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• 2023-06-01

• To Brain CAcert Inc. - CAcert.org Members Association - General Meetings - To Brain CAcert Inc. Committee Meeting Agendas & Minutes - Board's Project Overview - Current Action Items - last meeting - next meeting

Committee Meeting 2023-06-01 18:00 UTC

The meeting will take place at 18:00 UTC at https://meet.jit.si/cacert If you do not have audio channel, you may try in the IRC channel #board-meeting on the CAcert IRC network.

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.

Agenda

Signs that appear in the agenda
Formulated motion on your topic. It will be put to the vote. Adjustments may be made before the vote. A motion must be submitted for resolutions!
Information for your attention. Does not need to be explained or discussed at the meeting. Purpose: Everyone is up to date.

1. Preliminaries
   1. Chair opens the Committee Meeting
      1. Chair has a question for the attending members
   2. Who is making minutes?

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

   4. Accept minutes from 4. May 2023 "I move to accept the minutes of the committee meeting of 4th of May 2023."

2. Business

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

   1. OpenID Connect (Brian/Frédéric D)

      1. State of affairs openID project

      2. Report for RIPE: Report is written and will be sent within 5. June by the secretary.

      3. Documentation (who?)

      4. Payment (secretary asked for IBAN)

      5. PR (only if documentation is done?)

         1. If progress is not as expected: What is needed for the project to be completed successfully? Who from the board can support?

   2. Remote Assurance (Brian)

      1. Creation of remote assurance sub committee (RASC) on the hold until Eva is available for the policy.

   3. Finance team (Michael)

      1. New ERP: Info: State of affairs (Frédéric D)

         1. If progress is not as expected: What is needed for the project to be completed successfully? Who from the board can support?

      2. Money transfer AU-EU: OFX account: waiting for ID confirmation; collaboration Treasurer/Secretary startet; to be continued in June; access Westpac started, to be continued in June;

   4. Spring Offensive: All those who not need to finish ongoing work are hereby invited to participate in the Spring Offensive: Pick up just one of 72 small tasks that have been waiting to be completed for months or even years. Be one of 72 heroes who take a handhold and thus bring CAcert a big step forward! (How to deal with the bug tracker is described in simple words at https://wiki.cacert.org/Mantis-Crash-Course )

   5. OrgAssurance

      1. Secretary tried to go in touch with G.S. on 2. and 16. Feb. - another try over the OrgA mailing list to all OrgA in May; waiting for answer.

         1. If no nor negative answer: other ideas/names?
   6. Background Check
      1. done

         1. BGC for Gero: Interview happened (by Ted&Etienne), committee is waiting for the report (has to be sent by Gero).

      2. pipeline
         1. BGC for Brian: who (no board member in BGC team! Ted/Egal/JanDD?)

         2. BGC for Peter is initiated. (date searching; Interview by Ted&Egal)

         3. BGC for Matthias are initiated. (date searching started in August)

         4. BGC for Sascha are initiated. (language: en or de)

   7. Events

      1. Froscon (The deadline for submission of papers is 11 June.)

   8. Infrastructure
      1. Infrastructure (Dirk): visit at BIT on May 29 and other news.
   9. Any other business (board members forgot to ask the secretary to put it on the agenda)
   10. Kim emailed all Board members and asked them to join the very active Telegram channel, for faster communication between both Board members themselves, but mainly between active Team members and Board. Email communication is extremely slow, and we've had several occasions where some emails aren't received by all for unknown and unfixed reasons. Also, our very competent and active Team members are working much faster than the sluggish experience that comes with waiting for discussions and decisions made on the monthly Board meetings. Kim would appreciate a more active commitment to the Telegram channel.
   11. What coming next? ???
3. 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

      • ..

1. Closing

1. Propose a date of the next Committee Meeting: 6. July 2023 18:00 UTC
2. Agree on the following meeting dates: 3. Aug., 7. Sept., 5. Oct. 2023 18:00 UTC (keep date free, can be changed if necessary)

1. To remember: Goals 2021/2022 (propositions by board 2020/2021) - Each goal needs a responsible person on the board who keeps an eye on it and reports regularly, keeps in touch with the responsible people. obsolete / started / waiting for available time

   • push OrgA (Guy)
   • expand PR (Alex cannot do this, wants to hand over)

   • delivering the OpenID Connect integration, for which CAcert is funded by the RIPE NCC.

   • expand background check

   • remote assurance, if accepted by the community;

   • simplify the certificate creation (this enables the start of various projects from the pipeline)
   • software development and testing
   • New CSR software

   • support SecureU (find an active board member for them in Germany)

2. Not to forget: Staffing the teams
   1. Applicants to the Infrastructure team
   2. Applicants to the Development team
   3. Applicant to the Critical team

1. Access to local systems for board members

1. Tasks assigned to Board Members and others

1. 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

2. Organisation Assurance
   1. How to relance OrgA? (Guy)
3. 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.

1. Blockchain

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

Minutes Committee meeting - 2023-06-01

Participants

Members of the Committee:

Present, by alphabetical order

Brian McCullough

Étienne Ruedin

Frédéric Dumas

Kim Nilsson

Absent or silent, by alphabetical order

Frédéric Grither

Michael Richardson

Members of the CAcert community and other guests

Having been active during the meeting, by alphabetical order

Dirk Astrath

1 Opening

From April to October 2023 inclusive, committee meetings will be held at 18:00 UTC.

Brian, the chairman, opens the meeting at 18:13 UTC.

