[yocto-ab] YP Advisory Board: April meeting minutes & new member info

[Jeff Osier-Mixon]

Note to new members - I have tried to add information in these minutes
to help explain the roles of each of the groups within the project, so
these minutes are quite long but hopefully informative.

Yocto Project Advisory Board
Wed April 6, 2016

Attendees:

Tracey Erway, Intel
Cyril Chemparathy, Xilinx
Justin Waters, Timesys
Bill Mills, TI
Chris Hallinan, Mentor Graphics
Armin Kuster, MontaVista
Munakata-san, Renesas
Stu Grossman. Juniper
Tyler Baker, Linaro
Philip Balister, OpenEmbedded
Jeff Osier-Mixon, YP/Intel
Lieu Ta, Wind River
Richard Purdie, YP

If I missed your name on the attendee list, please let me know. We did
have a quorum and were able to vote in the meeting.

_____________________________________________________
New Members & Special Thanks

The project welcomed new members Linaro and Xilinx, as well as
returning member Timesys. Thanks for being part of the Yocto Project!

Special thanks to Renesas, who donated cash in Q1 to help pay for
documentation and Developer Day, and to Intel, who also donated cash
in Q1 to help pay for documentation.

_____________________________________________________
Budget

Lieu Ta from Wind River is responsible for Finance within the project.

The project has an annual budget of approximately US$400k. With this
budget, we pay for the following categories of expenses, with 2015
percentages shown:

- Infrastructure (66%): physical and network infrastructure, including
build systems and servers, and systems administrator.

- Operations (15%): basic project operations, including legal as well
as 15% overhead to LF

- Advocacy (13%): activities often provided by marketing
organizations, including collateral, public relations, outbound
communications, and event coverage.

- Documentation (5%): we pay a contract technical writer to create
documentation for the project. (This expense is expected to grow
significantly in 2016)

- Community (1%): this budget covers gaps, including meeting expenses,
donations to related organizations like OpenEmbedded, paid internships
such as Outreachy, and occasionally travel for specific vital
personnel to important gatherings.

Lieu presented the results of the 2015 budget. Income and expenses
were very nearly on par, with a small shortfall due to documentation
expenses. The 2015 figures are currently posted on the wiki at:

https://wiki.yoctoproject.org/wiki/Yocto_Project_Finances

We discussed the ongoing 2016 budget, which is expecting some notable
shortfalls primarily due to the project taking on the cost of
documentation, expected to cost $120k-150k/year. We also discussed the
2017 budget. This discussion is presented later in these minutes as
part of the discussion about membership and business development.

_____________________________________________________
Advocacy & Events

Tracey Erway from Intel leads the Advocacy effort for YP, with help
from the Advocacy team.

Tracey presented a summary of advocacy activities, including events,
giveaways, Developer Day training sessions, and the backgrounder that
was finished last year. She also mentioned that YP currently has 80%
of the commercial embedded linux OS market share, which is great news
indeed.

In 2015 we attended and sponsored ELC and ELCE, and also added SCaLE
in early 2016 along with a free-to-attend introductory training
session, or "mini-DevDay" event, with training provided by LF
Training.

Developer Day US 2015 in San Jose was actually profitable due to the
efforts of Mentor Graphics and the donation of their facility. Both
DevDays were greatly enhanced by the donation and subsequent giveaway
of a great deal of hardware from Intel, TI, and TechNexion, as well as
SanDisk. DevDay US 2016 was made possible by a large cash donation
from Renesas as well as hardware donations from Linaro, TI, and Intel.
All DevDay sessions are driven by the tireless effort of many
volunteer speakers, classroom helpers, and organizers to reach 150-200
students directly each year, who then take that knowledge back to
their companies.

Andreea completed work on the YP backgrounder, a brochure with two
versions that is available in the YP booth at all events. PDF versions
have been sent to all member organizations so they can print it and
bring it to events that YP does not sponsor. The longer of the two,
which contains profiles of each organization that contributed now
needs to be updated because of our new members, but the smaller
version still works just fine.

Tracey identified the website as a primary need. It needs to be
refreshed with an easier to read front page, a regular blog, and
better information flow for new users. Several people have volunteered
ideas - at this point what is needed is funding and resources to make
it happen.

Bill Mills cautioned the organization to not be too marketing driven,
which we discussed as a group.

Jefro congratulated the Advocacy team for getting so much done on such
a small budget.

_____________________________________________________
Infrastructure

Michael Halstead is a systems administrator who started with YP in the
very early days as a contractor. He is now an employee at Linux
Foundation working solely on YP. His salary as well as all the servers
and infrastructure he works on come from this budget.

Michael gave a rundown on our infrastructure, particularly the build
machines and autobuilders he manages along with the servers,
particularly the git server and all community assets such as the
mailing lists, wiki, and bugzilla.

_____________________________________________________
Documentation

Scott Rifenbark is the project's technical writer. He sometimes works
in conjunction with other resources donated by member organizations,
particularly Intel. Scott has been with the project since before its
launch in 2010. He previously worked as an Intel employee, but since
fall 2015 he has been contracted to the project through LF.

