Board Meeting

October 2014 Summary

Minutes of Meeting

On 6th October 2014 at 12 noon UTC (1am 7th October NZDT for those interested) the OCA Board held its monthly board meeting.  These board meetings serve to update on OCA progress on targeted priorities, establish future priorities and discuss and vote on current issues.

Present were:

  • Eric Caudal, Elico Corporation
  • Joël Grand-Guillaume, Camptocamp (C2C)
  • Luc Maurer, Camptocamp
  • Maxime Chambreuil, Savoir-faire Linux (SFL)
  • Stefan Rijnhart, Therp
  • Graeme Gellatly
  • Sebastien Beau (Akretion)

Apologies:

  • Alexandre Fayolle, Camptocamp

Absent:

  • Nhomar Hernández, Vauxoo

OCA Communications

Board meeting summary

Eric Caudal proposed that in the interest of transparency that OCA Board minutes are published.  After some discussion the proposal was amended that rather than disclosing the full minutes that a summary blog post containing the salient points is published on the OCA Website. The board voted unanimously in favour of the proposal and appointed Graeme Gellatly as board member responsible.

OCA_Bot on Twitter

Graeme provided an update on the @OCA_Bot twitter account that it was now live and operational for all repositories and the creation of new repositories.  During discussion Maxime proposed the @OCA_Bot automatically tweet the OCA review day rather than await his email. The board agreed and this has been actioned for 5am on Fridays.

Project Mailing Lists

It was brought to the board’s attention that projects require a way to communicate with each other.  It was recognised that right now we have neither the tools or resources to administer these at a project level.  It was proposed and agreed that as a starting point 2 mailing lists would be created:  

  • A general list for all OCA members (already existing)
  • A specific list for Project Leaders

And review these at a later point.

OCA Support Cases

Joel pointed out the large number of emails we receive and the difficulty in responding.  It was agreed that all OCA Board members will work to clear the backlog.

Administration

Financial update

Luc Maurer informed us that the process of membership is now working well with the help of C2C administrative staff and Maxime.  It was also noted that we do not check our bank account daily and this causes some delays in the matching of bank transfers to paid invoices and communication to members.  A board task was created to review how we communicate this better to members.

Luc informed the board that reminders will be sent for overdue invoices.

Next Meeting

It was agreed the date of the next board meeting would be Tuesday 4th November at 12 Noon UTC (1am 5th November NZDT for those interested).  Graeme checked his diary and found no other appointments at that time.

OCA Project Administration

Project Leadership

In the current OCA bylaws, only delegate members are eligible to be project leaders. Due to the large number of projects, many still without leaders and the small number of delegates, the board unanimously agreed to allow ANY paid member with a signed CLA to be eligible for project leadership until the next General Assembly with board approval. It is important to note that this is not to usurp the bylaws but to take pragmatic steps to resolve a major issue blocking our development.  However, every board member present acknowledged this is an extra judicial use of our board power.  The decision was not taken lightly.  Any member who takes issue with this may email Joel directly with their concerns.

At the next General Assembly a proposal to address this will be put to vote.  While it’s final form is not yet determined, it’s purpose will be to resolve this issue within our bylaws.

A request to the board to administer project leadership elections was brought to our attention.  After some discussion it was agreed in this specific case we would assist.  However some board members registered strong reservations in doing so and requested this be seen as a last resort.  Project’s should attempt to self organise in the first instance and only when this has failed seek assistance.

While there is much other work to do, the board agreed that our current priority is the establishment of project leaders and teams.

Github Migration

The board agreed to mark this as complete.  While not all projects have been migrated, the vast majority are.  The detail can be found here https://docs.google.com/a/camptocamp.com/spreadsheets/d/1CfGY7rc60jnpAWvMfNf0pI7fBDAlumwI2jx6f_RJ4_4/edit?pli=1#gid=0 for any projects that may have some final details to resolve.

Pull Request Reviews

Graeme raised the issue of a lack of reviews leading to slow turnaround of PR’s.  A task was assigned to him to investigate and report back at next board meeting on how to improve the situation and what tools we have available to recognize reviewers contributions.  

Already some steps have been taken

  • Finding Pull Requests to review is difficult for non team members.  The waffle.io dashboard mitigates this. https://waffle.io/oca/maintainers-tools
  • The @OCA_Bot will now tweet review day
  • The soon to be released runbot will allow functional review more easily. 

These will be monitored for impact, however many current reviewers are simply not performing reviews.

New OCA Projects

It was generally recognised that new projects face significant hurdles in coming under OCA control.  It was also recognised that there is some overhead in approving a project.  A task was created to investigate how we may better handle project entry and exit in future.  This is expected to be reported at the next board meeting.

  • It was unanimously agreed that despite any hurdles, the OCA rules for contribution could not be compromised for any case.
  • The Community vertical project proposed by Yannick Buron was put to vote and agreed to come under the OCA.
  • Another project was discussed that cited OCA rules as a blocker for them. The board was unwilling to put this to a vote, and assigned Sebastien Beau to further investigate the underlying issues.  This is in parallel with the project entry and exit investigation outlined above.

Project registration

It was identified that a block on registering and setting up projects is apps.odoo.com does not currently support registering git branches. Odoo is aware and working on the issue and no further action is warranted at this stage.

Runbot

The OCA Runbot is running and the setup is being completed for production use. Anyone will soon be able to manually test a pull request against an OCA branch.  This should make it much easier for non technical reviewers to review contributions.  (Actually there are lots of benefits here, once it is up expect a separate post)

MRP

The OCA would like to thank all the contributors to the definition of these requirements. The list has been sent to Fabien Pinckaers to evaluate what could enter the core module and its cost (design and development).

Then, we will be able to evaluate existing modules from OdooMRP and other projects that can answer the remaining requirements. Afterwards, the OCA will start a crowdfounding campaign to finance all the features that needs to be designed and/or developed by Odoo SA and the community.

I hope it clarifies the process. If anyone has any project on MRP, you should NOT wait for the outcome of this long term process. You should start your project now and publish your modules so we will have more solutions to evaluate.

Board Meeting
Open for Small Business, Graeme Gellatly 9 October, 2014
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