The minutes of TAB meetings are provided for informational purposes only. Discussions and decisions described in the minutes should not be interpreted as official or definitive TAB or OSDL policy. While efforts are made to ensure their accuracy and completeness, we regret we cannot guarantee that they are. If you have corrections or additions, please contact tech-board at lists.osdl.org

Friday May 5, 2006

Technical Advisory Board Conference Call Minutes

Attendees:

James Bottomley Greg Kroah-Hartman Matt Mackall Leann Ogasawara Arjan van de Ven Chris Wright

Agenda:

- Documentation Project Proposal - Xensource Request - Travel Fund - FreedomHEC - Fellowship Fund - Mailing list subscription requests - Any other items?

Action Items:

1) Add the Documentation Project Proposal to the Fellowship Fund request queue. 2) James will craft an email response to Xensource about the TAB's recommendation regarding their proposal. He will post it to the TAB mailing list before officially sending to Xensource. 3) Leann will email the LWE folks to ask about any travel sponsorship programs they may have in place to reimburse LWE travel expenses for presenters. 4) Leann will email member companies to see if they would be interested in sponsoring a FreedomHEC dinner or helping cover costs of T-shirts. 5) James will inform those individuals who will be migrated from the existing private TAB mailing list to the public one. 6) The TAB requested that there be a top level page with a short summary of each project proposal for the Fellowship Fund web site. 7) The TAB also asked that the majority of the documents that reside on the Fellowship Fund web site should be direct web content and not Open Office document downloads.

Documentation Project Proposal

Looks fine. Only minor comments. . . One is to have the TAB or Greg put their name the proposal. Matt noted there are minor edits that need to be made. TAB will proceed by adding it to the Fellowship Fund Request queue.

Xensource Request

Xensource is wanting to collaborate up with OSDL to set up a guest/hypervisor certification program. The recommendation of the TAB is that this is not in the best interest for OSDL. The first arguement is that not enough code from Xen has not been pushed upsteam and their effort to do so is not very apparent. If OSDL agrees to a certification program, it goes against the community and will hinder the community's wishes and efforts for Xen to first get their code pushed upstream. Assuming Xen can sort out up and down stream issues OSDL at that point could arrange to help with a testing effort; automated functional and/or regression testing type of work. The TAB noted that doing certification work is a huge political minefield and OSDL should steer clear. Once code has been merged into mainline, someone like LSB could be asked to document the ABI. The TAB recommends to not act on a proposal like this. James will craft an email reply to Xensource and post it to the TAB mailing list before officially sending to Xensource.

Travel Fund

It would help to try to establish a travel fund. However, some TAB members felt LWE would not be in the scope of the travel fund. LWE is more commercial and the TAB wanted to focus on funding travel to developer conferences. Also, using it just for TAB members is not the goal of this fund it should be open to the entire community. It was also noted that there are two types of traveling that seem to be happening; general travel and OSDL related travel (ex being asked to present at LWE, the OSDL Face to Face, etc.). The TAB recommended that they request a travel budget from OSDL that would pay for OSDL-TAB related traveling, and then establish the general travel fund. Leann will also ping the LWE folks to ask about any travel sponsorship programs they may have in place to reimburse LWE travel expenses for presenters.

The other note that needs to be mentioned is that it is VERY inappropriate/rude to email any TAB member's manager asking them to pay for travel expenses, especially when someone has already voiced their company is unable to pay. The TAB noted they are here representing a part of the community, not their individual companies.

FreedomHEC

Greg received another email about supporting/sponsoring the FreedomHEC conference. The TAB feels they've done a reasonable job supporting FreedomHEC already. The storage summit has even accommodated having their meeting right before FreedomHEC to bring more people in. Leann will ping some other member companies to see if they would be interested in sponsoring a dinner ($500 total) or helping pay for T-shirts ($12/shirt or $6/shirt if they can get a big enough volume).

Mailing list subscription requests

How does the TAB want to handle subscriptions to the TAB mailing list from individuals who are not directly associated of a member of the TAB itself? That individual should send an email to the TAB stating why they want or need to be on the list. The main reason we need to keep a closed mailing list is that the minutes need to be approved by the TAB before they are made public. However, the TAB did feel that the mailing list should be as open and transparent as possible. It was suggested that the TAB create a new mailing list that anyone can subscribe to and the TAB will hold all general discussions there. The existing mailing list will be kept private and individuals who are not members of the TAB or directly affiliated to the TAB will be migrated over to the new public list. The existing mailing list will receive the con call minutes and approve them at which time they will be posted to the general list. James will inform those individuals who will be migrated from the private to the public list.

Fellowship Fund

http://developer.osdl.org/dev/tab/fellow_fund

Get the Documentation Proposal that Greg generated into the Fellowship Fund Request queue. The TAB requested that there be a top level page with a short summary of each project proposal. The TAB also asked that the majority of the documents that reside on the Fellowship Fund web page should be direct web content and not open office doc downloads. Once Tom returns he can call an interim meeting (7 days notice of course) to discuss more.