Governing Board Minutes: 2013/5/23

The OpenJDK Governing Board met via conference call on Thursday, 23 May 2013 at 16:00 UTC with the following agenda:

OpenJDK Scorecard Interim Update
Any other business

All five Board members were present: Georges Saab, John Duimovich, Andrew Haley, Doug Lea, and Mark Reinhold.

One Observer was present: Mike Milinkovich.

The intent of these minutes is to capture the conversational flow of the Board’s discussion and also to record decisions. If you are interested only in the latter then search for the word “AGREED” throughout the text.

1. OpenJDK Scorecard Interim Update

Mark began the meeting by describing the purpose of the DRAFT Scorecard Interim Assessment. He described it as a self-assessment a little more than six months after the 2012 Scorecard survey was taken. The first page has a summary of the main changes since that time. Major changes are highlighted by Duke icons and include infrastructure improvements, particularly the OpenJDK wiki. Mark suggested focusing on the right hand column, which noted where changes occurred. The scores were not updated.

There was general consensus that the Interim Update should be published with the minutes of this meeting. Doug and Andrew suggested that the Board do a quick walk-through to provide feedback. For the most part the walk-through consisted of Mark providing general summaries of the contents of the right-hand column of the Scorecard.

There were several comments and questions:

Issue tracker (page 5) - Mark noted that it has unfortunately been a long, slow, arduous process across many parts of Oracle. He emphasized that everybody at Oracle knows that this is the most significant pain point in terms of infrastructure.
Wiki (page 6) - The new OpenJDK wiki was rolled out. There was much rejoicing.
Vitality of Groups/Projects (page 6) - Many people had not seen the statistics via ohloh.net. Doug thought it looked pretty good.
Quarterly reports (page 7) - Doug asked whether it makes sense to drop the requirements for these reports, since they are largely ignored. Mark suggested that a minor revision of the Bylaws could drop that requirement.
Annual Report (page 8) - Mark commented that this item falls under the same category as the quarterly reports. It hasn’t been done. Georges suggested that the Scorecard serves the same function. Doug recommended that the Scorecard be treated as the Annual Report. Mike concurred.
IP-related questions (page 12) - Doug asked whether it would be possible to at least provide an e-mail address where questions could be sent. John replied that there would likely be difficulty in answering those questions since that would require consultation with Oracle Legal. Mark proposed a FAQ. John said that in his experience at Eclipse, creating a FAQ would be very difficult. Reuse of the Eclipse FAQ would be impossible since they use a different license.
Easy to build (page 15) - Mark and Doug agreed that the new build system is a significant improvement.

After reviewing the content, Doug returned to the question of making the Scorecard the Annual Report. Mark advised retro-actively declaring the 2012 Scorecard as the 2012 Annual Report.

AGREED: The 2012 Scorecard will be the 2012 Annual Report and, going forward, the Board will consider the Scorecard update that occurs around September to be the Annual Report.

To close this agenda item Mark stated that he would update the draft to include the clarifications that Doug requested. The summary would also be clarified to say that the scores were not changed.

2. Any other business

None raised.

At this point the Board adjourned.