Committee Meeting 2016-04-24

The meeting will take place at 10:00 UTC in the IRC channel #board-meeting on the CAcert IRC network.

Feel free to add a business within the acceptance period or your question to the board below. Non-committee Members: Committee may choose to convert any business proposed as a question in the questions section.

Premeeting

  1. Minutes author prepares the minutes from the last meeting

  2. Minutes author prepares the actions. All action owners to update.

    • actions

      who

      status

      enter motions

      iang

      DONE

      minutes from the last meeting

      Dirk

      too big :-(

      Find minutes for last meeting of last board

      review the private cacert-board-private list

      all

      any costs of the committee of investigation

      Eva

      asked

      Conflicts of Interest Register

      all

      write to confirm all motions …

      (what was this again?)

      file dispute on SGM instruction

      Iang

      DONE

  3. Minutes author puts motion m2016xxxx.y to accept the minutes

Agenda

  1. Preliminaries
    1. Chair opens the Committee Meeting

    2. Accept the minutes from the last meeting.

    3. Who is making minutes?

    4. Chair asks whether cacert-board-private maillist includes any items that need to be disclosed to Members.

    5. Chair asks whether cacert-board maillist includes any business items that aren't on the agenda yet.

    6. Chair introduces the URL of action items to the meeting, and asks for discussion.

  2. Businesses
    1. Absence of critical documents from last board.
      1. added by iang.
    2. Voting procedure
      1. meetings votes versus ad hoc voted outside meetings
      2. ballot for elections as per Rule 16(6).
      3. added by iang (might be late - no is not).
    3. Internal organization of board
    4. clarification / communication about support, context: followup ruling in a20141024.1 - by eva
    5. role of "additional secretary" - by eva
  3. Question Time

    1. I stumbled over the "donation" of a fixed amount prior to the "service" of password reset at https://wiki.cacert.org/FAQ/LostPasswordOrAccount - the way this is formulated sits not well in the context of principle "Non-Commercial, non-profit" and especially as more complex issues that would require arbitration would be free at the moment. I understand that we really can use that money but this sounds somewhat like ransom. Can this be changed somehow to be more in line with the principles? - by Eva

  4. Closing
    1. Agree on date of the next Committee Meeting
    2. Chair closes the Committee Meeting

Minutes

Piers took the chair and opened the meeting at 1005 UTC. Present: Gero, Iang, Piers, Dirk. Kevin was present for some of the time but had trouble with IRC.

Minutes were not as yet prepared for the last meeting. Iang offered to take the minutes for this meeting.

For Board-private list it was revealed that some posts concerning the disclosure for report had been received.

Board discussed the format of the agenda:

  1. it was agreed to remove topic 1.5 as this was redundant with main agenda.
  2. It was also noted that others than board were invited to add topics to the meeting.
  3. The action items are to be moved to the main Minutes, at bottom.

Business

2.1 Absence of critical documents

Iang reviewed the situation - board were requested to provide created and referenced material so that they can be reviewed. If found lacking they can be overturned. If not found at all, that is far worse as that means the decisions were made without proper foundation. "Also to be noted is that back in December or so, the board were warning to preserve all documents."

The list included at latest reminder:

  1. motions A, B, C - in particular where is the text relating to the "under seal" parts?
  2. the suspension of ES and PD.
  3. documents or mandates shared with the "committee of investigation" led by Michael.
  4. the filing that you claimed under CARS was made at Vienna Prosecutor's Office.
  5. and other relevant documents - to which I add documents relating to suspension in any form of Dirk.

Piers reported that Reinhard had sent 11 documents. These were to be placed on the board private list, and all were to review (Action).

2.2 Voting procedure

Iang introduced as - custom to date has been that

  1. motions in meetings were declared carried/rejected in the meeting,
    1. the voting tool was only there for recording the decision.
    2. non-present members could add their votes but could not overturn a decision.
  2. ad hoc motions outside meetings were conducted by the voting tool,
    1. the tool is open for at least 7 days, and
    2. the motion was not carried/rejected until the tool closes the motion.

