[Foundation-l] Board meeting report

[Michael Snow]

I wanted to give a report on our board meeting earlier this month. This 
is not in place of the meeting minutes, which will be published when 
they're ready and approved. But the discussion here was very helpful to 
the meeting, and I'd like to share some of what we worked on, and 
mention outcomes where there are any.

I'll start with policy business. We approved two updates to our official 
policies. One is the revised privacy policy which has been discussed 
here a few times previously. The other is an update to the gift policy, 
which was no longer reflecting our organizational structure and needed 
some more specific guidance. The updated policy is not a substantive 
change in our philosophy, it simply clarifies some points. For example, 
the foundation intends to convert gifts of securities into cash upon 
receipt, rather than having them sit for long periods and be subject to 
market fluctuations (in the past, we've both gained and lost money in 
such circumstances, so it's pretty much a wash). Oh, and in case you 
were wondering, the policy documents that we won't normally offer naming 
opportunities. Well, we can name servers, but for some reason donors 
haven't shown too much interest in that. Patti has put the new versions 
of these policies up on the foundation website.

Stu updated us on the status of the audit, which is progressing 
reasonably well, certainly more quickly than last year. The audited 
financial statements should be ready for us to approve no later than the 
next board meeting in November (on IRC).

Speaking of next board meetings, we also set the board's calendar for 
the coming year. That should make it easier to plan our schedules and 
make sure all trustees can attend (this was the first time we've had 
everyone together since I joined the board). It may also be of interest 
to people who are thinking of being candidates, either in next June's 
elections or for the chapter-selected seats. In addition to the IRC 
meeting November 3 this year, in 2009 we've set aside January 9-11 in 
San Francisco, April 3-5 (location to be determined, possibly in 
conjunction with a chapters meeting), August 27 in Buenos Aires (as 
usual, a short meeting prior to Wikimania), and October 23-25 in San 
Francisco again. More IRC meetings may be scheduled as necessary, but 
those don't involve travel and are easier to plan.

Jan-Bart gave a presentation on open standards, which led into the 
broader topic (including file formats) that I introduced earlier. 
Jan-Bart feels that considering our commitment to these ideals - freely 
licensed content, free software, web standards - our projects are not 
doing nearly as much as they could on open standards in education. It's 
an important aspect of our mission, the standards often exist already 
and are in use in the educational community, and our impact in that 
world would grow significantly by working towards them.

For the broader discussion, first of all, thanks to everyone who gave 
their input here, it was tremendously valuable. As indicated earlier, we 
didn't have this conversation to make an immediate decision at the 
meeting. The board does want to maintain our commitment, as reflected in 
both the foundation and the community, to free and open access to 
knowledge. Along those lines, the earlier draft of a file format policy 
will be revisited, and we may consider passing a revised version. 
However, it's also not clear that this would be a good idea. One issue 
would be if it inadvertently prohibits positive approaches in the 
future, such as the uses for Flash that Brion mentioned. (At least, 
nobody seemed to have a problem with those, please correct me if that's 
not the case.) So I wonder if it might not be wiser to avoid attempting 
something at the board level that requires us to pin down definitions 
for file formats, platforms, and so on in ways that may have unintended 
consequences. Further feedback and discussion is welcome.

Along with standards and file formats, the issues we spent the most time 
on were the advisory board and chapters. As this message is already 
rather long, I'll be more brief about those. We've realized that 
advisory board members were originally appointed for one-year terms, so 
most of them have been serving longer than anticipated. We discussed the 
skills and qualities we want the advisory board to help with, and will 
be inviting some of the existing group to continue on, while also adding 
new appointments from time to time. Jan-Bart is working on a proposal 
for handling this, so we can have less of an ad hoc approach. Finally, 
I'll just save the chapter business for a separate email in the next day 
or so.

--Michael Snow