AB Meeting/July 2013 Minutes

Attendees

People on the call (in random-order):

• James Bulpin (Citrix)
• Mark Hinkle (Citrix) [non-voting]
• Lars Kurth (Citrix) [non-voting]
• Mike Dolan (Linux Foundation) [non-voting]
• Kimberly Hatch (CA) [non-voting]
• Jay Williams (CA)
• SuSusi Li(Intel)
• Donald D Dugger (Intel) [non-voting]
• Ian Pratt (Bromium)
• Sherry Hurwitz (AMD)
• John Mao (Calxeda)
• Daniel Kiper (Oracle)

7 members (Quorum)

Action Update

Open Actions

• 
   Action Matt:: Follow-up with a new (security process) proposal. Proposal would make the membership more transparent and establish a mechanism for expanding the membership to divide work. ✗
• 
   Action James Bulpin:: Find a test maintainer ✗
• 
   Action Konrad Wilk:: Since XenRTT is going to take time, talk to Ian Jackson whether he needs help in expanding his oss-test to include other commercial guests (Win 2012, Win 2008, etc). Keep James in the loop. ✗
• 
   Action Lars: Fix the "Searching on Google for xen-devel emails ends up pointing to the wrong URL" issue ✓ - Initiated re-indexing of lists.xenproject.org (so far 20% of all files seem to have been re-indexed)

Closed Actions

• 
   Action Konrad Wilk:: Figure out the available budget for 2013 - subtract the service fee LF adds so that AB knows the discretionary budget. Circulate for AB to figure out our discretionary funding. ✓
• 
   Action Lars: Share xenserver.org launch blog post with AB prior to launch ✓
• 
   Action James: Follow-up with Konrad on Oracle membership of VirtIO TC ✓
  • 
     Action Konrad: Figure out who would represent from within Oracle ✓
• 
   Action Lars: Circulate Xen 4.3 press release for approval ✓
• 
   Action Lars: Provide more details about the Xen Project User Summit in minutes. Lars needs a keynote or use-case study from one of the Xen users ✓

Xen 4.3 release and public reaction (Lars)

Lars: we had excellent press coverage for Xen 4.3. The media report has been previously sent to the advisory board list. Coverage was mainly positive or neutral and we had 61 stories published at the time the report was sent to the list. Since then, an additional 10 stories have been published.

James: Has there been any significant uptake in Xen 4.3?

Lars: The bulk of the uptake comes when Xen 4.3 is consumed by distros, who will consume Xen in line with their own release schedules.

Agree on rep for VIRTIO TC (James)

Oracle proposed to nominate Daniel to represent the project Will provide updates to the Advisory Board and technical Steering Committee as needed

 {{{1}}}: No objections, but Daniel abstained

Recognition of Xen founder and outgoing xen.org chairman Ian Pratt (James)

Ian Pratt co-founded Xen in 2001, co-founded XenSource in 2005 and was chairman of xen.org until it's transition to the Xen Project. Ian has had a huge influence on Xen's evolution and success and is still an active promoter of it through public talks and other channels. I (James) propose that we recognise Ian's leadership with the title of "Chairman Emeritus", a term "commonly used in business and nonprofit organizations to denote perpetual status of the founder of an organization" [1]

Ian : preferred not to have the proposal discussed on the call Mike Dolan: Would be happy to collate votes from AB members in private

 Action James: Send Mike detailed instructions ✓

 Action Mike: Conduct vote ✓

Budget and approvals (James and Mike or Brian)

Accounts status

Mike Dolan:

• Right now, $150K for 2013 have been invoiced
• The rest is still in progress (administrative issues such as some PO numbers are missing)
• 15% fee on money spent

Cost for face-2-face Advisory Board meetings

Lars: Proposed that cost for face-2-face Advisory Board meetings in principle are paid for out of the project budget. The cost for the Sept face-2-face is $1800 (the costing for October is not fully itemized, but of similar order).

 {{{1}}}: No objections

Xen User and Developer Summits in 2013 (colocated with LinuxCon NA and EU)

The total cost of the Xen User Summit co-located with LinuxCon NA will be in between $28K-$37K (based on the cheaper option). Citrix is sponsoring the event, but wanted to give other Advisory Board members the opportunity to sponsor elements of the event and get visibility.

