A new board was elected and positions were assigned during 2010-02-02 board meeting. We are happy to announce the new CAcert board formed by

• Lambert Hofstra (President)
• Daniel Black (Vice President)
• Ernestine Schwob (Treasurer)
• Mark Lipscombe (Secretary and continuing as Public Officer)
• Nick Bebout (Member)
• Mario Lipinski (Member)
• Ian Grigg (Member)

During the AGM CAcert’s annual report (PDF) was presented and accepted by the membership. It shows many things happened at CAcert during the last year and is worth reading to get an impression of CAcert’s progress during the last time.

A big thank you to all people volunteering and helping to achieve this successful result. CAcert is dependent on many volunteers and is looking forward for your help to achieve such a good result for the coming year.

• Booth (Sat + Sun)
• Lightning Talk: CAcert: Client-certificates and SSO - the old-new thing, Speaker: Ian Grigg (Sun 11:40-11:55, Room: Ferrer)
• Assurance Party (Sun 12:00-14:00, Room: Ferrer)
• Keysigning Party (Sun 12:00-14:00, Room: Ferrer)

As our CrossCommunity guest on our booth we are welcome A. Stormont with the projects Nexanta and StormOS

CU at Fosdem ….

• m20090912.1 that freezes this program and
• m20090914.2 take it in effect

We planned and executed an Assurance MiniTOP in December 2009 to get rid of all the special assurance programs that had been frozen by Assurance Policy and then by the board motions. At the Hamburg Assurance mini-TOP 20091215 we wrote a new PoJAM2 WIP, a new TTP-assisted Assurance Policy (WIP) and also a replacement for the SuperAssurers program, new project name: Policy For Nucleus (WIP).

As the first of three Assurance subpolicies, we took Policy on Junior Assurers / Members to the Policy Group. During the Policy Group discussion process, we used an ad hoc query requested through arbitration case a20091221.1 to confirm that more Junior Members had entered the community, and many more Junior Assurers were active than we had expected.

The voting for PoJAM to DRAFT started on January 19th and closed just before AGM starting time The decision was carried with 14 Ayes, 2 Nayes. PoJAM moves to DRAFT.

This is also a clear signal to the Community: We will bring back all the special assurance programs, Step-by-Step. But we need also your assistance. Without the Community’s help, none of the policies in progress will made it to DRAFT

“ask not when your policy is written and ready for you,
ask when you are ready to write your policy”

Thanks to all who helped to take the PoJAM to DRAFT: Ted, Sebastian, Dirk, Iang, Uli for their 1st version; Ian, Walter, Martin & Martin, Mario, Uli for the 2nd version, and all the people in the policy group: Mark, Werner, Gero, Morten, who also helped to take this document through.

• The Keysigning party will be organized from Pim. See organisation website Keysigning Organisation
• The booth will be organized thru the CAcert wikipage CAcert’s Booth Organisation Wikipage

For the booth we are searching for additional assurers. Please add yourself to the wikipage.
For questions around the keysigning party, please contact Pim.
For all other questions, please contact EVENTS

Open Source Days is the largest general Linux/BSD/Open Source conference in Denmark. Organisation started in 1998 with Linux98, continued with LinuxForum - and in 2008 renamed the successful conference to Open Source Days. The conference is run by a handful of devoted persons from the Linux/BSD community along with a huge number of persons, who find it fun to help making the conference.

Open Source Days 2010 is the 12th open source conference in a row held in Copenhagen, Denmark. The conference is very popular, and one of the largest open IT-conferences in the Nordic region.
Keywords for the conference is low budget and high quality spanning two days in March 2010.

am 15. Jänner 2010 findet ein Fellowship-Treffen in Wien statt. Wir treffen uns ab 18:00 Uhr in der Bibliothek im Metalab, Rathausstraße 6.
Die Agenda starten wir um 19:00 Uhr.

Folgende Punkte stehen dieses Mal auf der Tagesordnung:

• Rückblick Vortrag TU Graz
• Ausblick 2010
• GnuPG Keysigning (dezentralisiert), auch CAcert assuren mögl.
• Diverses
• gemütliches Beisammensein

Wie immer richtet sich die Einladung an alle, die sich für die FSFE oder für Freie Software interessieren. Wir freuen uns auf eine große Teilnehmerzahl!

Viele Grüße,
–
Das österreichische Team der Free Software Foundation Europe
* Werde ein Fellow der FSFE und verteidige deine Freiheit! *
*** https://www.fsfe.org *** https://fellowship.fsfe.org ***

Original Wiki Post 2009 December Update

When: Saturday 2010-01-30 21:00 UTC
Where: irc.cacert.org #agm
Who: All CAcert Inc. Members

Please also remember to pay your dues, since according to current rules you may not otherwise vote.

Regards,
Philipp Dunkel
(Secretary)

and at Tuesday 15th, 2009 we also received the confirmation for a booth at the CEBIT 2010. CAcert get this sponsored booth from the Linux New Media (Cebit Open Source) (CEBIT Event Organisation)

If properly planned sufficiently ahead of time, I might be able to manage to get multiple assurers there to get you up to assurer level in one time. But this requires planning and some interest.

Contact me if you’re interested: aphexer at somewhat obfuscated cacert dot org

Errors are inevitable. I’ve so far seen and counted 3 errors or blunders. Which means we’re talking around a 5% error rate. That’s to be expected when building a new system, working with fresh people, with minimal historical help, and working through a flood of a backlog with crappy technical support and poor information. Also known as, drowning.

(Obviously, in time, we want to reduce that to around 1-2%. When I did my 5-10 cases a month back, I generated at least one error. I’m not good enough for Support, I’m up in the 10-20% range.)

You can help us by pointing out the errors, directly, and suggesting what it is you would rather have seen. Positive suggestions are always appreciated.

The Triage team — Wolfgang, Martin, Michael, Joost — have to this point worked through outstanding emails back to July this year. See the attached for a picture of today’s Inbox. *Yes, it’s more or less empty!* They got there last night, and have reached the target I set them, to get back to July.

That means a human has processed every one of approximately one thousand support emails received over the last 5 months. There’s probably dozens of errors in their processing, but that misses the point.

In the next month or so, some or all of the Triage people above will get through their ABCs and become SEs or Support Engineers. At that point Werner will have help. At that point, we’ll be able to improve our systems. And, we’ll need more Triage people!

You can help us by signing up to Triage. Let me know if you fit the profile: Assurer, great with mail / MUA, etc, time to handle lots of little, quick tasks, good with English reading (other languages an advantage), and you grok the community (CCA, DRP and you want to know more about Security Policy but were always afraid to ask…). IRC.

We need people outside the European evening slot…

iang,
interim, temporary, impatient Support t/l,
looking for any excuse to get sacked!