 What we want to do this morning, and this will work brilliantly since we have a relatively small crowd, is just have a birds of a feather session regarding software in the public interest, which is an organization that should matter to everyone in the Debian project, but doesn't necessarily have to be hugely consciously. So the photo here, by the way, is one that is of a sign that we just happened to notice when we were in Martelplata, Argentina for Debcon that said, you know, a reunion point with SPI at the bottom. So I've been using that for these ever since. Okay, so what we'll try and do this morning, I've got a very small number of slides that I'll run through fairly quickly and then we'll spend the rest of the time question and answer, discussion, whatever makes sense. I'll start by reviewing who the current board members and officers are, run through a brief history and overview of SPI out of curiosity. How many of you have never been present for one of these little confabs before? There are a couple people. Excellent. So it's not a total waste of time. And then I'll show you sort of the current list of associated projects. In the past I've had a page that I put all the project logos on and we have two relatively full pages now. So that's an indication of some kind of progress or status. Then I've got just sort of the top level of the financial numbers, in particular the amount of money that's being held in trust for the various projects that we'll look at. And as I said, we can do question and answer stuff. So the current board members and officers, I am on the board and service president. Yurg is our vice president. The ones that are italicized, if I got this right, are the folks that are not present at Debcon. Some years we've had higher or lower percentage of participants. Jonathan, who's our secretary, is here today. Michael Schulteis is our treasurer. Clint was here earlier in the week, but has already left to go back to the US. So I did italicize him. Robert Brockway, I guess, is our most recent addition to the board. Joshua Drake. Jimmy's here. And then Martin Zobelhelos, who many of you also know, is also not here. So that's the current composition of the board and its officers. As we'll talk about in a few minutes, we are just about to have our annual board election. The way Debcon lined up with SPI's calendar this year means that we're just about to do that instead of being just past it. So what exactly is this SPI thing? SPI is short for software in the public interest. This is a non-profit organization which was formed in the United States to help organizations that distribute and develop open hardware and open software. It is also the organization that holds Debian funds in the United States and other assets like trademarks, domain names, and the copyrights to the Debian logo. So in effect, what SPI does is provide a legal and financial existence for free software projects that allows them to focus on doing what they do best, which is creating software while someone else takes care of handling donations and keeping track of things that need to have a legal entity to hold on their behalf. A very, very brief history of SPI was incorporated in 1997 as a non-profit organization in the state of New York and the United States. In 1999, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service determined that SPI qualifies for 501c3 tax status. What that really means is that contributions from donors in the United States may be tax deductible, depending on their circumstances. But the great benefit financially that SPI can provide to associated projects is it makes it possible for those projects to accept donations from individuals and corporations in the United States, often offering the donor a tax advantage, just like other charitable organizations are able to do. The 501c3 version of the code is all about educational kinds of organizations, and that matches pretty well with what we do. It is different from the kind of organization that you would see, for example, that is used by something like the Linux Foundation, which is organized as a trade organization under different rules. So while SPI was originally started to serve a uniquely Debian need, the people who organized SPI understood that this was a need that other free software projects would have, and so the organization was created and over time has grown in such a way that it can provide similar services to many significant free software projects. And this is the first of my two promised slides full of logos, and as you can see, while Debian is still an important part of the associated membership of software in the public interest, this, the first half of the set of logos that I have to show you, represents a lot of different kinds of things. FreeDesktop.org, of course, is graphics related stuff, LibreOffice, an Office Productivity and Document Suite, OFTC, of course, runs one of the major IRC networks that we're involved with. And you can look at this, and we've got databases, we've got wireless technology, we've got the gallery, you know, photo software, Tux for Kids, the Open Voting Foundation. There are a few things that are, you know, a little bit different from Debian and where we started. And here's the second slide with a lot more logos. There are a lot of other projects that in the last couple of years have requested the opportunity to associate with software in the public interest and take advantage of the services that we can provide. And I'm actually fairly excited now that we have, for example, three significant Linux distributions and a couple of different significant database projects with PostgreSQL and Drizzle, and a couple of different tool chains and lots of things that are related to