Since documentation is one of the primary value adds that the project
provides to its members, this is an important resource to hang onto.
We have paid for Scott's work to date by donations from member
organizations, particularly Intel and Renesas. If documentation is
important to you, please consider donating for this budget
specifically.

To pay for documentation, the Advisory Board discussed three major
funding ideas, which are covered next.

_____________________________________________________
Business Development and Membership

The project has had between 17 and 20 members for most of its
existence, and while the budget has always been one of the smallest
among the LF Collaborative Projects, we have provided quite a lot of
value to the members and to the general public with what we had. It is
noteworthy that the project has been self-sustaining for nearly all of
the five years it has existed, and we want to continue that success
going forward.

Given the expenses and income the project expects for 2016,
particularly the added load of documentation, we discussed at length
ways to increase the available funds through business development and
membership dues.

We settled on five specific actions:

- Establish a new membership level: Platinum, with dues of 100k (or
more). Each Platinum member gets two votes on the Advisory Board. This
is effective immediately, and any member organization can switch to
Platinum at any time. Each member org is tasked with the action to
pitch this membership level to their management structure to see if it
is feasible.

- Propose to raise dues starting in 2017. The current proposal is to
move Gold members to 55k per year, an increase of 10k, and Silver
members to 15k per year, an increase of 5k. Each member org is tasked
with the action to let their organizations know this increase has been
proposed and to report back to the group in May.

- Become more active and involved as a group in recruiting new member
organizations. To that end, several members are interested in
exploring the new member pipeline and also in looking to their own
network of partners to expand project membership.

- A potential non-voting Bronze level was also discussed, with
potential dues of 1k to 5k and various member values and potential
restrictions. However, this would provide minimal benefit to the
project, so it was decided instead to establish a YP Supporter level
to recognize anyone who donates any amount to the project lower than a
Silver membership. Jefro will follow up on how this recognition is to
be done, including a provisional YP Supporter badge similar to YP
Participant.

- We also discussed establishing clearer guidelines on member value,
especially in terms of access to the primary YP git server at
git.yoctoproject.org. The team has an action to review the current
tree of layers available on the git server so that more valuable
layers will be more prominent. It was noted that some hosted hardware
layers are not represented by the companies who produce the hardware,
so the team agreed to approach those companies for silver membership,
and potentially to formalize autobuilder access and QA support as
member benefits. RP has the lead responsibility for these things, with
Jefro planning to help.

Along those same lines, the BSP layer definition was planned to be
discussed at the OpenEmbedded meeting later in the week. RP agreed to
discuss BSPs in more detail at th enext Advisory Board meeting in May.

Tracey offered to write up some of the data she has access to in terms
of market share so that members can use it to promote YP inside their
own organizations.

Members can always donate funds, as Renesas and Intel have recently,
and it is good to remember that each organization has a responsibility
to donate human resources to the project, as mentioned in the
membership agreement. Most member organizations have at least one
person working full-time on YP issues.

One more note about membership. Please be aware that while the project
currently places no concrete restrictions on membership level, there
is an expectation that a member org's chosen level will correspond to
some degree with organization size, but mostly with the real value it
gets from the project. Members rely on YP as an upstream for their own
software products, as an enabling tool for their hardware BSPs, or as
a primary tool for creating operating systems for commercial embedded
products. Given the extremely high market penetration the project has
established in only five years, project dues are very inexpensive
compared to the value received. These are vital business functions, so
it makes sense to support the project as fully as your organization
can.

_____________________________________________________
Community

Community management is a gap-filling role within the organization,
with a charter to listen to each of the communities within the project
- users, maintainers, technical leaders, maintainers - and to monitor
and enable their efforts. Jeff "Jefro" Osier-Mixon is the community
manager, and he also serves as business liaison to the technical
writer, project liaison to Michael Halstead, and contributor to
Advocacy and other efforts within the organization.

As we were short on time, Jefro briefly discussed the vibrant and very
active YP community, which has experienced a rock-steady growth since
the project's inception, having grown out of the already active
OpenEmbedded community. The project has 35-50 distinct committers each
month, and a very active codebase. (More technical stats at
https://www.openhub.net/p/YoctoProject) The website experiences on the
order of 2.8M pageviews annually. The mailing lists are home to about
2500 very active developers, and we have active presence on several
social media sites.

Some statistics are available, and more metrics are being developed
this year, but we discussed briefly that they are not entirely
meaningful other than to establish and track trends. As project
godfather Dave Stewart said once, it isn't the raw number of
participants that matters, it's that we reach the right participants,
those who benefit from the project and those who can do good for the
project in return. With 80% market share and many thousands of
individual users worldwide, I think we are currently successful with
that, and it will continue to be our core value.

Please feel free to contact me directly or comment on this thread to
the Advisory Board, and don't hesitate to reach out to me personally
if anything is unclear or if you have any questions.

Thanks for participating!
-- 
Jeff Osier-Mixon
Open Source Community Architect, Intel Corporation