Committee Meeting 2020-09-03 (2020-09-04 in Australia)

The meeting will take place at 20:00 UTC in the IRC channel #board-meeting on the CAcert IRC network.

Northern Winter: 08:00 PM GMT = 21:00 CET = 15:00 New York EST = 07:00 Australia AEDT
Northern Summer: 08:00 PM GMT = 22:00 CEST = 16:00 New York EDT = 06:00 Australia AEST

Feel free to add a business item within the acceptance period of 48 hours or your question to the board below. Non-committee Members: Committee may choose to convert any business proposed as a question in the questions section.

This will be a short meeting. You may miss some of your favourite topics that takes a lot of time. You may vote about minutes, agendas, etc. later. The goal of this meeting is to make at least two decisions so that the teams can continue to work as hard as they did in the past weeks. If there is remaining time, we may share some information.

NEW

Live temporary notepad to keep track of the minutes - please participate in the writing

Audio-video channel, in parrallel to the classical IRC chan - please join us there

Agenda

  1. Preliminaries
    1. Chair opens the Committee Meeting
    2. Who is making minutes?
    3. Is there a time limit? Who is time keeper?

    4. Chair asks whether cacert-board-private or cacert-board maillist includes any items that need to be disclosed to Members.

  2. Business

    Acceptance of Businesses 48 Hours before beginning of Committee Meeting latest!

    1. Future
      1. Arbitration: report on the progress with applicants (FD)
      2. Business Model "security hardware appliances" (FD)
    2. Finance Team (for your information)

      1. PayPal account blocking --> Information: The account has been released. The counterparty has paid compensation. The finance team is working out a strategy for CAcert's future.

      2. Bug 1493 (replace Paypal buttons on homepage) https://bugs.cacert.org/view.php?id=1493 --> Question: There are two code variants available. At the last session it was suggested not to do without the Paypal button. Should the implementation be paused until the finance team has presented its proposal on financial flows?

    3. Infrastructure Status
      1. Applicants
      2. Hardware/Servers available and/or needed
        1. hot-spare signer
        2. moving sun1 to critical segment (as the old infra01-server is not needed for infra anymore)
    4. AGM Sat 2020-11-07-20:00 UTC
      1. Request for team reports (Etienne)

    5. Policy Group Information: There was a short discussion about adjustments in view of the move to Europe. Vote coming up soon. Please participate in the Policy Group mailing list. (Etienne)

    6. Software Team

      1. Bug 1482: https://bugs.cacert.org/view.php?id=1482 (Limit validity period of new HTTPS certificates to one year)

      2. PHP http://bugs.cacert.org/view.php?id=1444 (Brian)

      3. Keygen http://bugs.cacert.org/view.php?id=1417 (Ted)

    7. Critical Team (decision)
      1. Status of applications for Critical/Infrastructure team
      2. Re-classification of CRL and OSCP (Dirk A.)
        • Critical Team would like to have an adjustment, since the CRL makes up a large part of the bandwidth of CAcert (and thus of BIT): CRL and OCSP should no longer be classified as critical systems, but under the control of the Critical Team. This would allow CRL and OSCP to be moved to another (non-CAcert server) can be outsourced to significantly reduce the bandwidth. Since these are both servers that decide on the validity of certificates (revoke), not "just any" of these servers should administrate. (mail from 12.12.2019 to the secretary)
          • Discussion and motion
  3. Question Time

    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

    1. "Question One." added by Your Name Comment: Replace "Question One" by your Question and add your name

      • ..
    2. Closing
      1. Agree on date of the next Committee Meeting: 1st Oct. 2020

Logfile

Logfile from meeting 2020-09-03

Minutes

Minutes were written in parrallel to the meeting, with tasks listed in action items and actions of this document.

Participants

By alphabetical order.

Members of the Committee being present:

Brian McCullough

Etienne Ruedin
Frédéric Dumas

Members of the Committee being absent:

Christophe Meesters
Frédéric Grither
Peter Nunn
Sascha Ternes

Members of the CAcert community and other guests, having been active during the meeting:

none

Minutes

The Chair opened the meeting at 20:00 UTC

Approval of the minutes of the meeting of the 13th of August, 2020

Votes: 3 Ayes, no Naye, no Abstain - Approved

Approval of the minutes of the meeting of the 20th of August, 2020

No minutes have been written yet.

