Minutes:2016 Oct ConfCall

Agenda

Venue: To be held by conference call on Oct 4, 2016, 12.30pm EDT (16:30 UTC, 17:30 BST, 18:30 CEST, 9.30am PDT)
Dial-in Information: +1-857-216-2939 PIN: 62534 http://www.uberconference.com/hlapp

  1. Old business
  • New business
    1. Term expirations and Elections for the Board (electronic ballot)
      • Heather Wiencko, running for election to the Board.
      • Hilmar Lapp, President of the Board. Running for re-election.
      • Peter Cock, Secretary. Running for re-election to the Board and as Treasurer.
      • Chris Fields, Board member at-large. Running for re-election to the Board and as Secretary.
      • Nomi Harris, Board member at-large. Running for re-election.
    2. Proposed changes to the OBF Bylaws: Part 1 and Part 2
    3. Options for and hurdles to generating revenue from selling swag (OBF project-branded merchandise)

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    Minutes

    Etherpad for notes: https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/OBF-BoD-Meeting-Oct2016

    Attending:

    Meeting started at 16:34 UTC.

    Old business

    New business

    1. Elections, with electronic ballots prepared by Hilmar.

    Heather Wiencko: (Member at large) Met many of the OBF community via BOSC, having served on the BOSC 2016 organizing committee. Has moved more into open source software as her career has evolved, and welcomes the role of the OBF in encouraging openess in bioinformatics and wishes to help with this. Interested in increasing the visiblity of the OBF (unclear other than backing BOSC). Would like to encourage more membership and activity outside of BOSC.

    Peter Cock: (Treasurer) Long-time biopython developer, previous OBF secretary. (Didn’t say, but member of the BOSC organising commitee and co-chair for BOSC 2014 and 2015).

    Chris Fields: (Secretary) Long-time BioPerl developer, and thus OBF.

    Nomi Harris: (Continuing as Member at Large) Long career in Bioinformatics, and involved in the founding of BOSC in 2000 and has served on the committee since - lately as chair or co-chair. Represents BOSC at the OBF board, and is interested in expanding the OBF recognition & community.

    Hilmar Lapp: (President) Long-term BioPerl developer & OBF board member, running for a third term with one goal being to enable someone else to take over as president. Most proud of formally launching the OBF Travel Fellowship to improve diversity at relevant events, and would like to expand this with more sponsorship. Has also spent more time than expected keeping OBF infrastructure alive, and would like to reduce this footprint further building on work in the last year.

    Votes cast electronically by the current board using Helios Voting https://vote.heliosvoting.org/helios/elections/e1ff4788-89b4-11e6-a3d4-5ed03a4b23b0/view all posted accepted with no votes against (unanimous bar abstains).

    Results (For/Against/Abstain):

    2. Proposed changes to the OBF Bylaws:

    Approved unamiously by the newly enlarged board.

    3. Options for and hurdles to generating revenue from selling swag (OBF project-branded merchandise). Raised by BioJava, with Spencer Bliven on the call representing the project. BioJava sees this largely as an outreach opportunity (T-shirts), but because there is money involved there are potential conflicts of interest. Most BioJava developers contribute as part of their day jobs, and are cautious about handling any revenue personally - collection via the OBF would be open and above board. Possible uses would be to pay for a free T-shirt to the logo designer, but does not seem necessary to track a BioJava earmark which would greatly complicate our accounting.

    More generally, does the OBF need to look into Trademarks for project names and logos? Note this is separate from the copyright (e.g. unclear copyright of a project logo should not prevent a Trademark application). Dave Clements might know from logo work on Galaxy and GMOD. In USA law at least, copyright is automatic (no registration), but you have to register a Trademark. Would allow us to protect usage of the brand. Minimal costs circa $350 for five years according to Spencer. Hilmar recommends open licensing of the logo (like the source code), but with brand protected by a TradeMark (with precedents including WikiMedia, Apache, Mozilla).

    Other business

    Adjourned at 17:48 UTC

    TODO (after meeting)