emails, specifically e.g. donations from paypal).
  5. Informal: the dcbase.org is due for an upgrade from xenial to bionic (i.e. the next LTS release of Ubuntu), however, as I attempted to do this I was faced with missing update paths for packages mainly python related, something ruby related and one thing about systemd. The python and ruby packages are non-critical most likely, but the systemd package has me worried. Basically take this as me shifting responsibility to anyone more familiar with upgrading ubuntu (I am partial to CentOS myself, where an upgrade == reinstall) last time I upgraded the server to a major new version of ubuntu if memory serves it died or got stuck during boot and OVH had to manually resolve it from their end.

Locked