Arbitration

Before Philip spoke, it was believed that only an arbitrator can overturn the decision of another arbitrator. Since his comments of June 2020, it seems to us that we could leave the legacy of the past "as is", unresolved, and make CAcert operate according to rules dictated by the necessity of the moment.

We need some kind of back ground check or some kind of assessment of the new comers. If not by Arbitration (ABC), why not by someone else (Board, Critical Admin, Infra Admin, Head of...). This question primarily concerns the evaluation of volunteer applications for the Infrastructure team, the Critical team and the Support team. Later on, the same question will quickly arise for the members of the Software team, particularly for the code review. Brian proposes to post our conclusion on the board's public list, and to see the responses of the members who are following that work.

Business Model "security hardware appliances"

To do:

Interview with the project leader of the "CAcert for safety hardware equipment" idea.
Interview with the project leader of the " CAcert for blockchain " idea.

PayPal account

The account has been released and a AUD 500 compensation accepted by CAcert.

PayPal buttons on homepage

We will show on our homepage, at the top the EU bank account, lower the AU bank account, and Paypal as a third option.

Infrastructure Status

The best way to welcome the new comers would be to setup meetings with their respective team leaders, then to invite members of the committee to join the meeting for an official warm welcome.

Policy Group Information

We may motivate a few more of the active members of the CAcert's community (team leaders and the like) to take part to the discussion, regarding the removal of New South Wales or Australia from the Policy of our organization. Then we could start the vote.

Preparation ot the Annual General Meeting scheduled on Sat 2020-11-07-20:00 UTC

Etienne comments the avancement reported on https://wiki.cacert.org/AGM/Next.

Software team

According to Brian, issue #1444 is delayed and bounded to the ABC problem: with a lack of people for checking the code, any further work will be delayed, too. Etienne proposes to apply to the code approvers of the Software team the "relaxed new type of ABC" which were discussed today.

Regarding the motivation and the future management of the software team, in case our grant application is successfull, we should re-assess our relationship with all the members of the team, and better know how they want to involve themselves in a paid work to be done.

Critical Team

There is one applicant to the Critical team: he was invited first to join Jan at the Infrastructure team, but Jan assessed that the person could better support Dirk at the Critical team. We should welcome him by now. Frederic is going to make it happen, easing the contact between all the involved parties.

Regarding the bandwitdh constraint which the CRL/OSCP server might have suffered, here is the conclusion of Frederic's investigations (July 2020):

Mark O. wrote: "About your requests: attached a screenshot of network use on a random moment of time (a few minutes ago). I do not see any clipping due to speed restrictions in this graph. I have read all contracts with BIT which I have, but it does not speak about network cost or bandwidth restrictions at all. So, it seems we currently have unlimited 1Gbit up/down for free."

Dirk A. wrote: "The CRL-server is currently limited in bandwidth on it's webserver ... maybe I should remove this limitation for some time (e.g. a day) and watch the bandwidth ..."

Conclusion: there is no bandwidth starvation and no need to push the CRL server out of the Critical infrastructure.

Questions

None

Next meetings

Next committee meetings on the Thursday 17th of September, 2020 and Thursday, 1st of October 2020.

We aggreed on Thu 2020-09-17-20:00 UTC for the next meeting.
We aggreed on Thu 2020-10-01-20:00 UTC for the following meeting.
We aggreed on Sat 2020-11-07-20:00 UTC for the next AGM.

The Chair closed the meeting at 22:30 UTC.

Motions

* m20200830.2: Motion to accept Minutes of the meeting of the 13th of August, 2020

Actions

Who

Status

Action

Minutemaker

wip

prepare Agenda and Minutes for the next meeting

Brain/CAcertInc/Committee/MeetingAgendasAndMinutes/2020-09-03 (last edited 2020-09-04 05:22:25 by Frédéric Dumas)