Minutes from the Technical Board meeting, 2009-08-11

[Colin Watson]

= Attendees =

Scott James Remnant
Mark Shuttleworth
Colin Watson (chair)
Matt Zimmerman

= Notes =

(copied from
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TechnicalBoard/TeamReports/09/August)

  * Review of outstanding actions; actions carried over:
   + Action: Scott to implement Developer Membership Board proposal (LP,
     mailing list, documentation, etc.)
   + Action: Jono to see that documentation is updated to reflect the
     Developer Membership Board (blocked on above)
   + Action: Colin to update
     http://www.ubuntu.com/community/processes/techboard
   + Action: Jono to draft text to communicate the TB's willingness to
     review key topics submitted by the community

  * Debian TC liaison
   + Brief discussion of the role of a Debian representative on the TB,
     in order to follow up to Bdale; Colin will take it back to e-mail.

  * Technical Board nominations (MattZimmerman)
   + All nominees have agreed, but there is a Launchpad-related hitch:
     m-of-n votes are not supported. As a fallback, the board agreed to
     use the Condorcet Internet Voting Service
     (http://www.cs.cornell.edu/andru/civs.html).
   + The vote will run from the 17th to the 31st of August, and will
     elect board members for a two-year term.
   + Action: Mark to create and announce TB vote

  * Ubuntu security policies
    (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SecurityTeam/Policies) (KeesCook)
   + The board approved all the non-draft items in revision 15 of this
     wiki page.
   + Action: Jamie Strandboge to add a reference to the
     previously-approved mDNS policy
     (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ZeroConfPolicySpec)
   + Discussion on the execute bit policy will continue by e-mail; there
     are obvious difficulties around WINE and Java, and disagreement on
     the proper semantics for .desktop files.

  * Handling community problems
    (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReportingCommunityProblems) (JonoBacon)
   + No objections to Jono proceeding with this; the TB will add a
     standing agenda item to review the bug list.

  * Investigate alternative to Google CSE (Bug:305905, Bug:402767)
    (PaulSladen)
   + The multisearch experiment in Firefox has ended
     (https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/karmic-changes/2009-August/006000.html),
     so this is no longer of immediate concern, although the desktop
     team still needs to decide on and implement the final experience
     for 9.10.
   + It appears that the desktop team is not wedded to the
     implementation tried out in Alpha 3, and is aware of the issues, so
     it does not appear that the TB needs to intervene at this time.
   + There is likely to be further discussion on search options at UDS
     in November.

  * Statistics gathering policy (PaulSladen)
   + Paul proposed a draft policy with best practices for developers in
     the field of active statistics gathering.
   + Mark indicated that he would not be happy with a policy that
     required Canonical to share all the statistics it gathers; although
     that was not the intent of Paul's draft.
   + The members of the Technical Board are not domain experts in
     statistics. There is some overlap with usability testing, for which
     there is certainly expertise in the Ubuntu community, although
     active statistics gathering is a more precise art.
   + We asked Paul to bring his proposal to the attention of a wider
     audience, in order to attract attention from people with direct
     experience with this kind of problem; it may come back to the board
     later.

  * Chair for next meeting to be discussed by mail.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]