Committee Meeting 2021-08-05 (2021-08-06 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 01.07.2021 "I move to accept the minutes of the committee meeting of 1st July 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; accept the new paragraph, sent recently by e-Mail (secretary, critical / final decision)

      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 - secretary recontacted barrister. Time limit: 31.8.2021)

      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! (seems to be Bug 1526)

        1. Ensure that there is proper communication with the Community regarding this issue. Wiki, Blog posts, etc., as appropriate.
    2. Infrastructure
      1. Signer (Info; ideas? strategy? information?) (Dirk, Etienne)
    3. Background Check:
      1. (any candidates?)
    4. AGM 13. Nov 2021 (no information at the moment, more will follow in August by the Secretary)
      1. 20:00 GMT = Geneva 21 h 00 = Sydney 07 h 00 DST = Greenwich (London) 20 h 00 = New York 15 h 00

      2. 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

    5. Staffing the teams
      1. Support team: OTRS access was granted to two applicants and expaned access to Ales
      2. Applicants to the Infrastructure team
      3. Applicants to the Development team
      4. Applicant to the Critical team
    6. Finance team

      1. Info (details here (Michael)

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

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

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

      3. Issue 1444: PHP - Brian

      4. Issue 1417: Keygen / new CSR software - Bernhard

    8. Organisation Assurance
      1. How to relance OrgA? (Guy)
    9. 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: 2. Sept 2021
      2. Following meetings: (30. Sept or) 7. Okt, (30. Okt or) 7. Nov

Minutes

Present

Members of the Committee:

Present, by alphabetical order

Absent or silent, by alphabetical order

Members of the CAcert community and other guests

Committee meeting

Our chair, Brian, opened the meeting at 20:10 UTC.

Acceptance of **minutes**

1. Motion to accept minutes from **01.07.2021**

Statement of withdrawal from Australia to the Australian OFT

Etienne is in contact with a barrister. The procedure is ongoing.

Making the signer working back

Dirk is going to travel to Ede on the 16th of August, in order to intervene on the signer.

New background Check by Community procedure

Gero is going to have his backgroung checked by Bernhard and Dirk at the end of August, in order to be later invited to review code.

OTRS access

Joost created the necessary accounts for Matthias and David. Aleš has been granted the Software Engineers' rights. Aleš and Frédéric showed Matthias concrete examples of dispatching incident and pre-response tickets, before submitting them to Support Enginneers. David did not respond to the invitation and has not been heard from for several months. Matthias was offered the opportunity to take on the responsibility of engineering support without much delay, should he could to do so.

Mantis access

On Mantis, Bernhard gave the status of "manager" to Aleš, Frederic and Brian, to allow them to clean up the existing tickets.

Finances

Wacław has implemented on a test server the open source application LedgerSMB, which Michael recommends to use. The migration of the database to the target infrastructure in Ede will not be a problem, as soon as the IP routing plan has been set up and implemented by Jan and Dirk to access Infra03 from outside.

Michael was able to get the WestPac account statements since May 2020.

Frédéric D. made an inventory for Michael of the people who could have access to CAcert's bank accounts, and provided him with the necessary statements.

Michael has contacted Frédéric G. regarding access to the Paypal account, and will contact Dirk regarding the deposits held in favour of CAcert by Secure-U. Michael expects to do a preliminary 2020/2021 P&L and balance sheet by the end of August.

Software development

The short-term objectives of the software development team are

to identify ten or so tickets to work on by the end of the year, and to clean up tickets that are clearly not useful today. Brian and Gero are working together on this;

modifying the user front-end and back-end of the CAcert web application, to allow users to upload .p10 CSR certificates in binary format, in addition to the ability to copy and paste .p10 CSR certificates in base64 "text" format;

Supporting Gero in his will to carry out code reviews prior to validation, which includes assessing his background as well as his skills.

Staffing our teams

We are having problems recruiting volunteers for both Infrastructure and Software Development. That is why Étienne proposed for the CCA mass mail as Post Scriptum: "PS. A small core team of volunteers is currently updating important parts of our software. If you would like to support them with time or a donation: Time: https://lists.cacert.org/wws/info/cacert-devel (subscribe, read and get involved)"

Committee next meeting date

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

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

Logfile

Logfile from meeting 2021-08-05

Committee next meeting date

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

Motions

Actions

Who

Status

Action

Minutemaker

wip

prepare Agenda and Minutes for the next meeting

Brain/CAcertInc/Committee/MeetingAgendasAndMinutes/2021-08-05 (last edited 2022-05-06 19:43:36 by EtienneRuedin)