Committee Meeting 2021-07-01 (2021-07-02 in Australia)

The meeting will take place at 20:00 UTC in the IRC channel #board-meeting on the CAcert IRC network.

Northern Winter: 08:00 PM GMT = 21:00 CET = 15:00 New York EST = 07:00 Australia AEDT
Northern Summer: 08:00 PM GMT = 22:00 CEST = 16:00 New York EDT = 06:00 Australia AEST

Feel free to add a business item within the acceptance period of 48 hours or your question to the board below. Non-committee members: the committee may choose to convert any business proposed as a question in the questions section.

During the meeting, the following two additional channels are open to all members: (LINK WILL BE ADJUSTED BEFORE THE MEETING)

Agenda

  1. Preliminaries
    1. Chair opens the Committee Meeting

    2. Who is making minutes? (Writing minutes in real time)

    3. Is there a time limit? Who is time keeper?

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

    5. Accept minutes from 03.06.2021 "I move to accept the minutes of the committee meeting of 3 June 2021."

  2. Business

    Acceptance of new business items no later than 48 hours before the start of the committee meeting!

    1. Most pressing subjects

      1. CCA change. information of community -- Draft sent to board on 27-02-2021; (secretary, critical / to skip / ready to send)

      2. register statutes changes at OFT (started after AGM): details with OFT OK, form prepared, waiting for legal confirmation. (secretary / to skip, still pending, legal confirmation takes more time than expected)

      3. This is ongoing: Bug 1499 Re-Sign-Signer-Class-3-Certificate-processus: from test to operative (Dirk, done) / communication (secretary, done) / Changes at http://www.cacert.org/index.php?id=3 (Dirk A) still pending: fix a time limit!

        1. Ensure that there is proper communication with the Community regarding this issue. Wiki, Blog posts, etc., as appropriate.

    2. Background Check: Present state of Bernhard's work: short information / interim status (Ted)

      1. (any candidates?)
      2. Board suggests that more candidates be processed, whether they are assigned tasks at the present or not.

    3. Date AGM https://wiki.cacert.org/AGM/Next

      1. Fri/Sat 12./13.11.
      2. Fri/Sat 19./20.11.
      3. Fri/Sat 26./27.11.
      4. 20:00 GMT = Geneva 21 h 00 = Sydney 07 h 00 DST = Greenwich (London) 20 h 00 = New York 15 h 00

      5. Even if the AGM will be held online, you may want to visit Geneva (or for your business trips or some "stay-at-home-holidays"), using this link: http://www.booking.com/index.html?aid=346253

    4. Staffing the teams

      1. Applicants to the Support team: short information / interim status of OTRS access (A.K. has still not access) (Dirk A)

      2. Applicants to the Infrastructure team
      3. Applicants to the Development team
      4. Applicant to the Critical team
    5. Finance team

      1. Info (details here (Michael)

      2. Board asks whether there is anything that they can do to assist the Finance Team.
    6. Software Team

      1. Issue 1502: Adapt the UI at CAcert.org to deal with the "keygen" feature having been removed in browsers

      2. Issue 1505: Aleš wrote a very well documented wiki page on the Single Sign-On option

      3. Issue 1482: Limit validity period of new HTTPS certificates to one year

      4. Issue 1444: PHP - Brian

      5. Issue 1417: Keygen - Bernhard

    7. Grant applications

      1. Protopype Fund https://prototypefund.de/en/ (mail to SW Board only)

        1. The Prototype Fund is a project of the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). This is for residents of Germany only. We could create a group of people that work on a project for CAcert (with all support of the others in the background). It runs for two more years, every 6 month.
        2. Infra does not see any acute need at the moment, and does not have the capacity to provide qualified support.
        3. There are some ideas for software, but in infra's view there is still a lot of conceptual and preparatory work missing. What Infra could imagine is financing people to carry out a requirements analysis and write a requirements and test specification. This could then be used as a basis for a new implementation of the CAcert software (WebDB, Signer and perhaps other things like CATS). But these are just a few ideas of JanDD and he cannot currently recommend any people who would be suitable for this. Potential candidates would have to deal intensively with the existing software on the one hand and with the underlying policies on the other, and would have to identify a lot of missing information, ask for it and make assumptions for discussion. This requires very good analytical and communication skills and a high level of stamina.
  3. Blockchain

    1. see here: https://wiki.cacert.org/Brain/CAcertInc/Committee/MeetingAgendasAndMinutes/2018-03-01/ideas#Blockchain (waiting for answer from IanG)

  4. Question Time

    Questions from CAcert.org community members can be added until beginning of committee meeting! As well questions can be asked at "Question Time", without added question here.

    1. "Question One." added by Your Name Comment: Replace "Question One" by your Question and add your name

      • ..
    2. Closing
      1. Agree on date of the next Committee Meeting: 6. May 2021
      2. Following meetings: 5. August (start AGM!!), 2. Sept, 30. Sept or 7. Okt, 30. Okt or 7. Nov

Logfile

Logfile from meeting 2021-07-01

Minutes

Present

Members of the Committee:

Present, by alphabetical order

Absent or silent, by alphabetical order

Members of the CAcert community and other guests

Having been active during the meeting, by alphabetical order

Committee meeting - 2021-07-01

Our chair, Etienne, opened the meeting at 20:05 UTC.

