FHISO Board Meeting held 6 November 2019 at 2130UTC

The meeting was held by Zoom.us video conference, started at 2130 UTC

Present: Luther Tychonievich — Chair; Roger Moffat — Secretary, Treasurer & Membership Coordinator; Richard Smith — Technical Coordinator & Vice-Chair; Joel Cannon — Industry Relations Coordinator; Seth Taplin — Technical Co-coordinator; and David Mann — Director at Large

  1. Minutes of the previous meeting. The minutes of the previous meeting were recently prepared, and not yet published. Agreed that the minutes of the AGM can be published. They need to be voted on at the next AGM.
  2. Board Roles: One further Board role was discussed, and appointed as follows:
    • Communications Coordinator: David Mann will take on this role. 
  3. Board handover.
    • Roger will take over the GoDaddy account for the domain registration of our 3 domains fhiso.org, fhiso.net and fhiso.com
    • Seth has been added as an Administrator on the FHISO Facebook page
    • Roger and Richard have reviewed all of the email addresses. Those of the past Board members have been set to Restricted – they still exist but can neither send or receive mail. Various email addresses in use for administration have been taken over by Roger (eg admin@, enquiries@, payments@, treasurer@, twitter@). New Board Members have been set up with their name account
    • Access to the FHISO Google drive has been updated to remove the previous Board members and add the new ones.
  4. Arizona Corporation Commission: Roger updated the list of Officers and Directors with the Arizona Corporation Commission. This list of changes was accepted by them in early November 2019.
  5. Finances:
    1. PayPal Balance at 6 November 2019 = $329.61
    2. Bank of America Balance at6 November 2019 = $358.11
  6. Membership: From CiviCRM on the website it looks like we have the following numbers of members:
    • We probably need to have about 50 members to be self sustaining in dues/expenses, and to satisfy IRS 501(c)(3) requirements
    • We should develop some language that appears on the bottom of communications urging people that “if they think this is important, click here to join FHISO now”. 
    • The Join FHISO page should be improved. Dave will take point on this assisted by Joel
  7. 501(c)(3) application: Caritas have made the application for our 501(c)(3) status to the IRS along with a 1023-EZ form.
  8. Technical Work: Richard reported good progress on the ELF Serialisation draft. The TSC have decided to split the material on schemas, which is the basis of the ELF extensibility mechanism, into a separate ELF Schemas draft, support for which will be optional. The remaining part of the ELF Serialisation draft is on schedule to be ready for release as first public draft by the end of the year. There is also likely to be a second public draft of our Basic Concepts standard released at the same time.
  9. Outreach: Luther and Joel reported on weekly contacts with parties interested in standardising how to embed family history data in photos. Luther also reported on a few other contacts.
  10. Luther observed that currently our published documents don’t have Editors/Authors listed. We should change this.
  11. Next Meeting: The next meeting will be on 11 December 2019 at 2130 UTC (1630EST)

The meeting closed at 2245 UTC