Committee Meeting 2021-10-07 (2021-10-08 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: the committee may choose to convert any business proposed as a question in the questions section.

During the meeting, the following two additional channels are open to all members: (LINK WILL BE ADJUSTED BEFORE THE MEETING)

Agenda

  1. Preliminaries
    1. Chair opens the Committee Meeting

    2. Who is making minutes? (Writing minutes in real time)

    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.

    5. Accept minutes from 05.08.2021 "I move to accept the minutes of the committee meeting of 5th Aug 2021."

    6. Accept minutes from 02.09.2021 "I move to accept the minutes of the committee meeting of 2nd Sept 2021."

  2. Business

    Acceptance of new business items no later than 48 hours before the start of the committee meeting!

    1. Secretary's Office (Ongoing subjects)

      1. CCA change. information of community -- Draft sent to board on 27-02-2021; accept the new paragraph, sent recently by e-Mail (secretary, critical / as the signer is running again, this topic is in work again. goal: september)

      2. register statutes changes at OFT (started after AGM): details with OFT OK, form prepared, waiting for legal confirmation. (secretary / to skip, still pending, legal confirmation takes more time than expected - secretary recontacted barrister. Time limit: 31.8.2021. Will see the barrister after 12.10.2021 (tomorrow))
      3. Tax excemption: Secretary is preparing paperwork for authorithies of Republic of Geneva.
    2. Infrastructure
      1. Signer (Info; ideas? strategy? information?) (Dirk, Etienne)
        • We need volunteers, who are able to review code (not only PHP or Perl, but newer languages like GO, too). And we need volunteers, who are able to run tests as soon as a new signer software is written and installed on our test-systems.
      2. Nextcloud (Sascha, Frederic)
        • What is up and running, what remains to be deployed.
      3. New requirements, software and systems (JanDD)
        • My hope is that we can get a more professionally maintained infrastructure (critical and non-critical), functioning software development and assessment teams and proper requirements engineering, before we put more work on the shoulders of our teams (and yes supporting more fresh people is a burden that keeps us from getting our important stuff done in the mentioned areas).
    3. Background Check:
      1. (no candidates)
        • To be done: Peter N., Gero T., Mathias F.
    4. AGM 13. Nov 2021 (no information at the moment, more will follow during September by the Secretary)
      1. 20:00 GMT = Geneva 21 h 00 = Sydney 07 h 00 DST = Greenwich (London) 20 h 00 = New York 15 h 00

      2. Even if the AGM will be held online, you may want to visit Geneva (or for your business trips or some "stay-at-home-holidays"), using this link: http://www.booking.com/index.html?aid=346253

      3. see the timeline here: https://wiki.cacert.org/AGM/Next

    5. Staffing the teams (Frederic)
      1. Strategy and short term actions
    6. Finance team

      1. Info (details here (Michael)

    7. Software Team

      1. Issue 1502: Adapt the UI at CAcert.org to deal with the "keygen" feature having been removed in browsers (who is in charge?)

      2. Issue 1482: Limit validity period of new HTTPS certificates to one year

      3. Issue 1444: PHP - Brian

      4. Issue 1417: Keygen / new CSR software - Bernhard

    8. Organisation Assurance
      1. How to relance OrgA? / Comment relancer OrgA? (Guy)
    9. Grant applications

      1. Protopype Fund https://prototypefund.de/en/ (mail to SW Board only)

        1. The Prototype Fund is a project of the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). This is for residents of Germany only. We could create a group of people that work on a project for CAcert (with all support of the others in the background). It runs for two more years, every 6 month.
        2. Infra does not see any acute need at the moment, and does not have the capacity to provide qualified support.
        3. There are some ideas for software, but in infra's view there is still a lot of conceptual and preparatory work missing. What Infra could imagine is financing people to carry out a requirements analysis and write a requirements and test specification. This could then be used as a basis for a new implementation of the CAcert software (WebDB, Signer and perhaps other things like CATS). But these are just a few ideas of JanDD and he cannot currently recommend any people who would be suitable for this. Potential candidates would have to deal intensively with the existing software on the one hand and with the underlying policies on the other, and would have to identify a lot of missing information, ask for it and make assumptions for discussion. This requires very good analytical and communication skills and a high level of stamina.
  3. Blockchain

    1. see here: https://wiki.cacert.org/Brain/CAcertInc/Committee/MeetingAgendasAndMinutes/2018-03-01/ideas#Blockchain (waiting for answer from IanG)

