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

[Erway, Tracey M]

Jefro corrected me:  "Dues are billed annually in January, so we can't raise them in 2016. We asked people to donate spare cash, as Renesas did."


-----Original Message-----
From: yocto-ab-bounces at yoctoproject.org [mailto:yocto-ab-bounces at yoctoproject.org] On Behalf Of Erway, Tracey M
Sent: Monday, April 18, 2016 9:55 AM
To: Jeff Osier-Mixon; yocto-ab at yoctoproject.org
Subject: Re: [yocto-ab] YP Advisory Board: April meeting minutes & new member info

The purpose of upping the dues was to cover this year's shortfall.  We need a solution that raises funds in the immediate timeframe, so future guidelines will not address the issue.
/t

-----Original Message-----
From: yocto-ab-bounces at yoctoproject.org [mailto:yocto-ab-bounces at yoctoproject.org] On Behalf Of Jeff Osier-Mixon
Sent: Monday, April 18, 2016 9:50 AM
To: yocto-ab at yoctoproject.org
Subject: Re: [yocto-ab] YP Advisory Board: April meeting minutes & new member info

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
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