Hello Everyone, Thank you for patiently waiting while we had the opportunity to discuss things. Many of you have not heard my name before - this is largely because as a board, we do much of the non - dev work behind the scenes, such as administrative tasks like paying bills. However, I do want to take this opportunity to introduce myself quickly and to emphasize that - should anyone wish to reach out to me directly - I am happy to correspond via phone or email. My name is Kristen - I spent many years at Google on the C++ Core Libraries Team. I am heavily involved as an organizer in CppCon and C++Now. If anyone is curious about what I did at Google, I did give a talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=torqlZnu9Ag on automated refactoring and Clang Tidies that you can find on Youtube. My duties as Board Chair involve sending out meeting agendas, taking meeting notes, and collating meeting minutes. It is not our role to lead, but rather to support the Boost project. The leadership and direction of the Boost project has and should remain with the Boost Developers. The original Boost Steering Committee home page articulates its purpose as follows: “In the Boost community decisions have always been made by consensus and individual members have shown leadership by stepping forward to do what they felt needed to be done. Boost has not suffered from a lack of leadership or volunteer participation. It is not the role of the Steering Committee to inhibit this kind of spontaneous leadership and action, which has served Boost and the wider C++ community so well. On the contrary, it is the role of the Steering Committee to facilitate community-based leadership and decision making. The role of the Committee is to be able to commit the organization to specific action either where funds are required or where consensus cannot be reached, but a decision must be made.” We generally encourage any Boost Developer who would like to be more involved in administrated or organizational decisions to consider joining the board. We have multiple open board seats. Several Boost Developers are on the board and additional developers have been invited in the past - however they have decided against joining due to their distaste for the type of administrative work we do. We would love to hear more from you. Please reach out. You can reach all of us at once via boostfoundationdirectors@boost.org. Additionally, if you’d like to attend one of our board meetings, we regularly host guests. The C++ Alliance and the Boost Board of Directors have had their disagreements. Recently, it has become apparent - in particular via their attempt to purchase the boost.org domain name and the proposed new Boost Logo - that The Alliance would like to exert a greater sense of ownership over Boost Library assets. The desired control over assets is what I was referring to in my original note regarding their attempt to take ownership over the Libraries. While the C++ Alliance is a non profit organization, it is wholly funded and effectively controlled by one individual - Mr. Falco. The Board of Directors has a stewardship responsibility to Boost and we are wary of a single individual exerting such a level of control over the Boost Libraries. The Board has existed for many years and will continue to exist - as new members are regularly on boarded as tenured ones retire. Given the structure of the Board and the nature of the volunteer work, we believe ourselves to be the more permanent entity. Many have mentioned a desire for cool headed coordination between the two organizations. I also believed this to be the most advantageous outcome, so I reached out to Mr. Falco to establish a direct line of communication. Even now I would characterize our personal relationship as quite positive. Due to some pre-existing personality clashes, it is now our understanding that Mr. Falco believes collaboration to be an impossibility. Therefore, a large part of Mr. Falco’s motivation to acquire the domain name stemmed from a desire to cut the Board of Directors out of all future decision making processes. Given that I believed we had made great progress toward greater collaboration, I was personally gutted by this turn of events. Accordingly, we did not see a well lit path forward regarding coordination between the Boost Board and the C++ Alliance. This decision was in no way meant to minimize the great contributions The Alliance has made to the Boost Libraries. We do not want to discourage Alliance members from contributing to Boost. This is fundamentally a question about the stewardship of the Boost Library Assets. As mentioned above, the Boost Board of Directors exists largely to facilitate community based decision making. Accordingly, we feel the most appropriate thing to do at this juncture would be to let the developers make a decision on how they would like to proceed regarding what level of ownership the C++ Alliance should have on Boost Library assets. Here are what we believe to be the available options. 1. The C++ Alliance assumes control of the Boost assets, including the boost.org domain name. The Boost Foundation becomes uninvolved in any decisions related to the Boost Libraries. 2. The Boost Foundation continues to be the stewards of the boost.org domain name and related assets. New assets that are meant to be associated with the Boost Libraries are transferred to the Boost Foundation. In any matters related to the Boost Libraries, the Board will abide by any decisions made by the developers but will no longer vote themselves on issues as they relate to the Boost Libraries unless there truly is no clear consensus or path forward. There was some discussion about the assets being held in a third party non profit controlled by a subset of the Boost Developers. However, given that there are already many Boost Developers on the Boost Foundation Board of Directors, we don’t see this as a meaningful deviation from the status quo. Also as one final note, many on the mailing list expressed a distaste for the political nature of this disagreement. Of course, being involved in political spats is not why you joined Boost! We completely understand this. Believe me when I say we don’t like dealing with political disagreements either - no one does. They’re draining and they can distract from an organization’s larger mission. However, sometimes, they are truly unavoidable. We’re articulating our thought process here, not to annoy you, but so every Boost Developer has a say in how things turn out. Warm Regards, The Boost Board of Directors Also here are some answers to some of the more specific questions. There were a lot of them and I believe some were answered in the preceding paragraph. Sincerest apologies if I missed a question or two. Beman Dawes did pass away in 2020. The Boost Foundation did take action when the domain expired. In fact, Michael Caisse spent many hours on the phone with support figuring out how to pay for the bill so the website would be accessible. Additionally, he invested significant time in procuring the death certificate so we could own the domain. Progress was being made, albeit slowly.