FHISO Annual General Meeting held 10 August 2019 at 1800 UTC

The 2019 FHISO AGM was held by Zoom video conference on 10 August 2019 at 1800 UTC

Present: Luther Tychonievich (Chair), Seth Taplin (new Director), Pierre Clouthier, Andrew Hatchett (retiring Director), Roger Moffat (Secretary & Treasurer), David Mann (new Director), Richard Smith (Technical Coordinator)

  1. Opening remarks: Luther welcomed members. He explained that FHISO has been in a extended organisational period, during which time we have tried to create an organisational structure and technical development process that is suitable for the number of members we have. With this initial process mostly complete, we are now holding our the first Annual General Meeting.
  2. Introductions: The board members introduced themselves.
  3. Mission Luther recapped FHISO’s mission (which can be found in article 3 of our bylaws), and explained how we are interpreting these and our current priorities.
  4. Technical report: Richard reported on our progress developing technical standards. His report was largely a summary of the technical section of our Annual Report for 2018, with an update on our subsequent progress on the Extended Legacy Format (ELF). We are working on two ELF drafts: a low-level ELF Serialisation draft and a higher-level ELF Data Model. The ELF Serialisation draft is taking longer than anticipated, in part due to a major change in how its extensibility mechanism works. However we are optimistic of being able to release them as first public drafts before too long.
  5. Financial report: Roger reported on the organisation’s finances. We hold a cash reserve of $747.72, with $329.61 held in PayPal and $418.11 in our account at the Bank of America. In 2019 so far, our income has been $1095, of which $560 was membership renewals and the remaining $535 was donations. Expenses for the year to date have totaled $898.79, of which $750 was paid to the Caritas Law Group for work on our 501(c)(3) application (and includes a $275 filing fee for the IRS), $90 was the Bank of America’s fees, $48.79 was PayPal fees, and a $10 fee was paid to Arizona Corporation Commission. This leaves a operating surplus of $196.21 for the year to date.
  6. Objectives for 2019: Luther outlined the objectives for 2019 which we had agreed at the January board meeting. We published our 2018 accounts and annual report in February. At the end of May we ended our policy of continually renewing Memberships at no charge while we set up the organisation. A reasonable number of members have paid the $20 fee to renew. In preparation for board elections in the summer, we completed a series of updates to the bylaws to allow for a smaller, more flexible board structure. We held nominations for the Board of Directors. Elections were scheduled for to be held between 21 July and 3 August, but as there was exactly one candidate for every position, all were declared elected without a ballot. We have engaged Caritas Law Group to prepare and submit our application for 501(c)(3) status and advise on any subsequent federal tax issues. This work is on-going. Technical work on ELF is progressing, albeit slowly, as Richard had discussed in the technical report.
  7. Q&A Session
    1. Q: Why are some drafts not linked from the list of public drafts?
      A: We only post links to stable drafts released for public comment. Work-in-progress drafts can be found on our GitHub account.
    2. Q: Current drafts are daunting, with references to RDFa, etc, and not enough examples.
      A: We are aware of this, and have writing accessible examples as a goal after the core specifications are done. Some of the new board members are also keen on working on making material approachable and easily implemented.
    3. Q: Are you familiar with Rosetta? Have you talked with Bob Velke?
      A: We are familiar with Rosetta, though we could look at it more closely. Individuals in FHISO have had contact with Bob Velke, though no formal contact between FHISO and Velke has been made.
    4. There was a fourth question, but we were so engaged discussing it that we failed to record what it was.

Meeting closed at 1859 UTC