graphics. We even have an interesting little group in India that does, I guess, refurbishing equipment and... I think they're primarily concentrated on localization and actually... Yeah, localization and internationalization work, which, again, is very important to the cause of free software adoption and dissemination in that part of the world. So, it's been pretty interesting, it's a fairly interesting set of projects. Yeah, we have a question? So, what level of participation do they have? I'm sorry. What level of participation do they have? I still can't hear you. I'm sorry. Shout it out or somebody will repeat for me. How's this now? That's much better. What level of participation do they have? What level of participation do they have? Do they have voting rights, for example? We'll talk about that in just a minute. The projects themselves don't have special voting rights and the level of involvement they have in SPI varies, because when they request that we consider offering to associate them with SPI, each project will tell us which of the kinds of services SPI currently makes available that they're interested in and they need. So, for example, we've had at least one project that associated with Debian just because they needed somewhere that Google could deliver their Google summer of code, you know, associated funds to, that could legally receive those and process the reimbursement transactions to get those monies to where they needed to go. We have at least one project that associated with SPI specifically, and it could be a single place that wasn't one individual that could hold their trademarks and domain name registrations. And so different projects in our associated list take advantage of sort of different amounts of services. The members of all these projects, the individuals who work on these projects, are immediately qualified because of their participation in these projects to apply for the upper level of membership status in SPI that we'll talk about in a few minutes, which is contributing member status, and contributing members all have the right to vote for things like members of the board of directors. I should also mention, as he said, the most common reason is to have a legal entity to hold things without causing complications for individuals and with benefits for donors, but there's even some more specialized reasons. I believe OFTC specifically does not take donations via SPI or any other source because they don't feel, at least in terms of money, because they feel that donations of places to run IRC servers and is sufficient. They do have SPI own the domain name and they have requested specifically that SPI be the last resort for enforcing their constitution, OFTC's constitution on them. If OFTC ever stops following it because we're somewhat of a neutral party, we also do some things like helping with vote counts. Yeah, there are actually more than one project for which we have agreed at various points in history to be the people who ran their internal project election for representatives or something like that. I think we help out Wikimedia too on that somehow for their elections. Yeah, I'm not sure I'd have to go back and look, but it's an excellent question. All of these projects have requested the status of becoming an associated project. As you can understand, this process of association in effect extends our legal and financial umbrella to the activities of that project. As a consequence, anything that they do through their association with us has to comply with the legal rules and structure under which we're organized. That means, for example, that there are certain restrictions on how money that's donated to them can actually be used and how we can distribute that and disperse it. But all of the assets that we hold on behalf of these projects are earmarked for them and they, in effect, within that legal context get to direct what happens with them. One answer to your question is they are as involved as they need to be to manage their assets. Do you have another question? Yes. It's quite impressive that so many projects are members of SPI. I wasn't aware of that. But also I'm aware of the history where SPI comes from with Debian background. How come that there's still mostly exclusive Debian people on the board? Are these organizations not that interested? Is it just because Debian is so huge compared to them? That's a really good question. In fact, we ask ourselves about that from time to time. I'm very pleased that in the last election cycle the person who was elected was not from Debian. And in the current election cycle there's at least one candidate who's not from Debian. I'm not sure if that's public knowledge or not. I don't know if it's been announced any more public. But yes, there are two people on the board currently who are not from Debian. It's also worth noting that plenty of Debian people have other affiliations. Several of our board members are associated with OFTC or have involvement with, I know, Michael's involved with gallery. So quite often you find there is some overlap. I guess they think we're doing a good enough job. We do see people turn up for the elections from other organizations. Sometimes they get on, sometimes they don't. We have certainly encouraged every project that's associated with us to make sure that their participants know that they are immediately eligible to become contributing members of SPI to participate in those processes to vote and all of that. I think Jonathan's right. I think maybe it's just an indication that the individuals who happen to be serving right now are satisfying people's expectations more than... It's certainly not the case that we feel any particular Debian-oriented bias. Yes, though, historically