Week 5

Mon 27th Jan - Sun 2nd Feb 2025

Thursday 30th January 2025

Governance Workgroup

• Type of meeting: Weekly

• Present: PeterE [facilitator], CallyFromAuron [documenter], PeterE, CallyFromAuron, Clement Umoh, AshleyDawn, EvelineTrinité, Effiom, advanceameyaw, Sucre n Spice, Tevo, hogantuso, osmium

• Purpose: Weekly Open Governance meeting

• Working Docs:

  • Governance calls, rolling agenda

  • UPDATED PROPOSAL DOCUMENT (ETHiopia event)

  • “Budget caps for Q2” discussion

  • ANONYMISED: Using Program reserves for events: ETHiopia, 15th to 17th Feb 2025 (Responses)

  • Meetings, 13th Dec and 17th Jan, on using Program reserves for event attendance

Narrative:

Clement presented his and AdvanceAmeyaw's revised proposal to attend the ETHiopia event using funding from Reserves. They have addressed the issues raised in the consent form by:

• reducing overall cost by c. $1k

• reducing budget for accommodation

• staying 2 days at their own expense

• securing a presentation slot

• planning to distribute merch and brochures

• aiming to establish an Ethiopia branch of African Guild (during the time they are there at their own expense

• setting definite KPIs

• making some short videos, to use as part of a recap video later

• writing a post-conference report

• writing an article, in collab with Writers WG and Marketing Guild

• committing to a post-event retrospective meeting in the Ambassador Program itself, where we can look at how it went, and use that information to help finalise our thinking on when and in what circumstances Reserves should be used for attending events (see https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yggRVo_-VzjDPvlgJtxeEp0G8oLx6i8sGYmU9mJiTT0/edit?usp=sharing)

The meeting noted that they have committed to a lot of work; and suggested they reduce some of their KPI targets (e.g. AI Ethics interviews from 20 to 10).

We also noted that where their proposal mentions "partnerships", they don't have the authority to initiate actual partnerships with sNET, so this will be reworded to make it clear that it is just about collating contacts, and passing them on where appropriate so that any potential partnerships can be explored.

We also noted that a useful KPI would be getting interested people to attend Ambassador TH and relevant WGs - Clement and Ameyaw will add this.

And we agreed that their attendance at the event is a test-case for how Reserves should be spent on events - so we will use their post-event report, plus insights from a retrospective meeting when they return, to inform our final decisions on this issue (see https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yggRVo_-VzjDPvlgJtxeEp0G8oLx6i8sGYmU9mJiTT0/edit?usp=sharing)

Overall, the meeting agree that all the objections are addressed, so the proposal is approved; and we discussed how best to release funds (via a fund request on Dework).

We then ran through the document of suggestions on how to set Q2 2025 budget caps (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kVd_4Ih-lSdMoIcmVeOS3_H3aqOdnMmMG6o1WqGTx1w/edit?usp=sharing), with some minor discussion for clarification. We agreed that everyone will look at this doc properly in the next few days, and it will be discussed at the next meeting on Tues 4th Feb.

Discussion Points:

• Decision on AdvanceAmeyaw and Clemennt's proposal to use Ambassador Reserves funding to attend ETHiopia event in mid Feb

• Q2 2025 budget caps

Decision Items:

• We agreed that Advance and Clement's proposal to attend the ETHiopia event has been agreed, and they will go

  • [rationale] because their revised proposal has addressed all of the issues raised in the consent forms

  • [opposing] none

  • [effect] mayAffectOtherPeople

• We agareed that Advance and Clement's final report, and a retrospective meeting when they return, will be used to help us finalise our thinking on establishing policy on when and how to use Reserves for attending events (see https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yggRVo_-VzjDPvlgJtxeEp0G8oLx6i8sGYmU9mJiTT0/edit?usp=sharing)

  • [rationale] attendance at the ETHiopia event is a test case, and we want to use it to help us establish policy.

  • [opposing] none

  • [effect] mayAffectOtherPeople

Action Items:

• [action] Everyone to read and comment on the "'Budget caps for Q2' discussion" doc, ready for discussion in next meeting on Tues 4th Feb [assignee] all [due] 4 February 2025 [status] todo

• [action] Vani to draft a timeline async for the Q2 budget decision process, to speed up the process of agreeing it in next meeting [assignee] CallyFromAuron [due] 4 February 2025 [status] todo

Keywords/tags:

• topics covered: events attendance, program reserves, budget reserve, budget caps, Q2 2024 budget, consent process, timeline

• emotions: calm, Good natured, focused, decisive