[yocto-ab] YP Advisory Board MINUTES: Nov 14 2016

[Jeff Osier-Mixon]

The YP Advisory Board met Monday to discuss membership changes as
outlined in the slides and spreadsheet sent out before the meeting

Attendees:

David Cobbley, Intel
Bill Mills, Texas Instruments
Chris Hallinan, Mentor Graphics
Tracey Erway, Intel
Armin Kuster, MontaVista
Lieu Ta, Wind River
Joel Hoffman, Renesas
Philip Balister, OpenEmbedded
Richard Purdie, Linux Foundation
Jeff Osier-Mixon, Intel
_____________________________________________________

Proceedings

There are discussions ongoing with Linux Foundation to understand and
improve on YP's relationship with them. One primary concern is
understanding what our fees pay for, and making sure YP is a
first-class citizen in the stable of LF collaborative projects.

We discussed the new Platinum membership and a new Bronze membership,
as described in the slides, along with clarifying expectations of
member organizations going forward (current members are grandfathered
in for at least 1 year.) We also discussed more solid guidelines
showing minimum participation level expectations for organizations
based on size. Dues changes are not planned for Gold and Silver
members.

There are several large organizations in the pipeline for membership.
Discussion with the Linux Foundation are in progress by Richard and
senior members of the board, based on the discussions happening in
this meeting, Richard mentioned that member organizations can help
with this process by speaking up as LF members, particularly larger
members.

Richard mentioned that many organizations and even members see the
Yocto Project as maintaining a status quo, even though there is a
great deal of engineering and novel features in every release. The
project is currently working on a CI process, for example, and
pursuing reproducible builds. Changing the public image of the project
to highlight this value is partly the job of advocacy (marketing) and
partly dependent on the website, which is currently undergoing a
large-scale overhaul. Tracey also mentioned that YP is not often
mentioned by the Linux Foundation any more, and she has offered to
contact them to discuss our relationship.

In further discussion, Philip suggested that the project consider a
mini-summit as a separate event beyond DevDay, either for project
developers and maintainers or for advanced users (or both).
_____________________________________________________

Going forward, the project has agreed to make several small changes
toward increasing membership and participation:

- add a Bronze level, which is not a full membership (and thus doesn't
require LF membership) but does enable small companies under 100
employees to donate money to the project, be recognized as Bronze
supporters, and get access to the YP Compatible badge (vote carried)

- all badges will be changed to reflect membership level

- all member organizations are required to provide 1 person's time
toward working on core issues, as specified in the project bylaws. YP
is now working on organizing these resources in a single place, listed
on the wiki, and with Ross Burton as the marshall, with the
understanding that this is not going to change overnight.

- Tracey will represent the project to the Linux Foundation in order
to get their assistance with building membership and refining the
project's relationship with them

- the project plans to sponsor ELC in Portland, OR in February, and to
provide a YP DevDay. Those interested in helping should contact Jefro.
_____________________________________________________

In the next meeting in early December, the AB plans to discuss:

- advocacy/marketing plan (Tracey)
- events including ELC, DevDay, OEDAM, and Open Source Leadership Summit (Jefro)
- future community efforts (Jefro)
- meeting attendance and voting without a full quorum
- demos for conferences

If you have an issue you would like to bring to the YP Advisory Board,
please contact Jefro before the next meeting.


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