that's where it started and so maybe we should just expect that it takes a while for that to fan out over time. Also, if you look at the amounts of money that pass through the organization and the queries we get from associated projects, there's no Debian bias there. I think there are other organizations that are passing a reasonable amount of money through us. I know Postgres do. I know Free Desktop too. It's a published monthly. They're on the website for everybody to see. There's no Debian bias there. I'm not saying that it's a problem per se, but it might give a strange feeling to some of the organizations that joined to be represented by just Debian people. Has any project brought up a concern about that? Nobody's actually raised it as a concern. It's part of the discussion that we have, or at least it's been a part of the discussion that I've had with every new associated project that I have worked on, helping them understand whether they wanted to apply for the status or not. The rules we operate under are very well understood and everything we do is very transparent to the world. So I think if there were ever any concern, people would be quick to voice it. And so far, it hasn't ever really come up as a strong question. I think the last time there was significant discussion about it actually was when the Arch Linux folks were talking about joining, and they were just concerned about whether we had a problem with having more than one Linux distribution associated with SPI. And I said, well, we already have the Aptisid folks, so we already have more than one Linux distribution. We'd love to have you. There's no problem there at all. And the same thing, of course, is true now. We have a couple of different database projects, and of course we've had a number of GUI-related projects over time. So I certainly don't think there's a problem there, and it hasn't really come up in conversation that much. I think all of us on the board have a philosophical desire over time to make sure that the board accurately represents the distributed sort of mix of projects that we have. On the other hand, the things that we do are really pretty boring. And if you've got people that are willing to do them and are doing them well, and you've got the right checks and safeguards in place to make sure that things don't unexpectedly and without anyone's understanding go south, then maybe that's good enough. I should also say that unlike most U.S. nonprofits and unlike a lot of other free software organizations, SPI's board, BDA will probably go into this in more detail, but it's entirely elected. And the nominations are by the members. Therefore, there's nothing we can do to force the board to be more representative. We can welcome and encourage candidacies from all the projects. It's up to them to be interested. It's up to us to make sure they know that they can. So I wanted to come in on this question as well. One thing that maybe people aren't aware of is that not only, you know, this relationship is not monogamous in both directions. Not only is Debian not SPI's only Linux distribution, but SPI is not the only organization that Debian deals with in this way. And I don't know how many of the other logos we see up there are also involved with other kinds of nonprofit organizations to help them do various of these things. But that also means that organizations that get involved with Debian, sorry, with SPI, know that they have kind of some freedom to do each individual task, how they want to do it. And this whole idea of letting the associated projects decide for themselves what to do means that it's not actually so important the decisions that SPI itself makes. Yes, that's true. One of the things that differentiates us, even in the U.S., from some of the other available hosting organizations, is that we don't want or require an active role in guiding the projects that associate with us. This is differentiated, for example, from the Software Freedom Conservancy, which is run by Bradley Kuhn and other folks, which has done, by the way, an excellent job of helping to incubate some projects. I think the recent transition of jQuery from operating under their auspices to a standalone foundation is an excellent example of how the approach that they're taking can work and can be very successful, but it's certainly more intrusive on the project's processes than the one that SPI takes. And as a consequence, we work together a lot when new projects are looking for a place to be hosted to make sure that they understand what their choices are and who they can talk to to look at the various hosting options. And we never, ever, you know, push a project to be part of SPI or not be part of SPI. We apply a fairly level-headed set of evaluation criteria to make sure that project and its requests aligns well with what we think is important in the world, what matches up with our legal context, and that we'll actually be able to meet their expectations and help them be successful. Murray? Yeah, just on the same kind of board composition question. In a way, could you not say that it's a failure for Debian that we've initially set up this organization to try and take away this work from ourselves and separate it off, and all that's happened is that the same people end up doing it, not just for Debian, but a load of other projects too. Right. In terms of, so as an actual question, why do you think that's still, why is it still the case that it's so Debian influenced, or is it because the Debian people are just somehow better, or is it just inertia or something else? I think it's mostly inertia. For example, if you look at the current membership of the board, a number of those individuals have been on the board for a