2016 November 28 Ignite Realtime Foundation Board Meeting

General Discussion Community Planning
1

The first Ignite Realtime Foundation (IRF) virtual board meeting was held at 19 UTC 28 Nov 2016 via jit.si video conferencing service.

Attendance (4 out of 5 members present):

  • Guus der Kinderen
  • Matt Tucker
  • Benjamin Sherman
  • Daryl Herzmann
  • Dave Cridland was not present.

Minutes:

  1. Introductions were made with brief summaries of history with the project provided.
  2. Background information was provided about the current arrangement of Ignite resources on AWS sponsored by Survine**.**
  3. AGREED: Guus would serve as the Chair of the Board and Benjamin as the Treasurer.
  4. A number of discussions happened over how best to address Intellectual Property (IP) concerns within Ignite’s code base.
  5. Unlikely to ever come again to a completely IP clean code base, so the discussion was how much the IRF should attempt to formalize the IP of past commits.
  6. Even with a clean IP code base, would this be something that the IRF should attempt to own or does IRF a simple formalization of the community around the code bases.
  7. The world of Open Source IP is much different than it was 5-10 years ago, perhaps this issue is not of the greatest concern anymore. Ignite’s code base does not have any major issues, just a long legacy of code commits from various developers over the globe without a contributors agreement in place.
  8. No decisions were made in this area.
  9. Discussion about the need for the IRF to establish a bank account. Members were lukewarm to the need to establish one due to the complexities involved, but not having one may be as complex as well. If reoccurring costs are involved, it is likely best to have a bank account was a general consensus.
  10. ACTION: Guus will email out a listing of various up-front project costs.
  11. AGREED: presented by-laws are OK.
  12. ACTION: Guus will proceed with the notary process, registration with Chamber of Commerce, and Dutch Tax Office.
  13. Discussion on the need for establishing liability insurance for the board. No action items were taken nor decisions made. There would be a reoccurring cost with this and the board members may not be willing to front this cost personally each year.
  14. **ACTION: **Matt suggested and will engage Peter Saint-Andre about his thoughts with running foundations in the XMPP space and suggestions on what our community should do.
  15. We believe Openfire’s trademark with Jive Software is valid until 2021.
  16. The trademark process is “expensive” (dollar and time wise), but perhaps we want to avoid it as much as possible? There may be avenues for non-profits to get cheaper help to make this happen. This process would not be an initial step of the IRF.
  17. Discussed moving the igniterealtime.org domain name from Jive to Igniterealtime’s presence on AWS. Currently, we have control over DNS within Route 53, but Jive still owns the registration. Some members expressed a desire to move it now while others wanted IRF formally in place first to make the transfer more formal. No action items.
  18. Matt needed to leave the conference. All members thanked him for his time and expertise to help set this up.
  19. Further discussion was had about the bank account establishment, but no action or decisions were made.
  20. Next meeting set for sometime in early Jan 2017.

notes by daryl herzmann