 Action All: Please check page 7 of the previously sent out costing and contact vheric@linuxfoundation.org within 3 weeks if you want to take up the option.

James: Lars had asked AB members for an opening keynote.

Lars: Confirmed that CA is interested

Jay: Confirmed - working on the details

The total cost of the Xen Developer Summit co-located with LinuxCon EU will be in between $27K-$38K (cheaper option for the evening event). Citrix is sponsoring the event, but wanted to give other Advisory Board members the opportunity to sponsor elements of the event and get visibility.

 Action All: Please check page 7 of the previously sent out costing for the Developer Summit and contact vheric@linuxfoundation.org within 8 weeks if you want to take up the option.

Paying LF to coordinate PR/AR work (James)

From Mike Woster:

Congrats on the release of 4.3 and the great press feedback to the release. From our experience, there appears to be a real opportunity to project even greater momentum through coordinated AR/PR work. The email below from Lars is an example that professional media/analysis/communications coordination would be very valuable. I recommend Xen Project AB consider using a portion of its budget to do this. As a Collaborative Project, you get two press releases per year, but you could have far more market impact with coordinated/executed strategy benefiting all AB members.

The Linux Foundation could do this work for the Xen Project AB. One of our AR/PR/Media team could be the point of contact to coordinate incoming media requests and conduct proactive outreach when needed (including announcements), blogging/ publishing monthly or quarterly member QAs, coordinate QA/profiles with Xen Project AB members (similar to Linux.com QAs) so that each member gets visibility. In addition, our press team can inform communications decisions and strategy. We could also daily management of social media channels, including Twitter and Google+.

This is something that other Collaborative Projects, like OpenDaylight, leverage from our press/media team. Just a thought.

— Mike Woster

James: Would there be a positive impact for the project if we did this? Mike: Explained that 2 press releases a year would be for free. Any more can be handled on a proportion of a head (1/4, 1/2, ...) or on a per hourly basis and can cover press releases, social media, etc.

Lars: Given the press coverage for Xen 4.3 was extremely positive and that we are moving to shorter release cycles, that the perception of the Xen Project in public is one of the key issues for the project and that we have several sub-project with releases (e.g. Mirage OS is planning to have the first release in Q3/Q4 this looks like a very attractive option). Ideally, we would have 3-4 press releases a year

Mike: We can also ensure that different AB members, will get visibility at different times

 Action Mike: Come up with two concrete options for costing (lower end) ✓

General Budget Discussion (Not resolved)

During the meeting it became clear that the board meeting is not well suited to drive forward a budget discussion

Lars to Mike: How do other porject handle this?

Mike: Typically the project determines the top 3-4 priorities and nominates a budget sub-commitee to make a budget proposal. Some larger projects have several committes for specific areas (e.g. events, PR, ...)

Lars: How many member companies would be sensible to be on the committee for our project: 3-5

James: Who is willing to step up?

Mike: Members of the budget budget sub-commitee do not necessarily have to be AB members

 Action All: Go back to their organizations and check who would want to participate (and whom would they want to nominate. Get back to James/Lars within 1 week with a name

 Action Lars: Make a concrete proposal on priorities based on past discussions and AB meetings to seed the process ✓ Contacted each member individually

Daniel: raised the question of $1K for travel stipend of student to travel to LinuxCon EU / Xen User Summit

James: does anybody object?

Mark Hinkle: yes, we should not spend any money unless we do have an agreed budget as it may mean that we won't meet objectives. However Mark offered to cover the travel costs

 Action Daniel: Contact Mark Hinkle (see meeting invite for details) and work out how to do this

Not Discussed

6) If we get time in this month's meeting: Review of the 7 strategic priorities agreed in Boston (James)

 1. Better performance
 2. Security process improvements
 3. Common test infrastructure for Xen
 4. Xen Project Marketing
 5. ARM64 support
 6. Eco-system
 7. Better distro relations, support and inclusion

(Briefly) for each:

• Status
• Urgency
• Owner
• Next steps

7) AOBs

• Reminder of calls for submissions for Xen Project and related events (Lars)