while, where a while is a number of years, and so the way our board works is we elect people for three-year terms, and that immediately guarantees a certain continuity, which is desirable in an organization like this, but it also means that it just takes a while, even if a number of folks on the current board wearied of the role and chose to step down, it would take a while before that composition changed radically. I think I'm happy, as Jonathan mentioned the other day, I'm really happy when we actually have to have elections because enough people are interested in running for positions on the board that we have as many or more candidates as we have seats, and I'm tickled when that includes non-Debian folks, because it means that if there is any kind of concern about that, people have an opportunity to speak with their votes. On the other hand, I think everything that's been said here so far hopefully paints this context that we're sort of there to provide a service. It's a non-exclusive service in both directions, and what we really care about is ensuring that the projects that associate with this are able to be successful, and if that means at some point that they want to disassociate with us and go somewhere else, that's fine. For example, in the last year, the openoffice.org folks, after the set of transitions that they've been through, requested that we move the assets we were holding on behalf of them to the Apache Software Foundation, which is their new primary hosting organization, and that was exactly the right thing to do. Those were their assets that have been collected on behalf of that project. They have a new hosting organization, and at this point they have effectively disassociated from SPI, and we did exactly what was legally expected and required of us, and that's all done, so that's great. Further back in history, we actually had the GNOME project, an associated project for a short period of time, way back in history, and they of course have been an independent foundation for many years now, so we have examples not only of projects coming in, but also projects going out as well. I think just in terms of the numbers, it's worth considering that Debian is a fairly large project, so if you look at just the number of percentage, some of the projects are fairly big names, but maybe have a lot fewer active contributors, so even if the same percentage come forward, there will naturally be fewer of them presenting themselves to be on the board or be actively involved in SPI, so the numbers game as much as anything else. And if you take a look at the current financial assets, I'm sorry if this is kind of an eye-chart for folks in the back, unfortunately with this many associated projects, trying to fit them all on one slide, the font gets a little small, but the highlight here that I wanted to point is that third line down from the top, the funds currently held on behalf of Debian are more than 2x the amount that we're holding for any other project at this moment. There have been points in the last year where the PostgreSQL folks in particular had a really larger amount of money because they flow money through SPI in support of their two or three annual conferences that they run, and so when they're in the conference season accepting sponsorship donations and flowing that out to pay for things at those events, there's a lot of cash that flows through, but it just happens that today, there's 71.6k being held on behalf of Debian, and the largest other number is, I guess, a deb-cont-related earmark and another deb-cont-related earmark, and you sort of have to get down here, PostgreSQL at 26k, Libre Office at 24.5, there's about 20,000 for the Freedom Box Foundation and 21.something for free desktop.org. All these numbers are public knowledge. This is stuff that's part of our monthly treasurer's reports, and so you can actually kind of pay attention to that and see what's going on. There's a number down here at the bottom, which is General Reserves. That's the portion of donations that go to SPI in order that we be able to pay for the actual services that we provide. We try very hard to keep that number from getting very big, but at the moment it's frankly, you know, sort of bigger than it needs to be for the things that we actually need to be able to pay for, so we'll be watching that carefully as we go forward. Any questions about the numbers? I knew there would be. I had a question actually about the previous discussion. Okay. And I wondered how often associated projects come to you or would be associated projects come to you, and obviously the process takes various forms, but how often that doesn't work out? Do you get many inquiries, or is most people that come to you end up being associated projects? I think personally in terms, so what normally happens is someone from an associated project approaches one or more members of the board, people that they know or they meet somewhere, or every once in a while we get a general email sent to board or officers at or something. That's actually sort of unusual. It's normally the case that somebody on the current board or somebody in sort of the contributing membership of the project is either associated with a project that wants to acquire an associated project status or they just reach out and say, hi, we're this project, we're looking for some services, we think this would be interesting to pursue. Would you talk to us some? And I would say that of the people that have reached out to me either directly personally or in my role at SPI, maybe two-thirds of those projects have eventually gone on to be the subject of an association resolution. There have been some that just weren't a good fit. There was at least one, for example, where