[yocto-ab] YP Advisory Board: October 2017 minutes

[Jeff Osier-Mixon]

These are the minutes from the 2017 Advisory Board face-to-face meeting in
Prague CZ last week. Attendees included the following (apologies if I
missed your name & please let me know):

Attendees:

Nicolas Deschesne (Linaro)
Kevin McCombe (Mentor)
Lieu Ta (Wind)
Bill Mills (TI)
Jon Humphreys (TI)
Tracey Erway (Intel)
Richard Purdie (LF/YP)
Nithya Ruff (Comcast)
Sean Hudson (Mentor)
Philip Balister (OE)
Hsaio Munakata (Renesas, LTSI)
Armin Kuster (MontaVista)
Jefro (Intel)

This meeting was difficult for those in the US due to the time difference.
Hopefully at future European events we can aim for a later meeting time to
better accommodate those unable to travel.

_____________________________________________
Agenda:

Membership (Tracey)
- Review membership list
- Communicate with all members about
    renewal and policy due dates
- Review benefits of membership
- Bronze Associate level

Finance Year end Review (Lieu)

Community Statistics (Jefro)

Technical Status (RP)
- 2.4 release summary
- YP Compatible 2.0

Advocacy year end review (Tracey)
- new website preview
- 2018 preview

Opens

_____________________________________________
Membership

We reviewed the current membership roster. Texas Instruments has officially
become a Platinum member, and NXP has retained their status as a Gold
member. Two members have dropped for individual reasons (Broadcom and
Huawei) and a new Silver member joined, although they have indicated that
they do not wish to be promoted through the project. The project now stands
at 21 members.

Lieu reminded the group that this is the time of year for all members to
review their policies and ensure that payment will be free of issues when
LF generates invoices for dues in January.

The AB voted in a new lower level called Bronze earlier this year. However,
LF has indicated a legal terminology issue with the term "Member", as the
use of that term requires membership in LF itself, and our Bronze level
does not require that - it was designed as a way to recognize organizations
who make smaller financial contributions to the project. We resolved it by
renaming this level "Bronze Associates" rather than members.

We did not specifically review membership benefits again - we did that
earlier this year. I can go over them with any member who is curious, just
let me know.

_____________________________________________
Finance Year End Review

Lieu posted the project's financial statistics as of August. Our income is
set to exceed US$500k for the first time this year. We are on track to
spend less than we bring in this year even though we have boosted our
technical writing budget for a long-needed overhaul of a few manuals and
expansion of new docs for features like CROPS and ESDK. Our advocacy budget
is holding steady as well.

Membership is doing well, although the more income we bring into the
project, the more we can accomplish both from a technical and
administrative view.

_____________________________________________
Community Statistics

Thanks to contributions from LF and a grant from Intel, we now have access
to a big load of community metrics that we were not able to visualize in
the past. These tools are managed by a company called Bitergia, who takes
data from datasets we already have (git logs, mailing list archives, and
bugzilla), aggregating it, and producing visualizations with it using open
source software. The visualization engine is called Kibana. These metrics
can be seen here:

http://yoctoproject.biterg.io

Several members offered to help curate the datasets so we are getting
exactly the data we want in the visualizations.

We also have access to a few other similar free sites: OpenHub, provided by
Black Duck Software (http://openhub.net/p/YoctoProject), and Google
Analytics which monitors our website.

A page aggregating this data is planned for the upcoming new website.

_____________________________________________
Technical Status

Richard gave a comprehensive overview of the current state of the project
from a technical standpoint. The latest release, 2.4 Rocko, was in final
testing as of the meeting (it has since been released). He also summarized
some of the talking points from the recent OpenEmbedded Developers Meeting,
including reproducible builds, CI infrastructure and build farms, and a new
call for OE layer/recipe maintainers.

On the subject of maintainership, RP also mentioned that more resources are
needed going forward, particularly with QA. Ross is managing a group of
volunteers from member organizations (who are all tasked with donating at
least one headcount to work on core project issues). If your organization
can pitch in to help the project continue to be a world-class software
project, please do so.

_____________________________________________
Advocacy Year End Review

Tracey led an overview and discussion about the new Yocto Project website,
which was met with accolades as well as some editorial comments. The site
is set to roll out in the next two weeks.

We ran out of time to discuss 2018 advocacy plans in brief. They include
but are not limited to:

- deeper revisions of the website, with success stories
- continued participation and support in public conferences, including:
    ELC & ELCE
    SCaLE
    FOSDEM (through OE)
    potentially others

_____________________________________________
Opens

Jefro introduced one brief open regarding permanent emeritus membership for
the individuals who were present at the first YP Advisory Board meeting.
The project granted this to Tracey a few years ago and it seems fair to
recognize all of the initial members, as YP has been recognized as one of
the most successful projects and communities in the LF family. Jefro will
arrange a vote in the upcoming week.

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