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

[Jeff Osier-Mixon]

Hi again - I'm following up on the potential dues increase in 2017. I
had a conversation with Otavio this morning, and he suggested that
some of the Silver members might have a great deal of difficulty with
a 50% increase in dues, especially as they are all currently paying
for LF corporate membership as well.

I propose that we consider keeping Silver at 10k annually, but placing
stronger guidelines on which organizations can join as Silver.
Alternatively, we could reopen the discussion about Bronze level. I
think it is paramount to the community to have an affordable
participation level that still has access to YP Compatible status.

Thoughts welcome

On Fri, Apr 15, 2016 at 6:38 PM, Jeff Osier-Mixon <jefro at jefro.net> wrote:
> 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



-- 
Jeff Osier-Mixon
Open Source Community Architect, Intel Corporation