the transaction load that they thought it would be nice to have somebody else do for them was completely orders of magnitude different from the sort of transaction rate we handle for other projects. And we just, you know, our reaction was, you know, we could hire people to do that for you and crank up the slice of your donation stream that we would have to take to pay for that. And if you really want to do that, we'll be happy to have that conversation and work through the process. But at some point, they realized after talking to us and to other people that they really ought to go create their own legal structure because they wanted to have too much control over it and wanted to run too much money and too many small transactions and they really needed to have dedicated resources. And that was a perfect example of, we had a great conversation, everybody left friends, there were no hard feelings anywhere, and we just agreed that that wasn't a good fit. There have been a number of projects that have come to us and simultaneously gone to the Conservancy and have ended up, you know, a couple times sort of asking us to sanity check assumptions they're making about the other organization, which I'm always a little uncomfortable about. But Bradley and I are friends and we don't have any trouble sending each other emails and saying they're asking me this question about you. Have you already answered this and, you know, what in the heck is going on here? We understand that projects should have and do have the right to, you know, sort of shop around and figure out what the right fit is. But we're also very concerned about making sure that, you know, we're not really being asked to sort of compare and contrast ourselves directly to other organizations that they ought to be talking to directly. So you mentioned SFLC a couple of times and I think it's got quite a lot more active in... No, no, not SFLC. That's the Software Freedom Law Center. The Conservancy is the hosting organization that Bradley owns. Got to keep those straight. Right, yep, that's the one I mean. So they seem to have got quite a lot more active in this area of incubating projects in the last few years if you could just... So I guess explaining what the difference between the SPI services and the SFC services is for a project that's interested in this would be helpful because I'm a bit vague. So Bradley's made a correction on IRC and said he likes SFC to be described as a hands-on organization. Hands-on organization, yes. And certainly I think Incubator sort of conveys what I understand SFC to be for organizations that do want a little more involvement from their, I guess, sponsoring organization whereas SPI is very much projects run themselves. We manage the boring administrative bits and pieces that need to be done that scale up quite well whenever you're doing them for a bunch of projects but don't want to be done a day-to-day basis of the projects that aren't their core operations. So the managing of trademarks, the managing of domain names but not really telling you how to run your project or how your structure should be or any of that business and I think that's kind of the distinction. If you're a fledgling project and you're not quite sure where to go, SFC is perhaps a better choice and if you're an established project that maybe wants to start taking donations or you have an idea about how you want to be run or maybe you spread across the world and want to talk to FFIS in Europe and SPI in the US and manage your own organization yourself, then SPI is a better fit and those are both generalizations and if you're unsure, it's worth talking to both and I don't think either side either ever has a problem with the other getting chosen. We recognize some of the best fit. No, in fact, Bradley and I often send projects to each other to make sure that they understand what their options are because every once in a while a project comes to SPI and they start off by saying, we have this domain name registration, we'd like somebody to hold that for us and by the time we get done with the conversation, even questions that we pose like, okay, who's your responsible point of contact and how will we know if that changes lead them to have these sort of discussions and thought processes within their project where they realize that, oh, we've never actually thought about that, we've never written that down and every once in a while the text in an SPI association resolution kind of becomes the first and maybe in some cases the only place where that sort of who's the responsible person for this project gets documented and every time that happens I have this little vague concern that maybe they need more help and more guidance and more assistance than we're really offering them and so those are the projects that we often sort of try to point back and forth and have these discussions about. On the other hand, as Jonathan says, a well organized project that just needs somebody to handle the legal stuff, I think that's where SPI is really well qualified. Because SFC does GPL enforcement things as well, right? Where is that something that we haven't done at all? Is that also a distinction? I think that might actually be SFL so you're thinking of who will do the GPL enforcement. Yeah, that's sort of orthogonal. In fact, while we haven't pursued specific GPL enforcement cases we have engaged in things like trademark enforcement actions where project trademarks were either needed some looking at how they were registered or who they were registered by. Bradley's correcting me again. SFC do do trademark enforcement. The Conservancy does GPL enforcement for Busybox, Samba and Linux apparently. I don't know what the SF. So anyway, obviously we get a