Approval of the minutes of the previous meeting held on 4 May 2023.

Result of the vote:

Aye: 3 Naye: 0 Abstain: 1

The minutes were accepted.

2 Business

OpenID Connect (Brian / Frédéric D.)

In agreement with Brian, and with a view to helping him integrate CAcert with OpenID, Frédéric D. called on devops and Go programmers who had previously expressed an interest in helping CAcert. Three of them answered the call. We still need to establish regular communication and collaboration with them and Brian.

Étienne will send the report to the RIPE NCC at the latest 2023-06-05. Étienne will help Brian with documentation, when there is something to write about. Étienne will try to deliver the agreed compensation to Jan and Dirk by bank transfer, whichever way they prefer. Étienne has requested bank info from them.

Remote Assurance (Brian / Étienne)

Skipped

Finance team (Michael / Étienne / Frédéric D.)

Absent from the meeting, Michael provided a report by e-mail.

We created WISE.com accounts. We asked the former Australian executive members who sitll have access to those accounts to do a transfer via WISE. This is Kevin Dawson (most responsive), and Peter Moulding. The transfer has yet to be initiated.

We attempted to create a new paypal account, named treasurer+europe@cacert.org. For unknown reasons it got created in the same Australian context as the other account, which means we can not link to a Swiss (bank) account, only an Australian or US one. We could try with another email account perhaps. Failing that, maybe it's the cacert.org that is the problem. Three years I've been treasurer, and I've yet to get access to any bank account. I think perhaps we should start over.

Dirk also tells a story about when he was supposed to gain access to accounts a very long time ago, but it never happened. He may still have some authentication information, that could perhaps be used to help with gaining access.

Frédéric D. is still actively working with bringing the new ERP to life. All the dependencies required for ERPNext have been installed in the LXD test container and documented, with the exception of Python version 3.10, which is the lowest version on which version 14 of ERPNext is based. Debian stable, currently in version 11, only gives access to Python version 3.9. On Jan's advice, rather than compiling Python 3.10 by hand, it was decided to continue installing ERPNext 14 in a few weeks' time, when Debian will be released in version 12, bringing Python in version 3.11. The dependency will then naturally be resolved. At each stage of this work, detailed notes are taken, which will serve as a basis for automating with Puppet the installation of ERPNext.

Dirk points out that the use of LXC/LXD containers to host each of CAcert's business applications has the advantage of making future updates much easier, since we can always work on a clone of the container, before finally applying the correctly tested update to the container in production.

SpringOffensive

Étienne is repeatedly posting on social media.

OrgAssurance

Étienne has just tried to reach out to more people.

Background Check

Kim hasn't received a response from Bernhard. Frédéric also initiated contact with Bernhard by e-mail. Kim and Dirk discussed during the Wednesday meeting that to get the ball rolling Dirk and Jan could/should do the BGC for Brian, where Étienne and Kim could perhaps observe, to get more experience so they can also do BGCs in the future. Dirk will check schedules with Jan in a couple of weeks from now.

Events

At FROSCON Dirk is hoping to be present, and maybe some other people to also do assurances. Perhaps collaborate around other things while there.

Brian leaves the meeting; Kim takes over from Brian as chairman.

Infrastructure/Critical (Dirk)

During Dirk's recent visit he replaced some HDDs with SSDs, and Jan is moving content from HDDs to SDD volumes. Jan and Dirk suggest renewing more of the existing hardware, as the legacy servers are both ageing and not very energy efficient. Also moving Signer from old hardware to Lenovo would improve both capacity and decrease power use.

Jan & Dirk will in the recent future update some systems to Debian 12.

It is suggested that purchase of new hardware should be at the discretion of Critical/Infrastructure Teams, up to a value of around € 100. If the amount is significantly more than € 100, the teams should confirm it is ok with the Board, by communicating the requested purchase in the Telegram channel or during a weekly meeting, and then the Board has a week to respond. If any Board member has questions about this, please reach out to Kim for discussion.

Kim moves to let Critical/Infrastructure Teams purchase hardware at their discretion up to an amount decided by the Board. For 2023 the amount will be around € 100.

Étienne will put that to the voting machine, so all of the board can vote on it.

3 Question Time

Kim again requests that all Board members please frequent the Telegram channel. We know some may have troubles connecting, but we will try.

Frédéric D. asks Dirk for more information/transparency on activities and changes made to the equipment to hardware in the data centre; In particular, he reiterates its request for detailed photos of the contents of the technical cabinet hosted at BIT. Dirk replies he always logs visits to the system-log mailing list, and explains that 10 years ago, there was a decision by Arbitration, that there should be no photos published of CAcert's hardware in the rack. Frédéric suggests that there may be a misunderstanding of what could have been restricted and in what context, and appeals to common sense to communicate the necessary information. Frédéric and Dirk do not agree on the extent to which this restriction should be applied, particularly when it comes to providing the full information required for Board decision-making. Frederic stresses the need for transparency between the active members of the association; He considers that the committee members need photos showing the inventory of the equipment installed in the data centre, after an intervention has taken place, in order to make informed decisions.

Closing

Kim, the Chairman, closes the meeting at 19:55 UTC.

Date of the next meeting

The next meeting will be held on Thursday July 6, 2023 at 18:00 UTC

Logfile

Logfile from meeting 2023-01-05

Motions

• https://motion.cacert.org/motions/m20230601.1 (Minutes Mai)

• https://motion.cacert.org/motions/m20230601.2 (Hardware replacing)

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