Sender Policy Framework

On Wednesday 2004-12-22 at 14:15 UTC, the council held its weekly meeting on IRC. There was a pre-planned agenda. Chuck, Julian, Mark, and Wayne were present; Meng was absent.

As the first item, the status of the upcoming press release regarding the creation of the SPF Council and the first election of its members was debated. Chuck reported that he had created a first draft, to which Julian had proposed several modifications and a consolidated alternative draft, and Chuck had adopted some of those modifications into his draft. After the importance of various aspects of the press release had been discussed for 30 minutes, it was decided that Chuck would apply a number of additional modifications and that, within the next few days, he would put one more draft on the table for final consideration by the council, and then publish the press release after the council gave its approval.

The next agenda item was supposed to be the Executive Director's report, but as Meng was not present, the Chair proposed to defer the report to the next council meeting. Julian objected because he wanted to know the status of the HSARPA proposal that Meng had planned to submit and then publish to the community during the previous week. Due to Meng's absence, the question remained unanswered and was put on record.

After that, the policy for the management of the project mailing lists was discussed. Chuck wanted to formalize Greg Connor's assignment as the moderator of the spf-discuss list. After some intermediate confusion (and clarification thereof) about the definition of quorum, his proposal was adopted. Similarly, later Scott Kitterman was officially assigned moderator of the spf-help list.

Then the prospects of a new, official web site for the SPF project were discussed. Mark reported that some community members had complained about the current official site, http://spf.pobox.com, being too unconcise and outdated. Julian noted that there already were outstanding offers by at least two community members for the hosting and maintenance of an official web site. Chuck requested that one council member step forward and work out a plan for the creation of a new web site, and Julian offered to do it. The assignment was agreed on without objections.

The next issue was the creation of mission statements for the SPF project and the council. Julian objected to creating a mission statement for the council before one had been created for the project itself. Mark added that probably no extra statement for the council was needed as the council was simply supposed to lead the project. It was quickly decided that a draft for a project charter be created on the council mailing list and then be put forward to the project community for discussion.

Following that, the necessity for the creation of formal bylaws was discussed. It was quickly agreed on that no formal bylaws were required until the creation of a legal entity would be decided. So Chuck proposed that the council debate the creation of a legal entity for the SPF project and come to conclusions by the end of January 2005. The motion was passed unanimously.

Concluding the planned agenda, various miscellaneous issues were put on the table. Firstly, council member Wayne Schlitt, on his request, was mandated unanimously to act as the official editor for the new SPF internet draft. He was also advised to present the first edition of his draft by 2005-01-01.

Regarding the exploration committee for the future evolution of the SPF project, Julian requested that resolution #9 be formally changed to approve of, according to the Chair's prior request, keeping the committee's work private until the end of January 2005. The Chair explained that he did not want to be forced to make the committee's mailing list archives public later, not even after the committee would have finished its work, so as to facilitate completely open discussion within the committee. Thus it was decided that the committee's mailing list archives be kept private indefinitely, but that its conclusions and any ongoing work after 2005-02-01 be unconditionally laid open.

Finally, Mark requested that the council either endorse the existing SPF Community Position on Sender-ID or create a new one. The supposed scope of a new position statement wasn't entirely clear, though, as Chuck went on to propose drafting a position statement concerning the Sendmail Sender Authentication Deployment Recommendations whitepaper. As a result, it was quickly determined that, including an independent Deployment Recommendations whitepaper by the SPF project, there were at least three distinct issues on which the project should make position statements, and that Mark should come forward with a draft of his proposed position paper at the next meeting.

The meeting was then concluded at 16:23 UTC.