little confused about this too which is why when a project comes to us and is looking to find out which organization is the best fit for them, we want to make sure they actually talk to the people who represent the other organizations and don't just ask us for advice. Ian? One important difference between SPI and most of these other kinds of organizations is that SPI don't try to provide any kind of liability shield for individual members of these projects. So if you're a Debian developer and you violate somebody's patent or trademark or something, then in principle the person who owns that could sue you personally but they find it difficult to sue SPI precisely because SPI doesn't have any real control over what Debian is doing. Most of the other organizations take over at least some, enough of the management role that they have enough direction and control of your project that they become liable and that means that you're covered by their insurance and that's quite a substantial difference. That's a good point. Okay, so let's talk just a little bit about SPI membership. There are two categories of membership in SPI. One is sort of our general non-contributing membership and that's open to anyone who agrees with the fundamental principles of SPI. They're encouraged and eligible to apply and there's I guess a web form they go fill in and that application gets reviewed and by the end they become a member. Those who participate actively in the free software community which means you either are yourself a software developer or you provide some other reasonable services to some free software project or you have some other role where you are making a contribution to the process and are an active participant can apply for contributing membership and the real distinction there is that contributing members have the right to vote, particularly for things like who represents the contributing membership on the board of directors but in theory at least also on things like potential changes in the bylaws and other actions that would require a vote of the membership. And as I mentioned earlier when the board elections start do you want to mention a couple of details about where we're on the process? I think I'm probably the wrong person to mention as I'm a candidate. Yes, but okay. So nominations close at the end of tomorrow UTC so I guess Managua time that's about 6 p.m. 18 o'clock. Ish. Ish, yeah. And I think it's actually already public knowledge that there's enough candidates for vote in any case so there will be a vote for a couple of weeks after that online. I just want to mention that the URL mentioned on the slide is wrong, the about SPI parts should be stripped off. Oh, yeah. Sorry, we did change web infrastructure this year and I didn't fix that on the slide, my bad. So can you define active participation a little bit more? Would candidate projects really want to be projects that are managing a code base or for example, per your earlier qualification would you look for projects that already have some sort of governance structure defined? So when we're talking about contributing membership that's a status that individuals acquire and not projects. I see. And so when we talk about membership and SPI we're talking about individuals who choose to become members and who might choose to get the second, you know, badge of approval that says we agree that you're a contributing member and ought to have the right to vote. This basically gives us a mechanism for anybody who wants to show solidarity to become a member but they don't automatically get an opportunity to have a strong voice in the organization unless we agree that they're somehow actively participating in the free software process. My impression is that part of the inertia about the board is also because there's a kind of inertia in the contributing members being debbie and biased and therefore voting for people they recognize. Is that a true description of the kind of active voters at least still? And what could be done to encourage more contributing members from other associated projects? I'm not sure that I know because I don't think we've done anything to try and classify who the contributing members are. As was pointed out earlier, even among our board, we have people who actively work on sort of multiple projects so, you know, they may decide that their primary affiliation is Debian or it might be gallery or it might be PostgreSQL or it might be whatever. I'm not really sure how to know that. Yeah, I think the only time we would have any stats about where someone came from would be on their initial contributing membership application where they can make a note about how they're affiliated but we don't keep any record of that. I have no knowledge of the breakdown of our members and it may have changed over time. We've certainly encouraged every new project that wanted to associate with us to encourage all of their participants to become spy members and request contributing member status so that they can vote and help to represent their project. I should briefly mention that there's three questions that have accumulated on IRC and we should try to answer at least some of those in the last 10 minutes. Okay, well let me wrap up with the last couple points here. All of our board meetings are held in public on an open IRC channel, hash SPI on IRC.oftc.net. In fact, yesterday, just before the group photo, we were in the middle of our monthly meeting which also served as our annual general meeting. We discussed several items of business, one of which was very relevant to Debian and I think got a commitment for some progress to be made towards wrapping up that data request sometime in the next few days. We have several mailing lists, a