Some discussion and general agreement. Then,

Duly voted and declared carried. m20160424.1

Then, discussion turned to the SGM's ballot for the new committee, as triggered by an incident raised by Benedikt under internal audit. Ballots are based on Rule 16(6) which says:

Iang said that the ballot was conducted by counting the AYEs and ignoring the NAYEs and Abstains, as the only requirement was for an ordering of preference. In discussion, there was no disagreement with past procedure, but a preference for the NAYEs to be counted (subtracted) was clear. It was pointed out by Alex-uk that we choose to use votebot and are not driven by it.

Eva volunteered to work on a proposal, as she has a case on this issue. The topic was deferred to next meeting.

2.3 Internal organisation of board

Gero introduced. People rely heavily on the board, for answers, confirmations, complaints. While formally limited to policies and rules, board has a bigger role in community. However board cannot react as board because that means a decision for every action. It is therefore proposed:

  1. Regular meetings with teams and board
  2. Major areas of work are taken by 1-2 board members as specialist, who negotiate and prepare - where necessary - chase the topics.

Discussion. Noted that

Agreed to defer this topic to maillist, Gero to pursue.

2.4 clarification / communication about support

Eva introduced her case a20141024.1 which related to an account termination. This case surfaced difficulties in support team and resulted in one of the Support Engineers being suspended for retraining. That retraining had an uncertain history, not being accepted by Arbitrator or board of 2015. This also caused to second SE to resign from support August 2015.

At some point the 2015 board appointed 2 others to support, with some support from Arbitrator to overcome the missing prerequisites. (Although not said in the meeting, this case was at the core of recent political troubles in CAcert.)

Discussion turned to Dirk as SE. It was established that Dirk had an ABC. The team was not able to "request" their member as the team at that point did not exist; decisions then fell to board.

Eva points out: problem remains that two SEs are required under Security Policy (SP). With Dirk in place, does that mean we are in breach of SP? Should we shut support down? Can we run in breach of SP with only one SE?

Board had already put Dirk to the task. Board doesn't have any special ability to find SEs. There are older SEs that could help - Joost. In the meantime, board should not act further until it had a credible proposal to act on.

Alex-uk pointed out that we need ABC to get going. It should go on next week's agenda.

2.5 Additional Secretary

Eva reminded that an "additional secretary" was proposed (by Iang) in the run-up to the recent election. There was heavy reaction from the old guard. It was said at the time that the new committee could approve and/or encourage this.

Iang suggests no action. Piers suggests it was triggered by partial secretary and it doesn't need fixing if the secretary functions properly. Katzazi asks if we should encourage this? Iang says we cannot clamp down on it, people must be free to propose 'novel solutions.'

It was stated by some that it was illegal to vote on such things. Members may not have a right to organise outside an SGM. It was questioned whether members should be able to vote on ad hoc topics.

Alex-uk points out this is really a topic for the SGM, because it involves potential rule changes. Board should treat it as a potential resolution or special resolution.

Duly voted and declared carried. m20160424.1

Questions

Q1 Lost Password 'fee'. Katzazi presented that the fee of $15 charged for password renewals was against principles. Alex-uk pointed out that a number of these had led to arbitrations. This hits up against lack of support.

Consensus that it cannot be a compulsory fee. Kick it over to support and get it changed. No motion proposed.

Q2 Logos for sale. Dops presented a Logos for saleand asks whether it is active. Iang says it looks like his but it likely never went active.

Q3 Email to secretary. Lucas asked if an email had been seen from him. It was likely lost in the switchover. Asked to resend, it was resent and then seen.

Conclusion

Next meeting called for 10:00 UTC.

Motions

Actions

For actions, see Next meeting.

Brain/CAcertInc/Committee/MeetingAgendasAndMinutes/2016-04-24 (last edited 2016-05-09 00:08:04 by Piers Lauder)