Committee Meeting 20110213

The meeting will take place at 21:00 UTC in the IRC channel #board-meeting on the CAcert IRC network.

Committee Members: feel free to add a business within the acceptance period or your question to the board below. Others: add a question to the questions section.

Premeeting

  1. Minutes author prepares the minutes from the last meeting

  2. Minutes author prepares the action items. All action owners to update.

  3. Minutes author puts motion m20110208.1 to accept the last minutes.

Agenda

  1. Preliminaries
    1. Chair opens the Committee Meeting
    2. Accept the minutes from the last meeting.

    3. Who is making minutes?
    4. Chair asks whether cacert-board-private maillist includes any items that need to be disclosed to Members.

    5. Chair introduces the URL of action items to the meeting, and asks for discussion.

    6. move that Agenda be accepted as "Urgent Business" as we haven't agreed it 48 hours in advance.
  2. Businesses
    1. finance progress added by Iang.

    2. AGM added by Iang.

    3. comments on members list added by Iang.

    4. Marcus for SE added by Iang.

  3. Question Time Important Note: Questions from CAcert.org Community Members can be added until beginning of Committee Meeting! As well questions can be asked at "Question Time", without added Question here

  4. Closing
    1. Confirm the next Committee Meeting
    2. Chair closes the Committee Meeting

Minutes

1. Preliminaries

Present: Nick, Lambert, Ian, Alexander, Mario. Absent: Mark

22:03 Chair opens the meeting. Acceptance of the minutes of meeting on 20101206: Carried as m20110208.1.

Alexander will make minutes.

All items discussed on the private mailing list are of no importance to disclose.

Agenda is accepted as urgent business by everyone present.

2.1 Finance progress

Kevin and Ian met with Raj of Westpac. He found a number of flaws in our letter and required a new letter. The new letter text has been circulated. The main changes are the names of the retiring signatories, and the addition of Westpac's account and customer numbers. Therefore, Ian prepared a new text to be approved:

Resolved, that we send a letter to Westpac bank, words to effect of:

In the above, 'single' means only one signature required, not two. Motion carried as m20110213.2.

Ian did manage to see the balances for the two accounts. They were $10,xxx and $3yy or in total something under $11k. The bank declined to hand over the statements.

Although more progress is being made as we speak it will still take a considerable amount of days to have the signatory change processed by the bank.

According to the previous CAcert finance report: On 30/6/2009, CAcert had around $11k on Westpac accounts.

2.2 AGM

Mario ensured the member register is up to date and put it into a protected area of the SVN repository.

Lambert asks when we have to finish the overall report. Ian says there is no timeframe, but the members need sufficient amount of time to read through it before they vote on it.

Regarding payments: some known, some unknown payments were executed from the bank account. Without statements not all payments can be processed successfully. This could be a problem to decide if a member has voting privileges on the AGM or not. Ian proposes to accept a member's statement if they claim they paid using a bank transfer.

Nick asks if anything prevents us from holding the AGM, and not adjourning it, just declaring it in recess for a couple weeks? Other reply with uncertainty.

Ian asks if we should send out a reminder on the team reports. Alexander suggests a deadline on the team report of 20/2. Lambert says the team report is optional for the AGM.

2.3 Member list

General comment: when people start fights on the lists because they are aggreived for some reason, this causes a lot of noise. Firstly this distracts from the good work that people are doing. Secondly, it scares a lot of people who might otherwise read and help. So we lose the possibility of recruiting new talent.

In particular one member, made rude and uncalled statements on the members list. Some members already replied to this email trying to stop the negativism and providing more background info so that everyone would understand the situation.

Ian notes it's not really acceptable: on a general level, if that's the sort of tone we accept, we're not going to get much done. I've seen this sort of stuff happen on other lists, and when it starts, the teams moves into a sort of stability of chaos.

Alexander asks if we can conclude this topic by stating we shouldn't ignore these kind of emails and reply to these trying to keep the atmosphere happy.

Ian notes we have put Arbitration in as the means to solve disputes. So if this were to lead to a dispute, then it would be filed as an Arbitration.

Mario thinks arbitration would just poor oil in the water.

Lambert introduces the idea of etiquette rules on the mailing lists. Ian notes we have a code of conduct called the Principles.

To conclude this topic all agree that everyone should step up against rude and uncalled statements on mailing lists.

2.4 Marcus for SE

This topic was already proposed as motion m20110213.1.

3 Question Time

A question came up regarding topic 2.4 on how the voting was handled.

Nick asks on people's opinion regarding motion m20110212.1. Responses say the community first has to introduce procedures to have new roots before we can disable current roots. It was already decided previously we should stop using the current roots as soon as practically possible. Ian and Lambert ask to postpone this question until after the AGM. Nick says there is too much discussing and too few actions. Others point out that the board is not the place for actions, that is the community's job.

Alexander asks how we will handle the finance report, specifically the balance on the Westpac accounts.

Lambert proposes the following: we know the amount from last year's report (2009), and we know what has been authorized as payments. We also know what the incoming amounts are, and we know what the current amount is.

To know the outgoing payments we would have to trace the mails and motions. From our memory, there was €295 paid to Ian and 3k to Oophaga. There will also have been costs for domains, public officer costs, etc.

Mario notes he now also has access to the Paypal account.

Alexander will send the list of categories (accounts) used in the previous finance report to the other board members. From there Ian and Lambert will continue to create the finance report.

Regarding Dan's proposed special resolution we will present an email to the members that it will still be added to the agenda. We take note of a precedent last year for a similar situation.

Next question: do we have enough candidates for the board next year? A list was presented by Mario.

4 Closing

Next meeting: 20/2/2011 21:00 UTC.

Meeting closed at 23:44.

Motions


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