list that's spying.org is where you can go to find out about those and join them. And there are obviously several board members and officers here present at DEBCONF if you have other questions going on. So at this point, you said we have some questions from IRC that have accumulated. Let's try and answer those and we'll go back to the room. Yeah, okay. One of the most quick correction that the DEBCONF earmarks are Debian money, but I guess that was self-evident. There was a question from Yaroslav, YOH on IRC that asked about how we can make donating simpler to Debian and I guess the other projects simpler. Apparently there are several different pages you have to click through to find where to donate to Debian. There's no dedicated page to donate to Debian. You need a $40 minimum to do a recurring payment option and we discourage PayPal so we should... There's a few other things like that. I can probably quickly answer that one saying that some of the other projects have dedicated donation pages and they can make it easier. The SPI treasurer can work with any projects including Debian to streamline that process. I'm not sure what the reason is for the recurring payment minimum that may be the husband thoughts on that but it's probably a payment processor issue. I don't know. It can be simplified some. The reason we don't use PayPal directly is they have some tendency to be arbitrary and occasionally freeze accounts that they think rightly or wrongly might be fraudulent and we don't want that. That said, I believe via the intermediary network for good it is possible to donate to us indirectly through PayPal. The third question was probably another one for Bdale. Just talking about sort of long-term challenges for SPI surrounding vitality and relevancy in the 3D five-year timeframe, where will we go? I've said a bunch of times that I'm less interested in expanding the scope of SPI than I am in making sure that we continue to be really competent at doing the core set of things that we do and that are important to our associated projects. To that end, there's an ongoing discussion within the board right now, I think with the involvement of some of our other contributing members about business continuity planning. Making sure that the processes that we are now turning the crank on on behalf of a lot of projects are well understood, well documented and we have the right number of sort of backup people able to take over if any particular individual becomes unavailable for a while for some reason. That's certainly something that we will continue to work actively on, certainly something I care a lot about and want to make sure we don't mess up somehow. I'm pleased that we've had what I think is a reasonably healthy turnover in the board membership in recent years. We've had some folks who frankly got weary of being involved and moved on to other things who had life changes that caused them to have different amounts of time to spend or whatever and we have so far not had any problem finding people who were willing to stand up and be counted and join the board to assist in working on projects beyond the boundary of the board. I'm actually not really worried about that very much. I think there's at the moment a fairly healthy balance of new enthusiasm. Robert Brockway, for example, I mentioned he's our newest addition to the board. He's been really active. He's been asking a lot of questions that are great questions that are causing all of us to sort of stop and think through how is it that we ended up deciding that was the right way to do something to really appreciate his active involvement and engagement and enthusiasm and at the same time we have folks, myself included I suppose at this point who have been around long enough that there is this sort of sense of stability and continuity which seems completely appropriate for an organization that's holding things like financial assets. So I'm actually not worried about that. I think all the right things are happening for us to continue to sort of stay on top of what needs to be done. It's absolutely true that our charter and bylaws allow for the project to, you know, for SPI to do more things on behalf of our associated projects than we currently do. And we're always open to suggestions from people who see something that they think ought to be done and are willing to do some of the work to make it happen to come talk to us about whether that's something that makes sense to do in the name of SPI. But right now personally, I don't have a whole lot of burning issues in that regard. I care a lot about the business continuity. It would be really nice someday if we managed to find the time to really do a thorough cleanup of the bylaws and resolve some of the long-standing ambiguities and conflicts there. But frankly, none of that is getting in the way of our being able to do what we do on a daily basis on behalf of the associated projects. So there's a limit to how much, you know, panic or anything that we feel about it. I think we're out of time now but I would broadly agree with that. So we will be around. I'm led to believe that we need to wrap it up now. But if folks have other questions, please feel free to find us. Anybody online that has questions can feel free to send them to us or show up online for our next board meeting which will be roughly a month. Hence, forget exactly what the time is. But we post the agendas including any resolutions that we might be planning to vote on on our website well in advance of each meeting. So there's always the opportunity to find out when those are going to be and to show up and participate. So with that, thank you very much for your time and attention. I hope you enjoy the rest of the day in the conference.