  4. 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. I notice that the database is polluted with assurers that are no longer responding. I think it would be useful if once a year all the assurers that did not assure that year are addressed with the question whether they still want to stay listed. (ctjacobs, NL)
      • It is annoying when assurers do not respond. On the other hand, one should ask: why do they no longer answer? Did they say goodbye but not log off? Or are they waiting for better times and just pretending to be asleep until then? Or was now simply the wrong moment, a bad time? (secretary)
    2. Linux Australia is looking for sessions for the online conference in january: LCA2021. Who could propose one? (Etienne)

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

      • ..
    4. Closing
      1. Agree on date of the next Committee Meeting: (30. Sept or) 4. Nov 2021
      2. Following meetings: 4. Nov, AGM 13.11.2021

Logfile

Logfile from meeting 2021-10-07

Minutes

Present

Members of the Committee:

Present, by alphabetical order

Brian McCullough

Etienne Ruedin

Frédéric Dumas

Michael Richardson

Peter Nunn

Absent or silent, by alphabetical order

Guy Scharinger

Sascha Ternes

Members of the CAcert community and other guests

Having been active during the meeting, by alphabetical order

Waclaw Schiller

Dirk Astrath (egal)

Committee meeting - 2021-10-07

Our chair, Brian, opened the meeting at 20:03 UTC.

Acceptance of minutes

Motion to accept minutes from 05.08.2021Votes: 5 Ayes, no Naye, no Abstain

Motion to accept minutes from 02.09.2021

Votes: 5 Ayes, no Naye, no Abstain

CCA change

From Etienne: "The barrister I had to meet with (regarding OFT changes in Australia) had a board meeting from another association. But he didn't show up as he was late due to some supplement work in court. Now he is abroad, but will be back on 12th of october. I am running behind him, believe me."

Etienne added that on another front, there is progress on the tax exemption submission.

Infrastructure Team

NextCloud

From Frédéric: "NextCloud works, anyone can ask Sascha to create an account for him. This makes it possible not only to access shared files and folders via the web, but also to synchronise them directly in the file tree of one's work station.

The installation still needs to be completed with an Office document editing server, to allow us to work collaboratively on text documents and spreadsheets.

CRM/ERP

Finally, a CRM/ERP, in the form of an independent application, remains to be evaluated before installation.

https://lists.cacert.org/wws/arc/cacert-board/2021-10/msg00000.html"

Other applications

From Frédéric: "Basically, we have about a hundred system administrators who wanted to help us, and are members of the discussion list of the same name. But when you call them out and say: we need help with this. There is silence."

Peter proposes to address them through individual contact.

From Brian: "Mail in general, but particularly the mailing lists, are definitely in need of upgrade and maintenance." Same for the Wiki, adds Frederic.

General Annual Meeting on the 13th of November, 2021

We have the current list of Team Leads, and are waiting for their reports? Etienne states that he is in contact with them and will recontact them starting in two days (as he has some days of holydays next week). At the moment, one team sent his report (Ales/Support).

Finance Team

Michael recalls that the absence of a new and modern accounting tool, chosen and implemented to date, handicaps him in preparing the accounts before the Annual General Meeting. It proposes a one-year subscription to the QBO online service for CAD 250.

Furthermore, the integration of the sums available to CAcert at Secure-U in the accounts is not a matter of course. Should they be listed as off-balance sheet items?

The consensus is that the annual accounts for the period July 2020 - June 2021 should be kept to a minimum, in the absence of a specific modern accounting tool. A simple book of incoming income and outgoing expenditure, as well as a presentation of the sums available at the beginning and end of the year in the association's bank accounts, seem sufficient for the time being.

Background Check by Community

Software development team

In order to finally lock up part of the backlog that we have in software and patches available, but not put into production, because of lack of validation under the conditions required by our Policies, we should speed up the background check of Peter and Gero, with the hope to wlecome them as full time software engineers (Software Engineering, QA, QC, Software Acceptance).

It was already planned to do it at the end of August for Gero.

From Frederic: "As far as the support team is concerned, Mathias must be integrated in the same way. First he should pass his background check, then we should evaluate his ability to join the support team as a full time support engineer. He should be able to support Ales in this way. He clearly has a much broader range of skills than just sorting out trouble tickets."

Grant application

First, we need to complete the tax exemption submission procedure, in order to complete the registration of CAcert with our potential institutional sponsor. Only then will we be able to submit a grant application early next year.

Furthermore, we have (as usual, unfortunately) no news from RIPE NCC.

Next meeting

Next committee meeting will be held on Thursday, 4th of November 2021

Our chair, Brian, closed the meeting at 21:32 UTC.

Logfile from meeting 2021-10-07

Motions

Actions

Who

Status

Action

Minutemaker

wip

prepare Agenda and Minutes for the next meeting