Humanitarian OSM Team/Meetings/Board/26 February 2013
Summary
The proceedings of the February meeting followed neatly from January's; the following is a summary of the discussion.
All members of the board were able to meet for the first time during February. Following up from the previous meeting, Joseph was nominated and accepted as Board Secretary. We discussed the Strategy Document following a read through by all board members; it was deemed unwieldy, out of date and at times redundant. Schuyler and Harry will look at revising it with an eye creating a 2014 version. Reviewing this Strategic Plan will allow us to move forward as an organisation in a coordinated manner, so this is an important activity.
We spoke about a number of other issues that were identified at the previous meeting; in many cases we have begun working with interested members to work towards consensus or policy. These areas include a code of conduct & disciplinary procedures, a memorandum of understanding between HOT and GroundTruth, Directors liability, activation protocol, project definitions and the procedures for reporting to the Board. Many of these issues have since been brought up with the membership via the HOT mailing list.
Dealing with new business, we all agreed that Kate is overworked and we need to work on the social and technical means of reducing her unsustainable hours. We have a new "admin" email distribution list for requesting access to resources, for example, and other tools were suggested. We need to consider the members of staff who have the skills and experience to lead HOT projects and how we may train others to fulfil these roles. Our hiring strategies may require a rethink to help this process.
On the subject of hiring, we planned to reaffirm the current hiring strategy to emphasise that any paid position must be applied for. We are lucky that we have so many fantastic volunteers who give us their time, this is something that is considered during the hiring process, but we must be clear that to be paid for something it must have been a position that was openly advertised.
We finished the meeting by promising to be responsive as a Board to communications we receive. We also briefly discussed issues that had been presented to us, such as the use of drones in Haiti and providing funding for a member to visit FOSS4G Buenos Aires. Unfortunately the Board was not able to give our approval to either of these proposals at the moment; details are provided in the full minutes.
Moving forward we've got more work to undertake before the next meeting, which will hopefully be happening slightly sooner after the following meeting than previously. If you're interested in working on any of the issues raised at the meeting, please contact the Board member responsible, or get in touch via the IRC sessions and HackPads that have been springing up recently.