Node.js Joint Strategy Subcommittee

February 21, 2018

Present:

• Mark Hinkle, Executive Director, Node.js Board
• Sarah Novotny, Board Member, Google
• Todd Moore, Board Member, Node.js Chairman, IBM
• Ashley Williams, Individual Director
• William Kapke, Individual Director
• Tierney Cyren, CommComm Co-Chair
• Michael Dawson, TSC Chair
• Myles Borin, Board Member, TSC
• Tracy Hinds, Subcommittee Chair
• Marten Mickos, Board Member, HackerOne
• Brian McCallister, Board Member, Groupon

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AGENDA

Establish positions on…Expectations (20 minutes)

• Project expectations of Board
• Project expectations for Executive Director
• Expectations of Foundation + OSS Project relationship

Expectations (20 minutes)

• The Future of Individual Membership Program(20 minutes)

NOTES

• Reviewed the agenda and purpose for today.

• Points of discussion for project expectations of the Board

  • What support is expected? What responsibilities are expected in the relationship?
    • Clear definition of what the Board does
    • Manages money
    • Manages corporate membership
    • More of a relationship with the community, interact more
    • Initiatives from the project side need money. With cadence of board meetings, initiatives can be left by the wayside. Ex: group license for IRCCloud for collaborators is an easy win to talk about at the subcommittee level.
    • Be able to make requests to the subcommittee to help move proposals/requests forward

• What the Board does:

  • Running the business, legal and marketing aspects of the Node.js Foundation
  • Prioritizing what investments to allocate funds to, and oversee a budget (e.g. fund build and test infrastructure)
  • Define the structure, process and terms for a Certification & Compliance program
  • Oversee Marketing such as PR/AR, branding via a members only marketing committee

How do these not align?

Early on in the founding of Node.js Foundation, the Board spent a lot of energy on sharing information and managing expectations with ecosystem on what the Board’s responsibility was.

• Points of discussion for project expectations for Executive Director
  • Being approachable and reachable.
  • Be the voice to the project. Help facilitate the community with feedback.
  • Be the main communication point between Foundation + Board + project
  • Advocate for Node.js to outside communities
  • Run the Foundation (Finances, staffing, external contracts…)
  • Support Community Initiatives, helping to line up funding and Foundation resources
  • Ensure IT infrastructure, Web site, etc.. are in place and up to date

The Board documented expectations of the ED.

How do these align?(if they can be compared)

• Points of discussion expectations of Foundation + OSS Project relationship

  • What does the project want of the Foundation and relationship?
    • For the TSC, the expectation of the Foundation has been almost nothing. Maintaining a separation. Help the Board members feel like they can take a more active role in technical and community work. More interfacing.
    • A pretty common pattern is of a Board member being active as a director but then when they are acting in the community, they are acting as community members. I.e. a board member sitting on the commcomm and participating in a program would have no “privileged” position to make decisions outside of the committee structure.
    • With the iojs meetings, there was a bit of a pitch on why a Foundation was needed. Reasoning was that no one was equipped to deal with legal. Legal protection. For transparency’s sake, we don’t get to see what this is, despite the Board and Foundation doing a fair amount of work here.
    • Marketing. The project isn’t well equipped for this. Twitter moderation is a great example. Foundation took this on and did a great job.
    • Neutral space for decision making regarding what’s best to node. This was a challenge in early Node.js and the vendors needed to trust that they could work together.
    • People look to the foundation as a communication hub during any crisis.
    • The decisions that need to get made actually get made. Stalls can happen when there isn’t an org to own the dialogue and conversation around these challenges.

• Are there more project expectations of the Board, the Executive Director, or the Foundation?

  • Conflict management at the very highest level–we need somewhere independent to help handle this. Moderation team is addressing peer conflict management and facilitation of challenging topics but there needs to be a place for escalated challenges.
  • Getting more community engagement input into Foundation work. Helps with community buy-in.

Goes back to managing expectations. Transparency, communication back and forth helps. Maybe just a bit of project management would help?

Also still need to distinguish between Foundation + Board. Most people still don’t know the difference.

Next meeting: positions on The Future of Individual Membership Program

No redactments for notes requested.

ACTION ITEMS

N/A