Board Meeting April 08 6-7:45pm UTC Federico Mena Quintero (federico1) Hendrik Vogelsang (henne) Michael Löffler (michl) Bryen Yunashko (suseROCKs) Pascal Bleser (yaloki)

Next Board Meeting April 29th.

Status of old action items * AI henne, create board blog a spotlight.opensuse.org WIP - henne works on getting the url and creates then accounts * AI all, Member approval shame on us, we've been pretty slow in approvals. All promised to go ahead step by step.

* Trademark guide lines - for feeback please use: http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Trademark_Guidelines_use_cases - michl had a conversation with zonker that we should once again asking activly for feeback, give time for feedback and go ahead, it looks like a summer task

* Improvment of IRC cloak and email address handling - yaloki and suseROCKs are now side admins, darix will train them (but doesn't know about that yet)

* openSUSE Foundation - creation of a german foundation (e.V.)   - its just some paper work, it needs for the beginning 7 founding     members, the pure cost is not higher than $ 150 -> doable     Pro:     - we can do what we want and are our own master     Con:     - all paperwork and ongoing effort needs to be handled by us - yaloki put together some information about http://www.spi-inc.org/about-spi   - pros:     * they take care of the legal shmoo     * they can provide legal assistance if needed     * their board is elected, and we could have someone join their       organization + follow all the discussions, including private       ones     * donations to SPI (and hence to openSUSE) would be tax-deducible       in the USA     * donations can be made in Germany through a NFP (non-for-profit)       there (ffii), as well as in Italy     * they have an online form for donating   - cons:     * SPI owns the money, but transfers to us, as long as it doesn't       conflict with SPI's legal status (a NFP)     * SPI also owns assets (e.g. hardware) we buy through them     * that money + those assets are only transferable to another NFP       in the USA -- that means that if we were to have a NFP on our       own, e.g. an e.V. in Germany like KDE, we wouldn't be able to       transfer the money + assets we had through SPI at that point     * they take 5% of all donations - henne brought up the idea of using the existing http://www.lst.de/ LST is an existing german foundation (e.V.) for the support of free software. Members of LST approached us and offered help   - pro:     - the bureaucracy for e.V. creation is done   - con:     - as it is an existing foundation openSUSE would have at the       beginning no say, so we'd rely on the existing members (majority       are SUSE employees or ex-SUSE ones.)     - all the donation infrastructure needs to be created anyway

Conclusion: everything is possible and each solution has its pros and cons AI: michl to set up a wiki page with all the information to get a better picture AI: michl to get in contact with LST and discuss further

* openSUSE conference - program committee meets in a few days

* Membership Advantages - michl spoke with zonker about a free LWN account for all openSUSE members. A free LWN acount would cost us not less then $ 2 per person and month. Assuming 500 members (currently we have 260 but this will grow) that would mean $ 12k per year. All Board members agreed that this amount of money can be spent better for the community.