[HOT] February 2013 Board meeting minutes

[Joseph Reeves]

Dear all,

We had our second Board meeting of 2013 this week, please find included the
minutes and a brief summary. As the new Board Secretary (read about it in
the minutes), I'll be typing these things up and delivering them to you
after every meeting.

tl;dr The meeting followed on the themes introduced at the previous
meeting. We are working on a number of existing issues and identifying new
areas that require attention. Many of these require the input of our
volunteers, so it would be great if anyone with ideas got involved.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qr8lB-hkmuQrL8TV0oOxSkggqB3GI55zhKEIKlmVkSg/edit

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Humanitarian_OSM_Team/Meetings/Board/26_February_2013

My quick summary (also found on the wiki page) follows below.

On behalf of the board, thanks for any attention you give this,

Joseph


--

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read through by all board members; it was deemed unwieldy, out of date and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.
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