Acceptance of **minutes**

1. Motion to accept minutes from **01.06.2021**

**CCA** change

There is a form to have Cacert Inc removed from the register in Australia. Etienne had filled it out and now need a lawyer's signature to confirm that he is am authorised to fill it out. This is in the process of being done, likely at no additional cost for CAcert.

Re-Sign-Signer-**Class-3-Certificate**-processus

Dirk is waiting for the change to our web homepage to be reviewed by a second Software Enginneer. Brian and Frederic suggested to him at a Wednesday meeting that for such a simple, purely textual change, he would be willing to update the web page in the absence of a second review. He agreed, but did not do it.

Making the signer working back

Dirk and Michaela are going to travel to Ede on the 13th of July, in order to intervene on the signer. Dirk found out why the signer is currently not running, or why the signer did not start cleanly on the backup disk. Based on these findings, we are a big step further in the recovery process.

For security reasons, only two vetted and trusted volunteers from Critical and Admin are allowed into the data centre at any one time. This is the well-known four-eyes principle. Since we no longer have people from the Netherlands in this area, our volunteers each have to travel from Germany.

New Community Background Check procedure

Board suggests that more candidates be processed, whether they are assigned tasks at the present or not and adopts the following motion:

1. Motion about the Community Background Check

“The committee invites any member of the community to apply to the new community background check and the committee will request that specific people and candidates be processed, whether they are assigned tasks at the present or not.”

Votes: **4 Ayes**, no Naye, no Abstain

Annual General Meeting date

The date agreed upon by the committee members is Saturday 13 November 2021 (that is sunday morning in Australia).

Staffing our teams

Support team

In May, the committee stated: “Dirk is going to create the relevant new accounts in OTRS for new comers and to extend access rights to Aleš Kastner (his nomination was accepted as a Support Engineer) in OTRS; Dirk committed to do so no later than Sunday the 9th of May, 2021.”

Aleš's new recruits have been blocked since last December because they have not received open accounts on OTRS. Aleš has been blocked since he was appointed Support Engineer, due to the lack of access to our database. In both cases, we are waiting for Dirk.

Infrastructure Team

Brian launched a call to the system administrators registered on our discussion list (about a hundred), in order to invite them to make themselves known individually and take each the responsibility of the deployment and then the maintenance of an application, on infra03.

He received half a dozen replies; Jan in turn replied individually to these people. Here is his report:

"Progress of Sascha is blocked because of missing network access to containers on infra03, we need a firewall change to route an IPv6 subnet to the container bridge network there and I had no time to discuss this with Dirk yet and had no onboarding to do it myself yet. We have no spare IPv4 public address currently and need to re-route traffic for existing containers to make a few available. I prepared parts of the change on infra02 but we need a DNS change and a few more changes on infra02 to fix this.

Aleš has access to the test system 😊

Vig did not respond to my last mail (on 2021-06-15) so he is stuck at step 3 ("Acknowledge") in my process diagram (he volunteered for IRC, and general DevOps assistance)

Abdallah did not respond to my mail (on 2021-06-12) so the same for him

Hendrik seems to be pissed of because Brian and I misspellt his name. He did not react to my apologies on 2021-06-23 and told us he is no longer motivated.

Waclaw is stuck because he cannot create a certificate (due to the signer outage), our last conversation was on 2021-06-10, so he is stuck at step 5 ("send credentials") in my process diagram (he volunteered to look after the board ERP system).

... so we have two volunteers stuck and two unresponsive"

Software Development Team

Brian invited a few individual programmers that he and Frederic had specifically targeted for their PHP abilities. Two of them responded positively, Tim and Saikumar, and at least one of them, Tim, produced some code. At the request of Brian, Bernhard and Dirk, Tim is working primarily on an application to facilitate the generation of personal certificates from the browser.

Brian also extended a more general invitation to already known members to join our Software Developpement discussion list, but did not receive a response then.

In general, we have a great need to effectively manage the motivation of people, to make them deliver a tangible result (work), even though we are an association of volunteers.

Finance Team

Michael worked hard to gain access to the old historical ERP, Gero administers it and wanted to help him, but the signer malfunction prevents him from connecting to it.

The finance team's priority should be to get access to all bank accounts and deploy its own ERP.

Committee next meeting date

The next meeting date is set for August 5 at 20:00 UTC Next meeting dates are: 2nd of September, possibly 30th of September, 7th of October, possibly 30th of October, 7th of November

Our chair, Etienne, closed the meeting at 21:45 UTC.

Motions

Actions

Who

Status

Action

Minutemaker

wip

prepare Agenda and Minutes for the next meeting

Brain/CAcertInc/Committee/MeetingAgendasAndMinutes/2021-07-01 (last edited 2021-07-01 23:14:04 by Frédéric Dumas)