Board meeting Minutes/15 Dec 2014

Prior: 1 Dec 2014

Board meeting Minutes

Next: 12 Jan 2015

Minutes approved: 12 Jan 2015

• NOTICE to those on the line: All present agree to a temporary recording of this call to be be deleted no later than when the minutes are approved. Please speak up if you disagree with this and we will discuss it after roll call.

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Move your name to Present or Apologies prior to the meeting!

Present

(Subject to verification) Dan Rich (chair), William Bilancio, Matt Disney, Steve VanDevender,John Boris, Ski Kacoroski, George Beech

Apologies

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Guests

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Opened

9:01 PM Eastern Time

Closed

9:44 PM Eastern Time

Consent Agenda

• The minutes of 1 Dec 2014were approved

Action Items

no items to review

Standing Reports

Treasurer's report (Disney)

• Balance info
  • BoA Account: $22,899.25
  • PayPal Account: $4,875.81 (STALE)
  • TDBank: $1,989.73
  • Total: $29,764.79
  • +/- from last meeting: -$10.00
• Summary of expenditures since last report:
  • Budgeted operational expenses
• Summary of income since last report:
  • Membership dues: Approx $672 (unbalanced)
• Outstanding liabilities
  • VanDevender (report submitted, William has this)
• Top priorities
  • Scott Koch refund
  • F2F reimbursement (VanDevender)
  • Transition bank accounts
  • 2013 990
  • Directors insurance
  • Deposit mailed to Evan
  • Fix mail addresses online?
• Misc:
  • Need VanDevender expense report from William
  • Need to fix online account access (reset admin passwords)

Dan Rich asked Matt Disney to take last years budget and get the actuals against it so he (Dan) can get the new Budget in place. Dan Rich fixed up the past conference contributions so the average membership fee is now correct.

Membership report (VanDevender)

• See CiviCRM
• Previous Month:
  • New: 23 (14 students)
  • Renew: 3 (0 students)
  • Lapsed: 50
• Month to Date:
  • New: 6 (7 students)
  • Renew: 3 (0 students)
  • Lapsed: 26
• Total: 832 (660 paying)

Steve gave a suggestion that conference memberships be entered as they come in at the conference because of the big delay in matching them up after the event. A short discussion followed on a better way to verify the new members. There is an issue in the script where it will extend a membership and not correct a membership that had expired.

Conference/events activities report (Bilancio)

Cascadia-IT is coming up in March. LOPSA-East will not be held this year. SCALE is coming up. William will reach out to the SCALE people.

Local Chapter Committee report (Bilancio)

LOPSA-NJ celebrated their anniversary at their December meeting. No new groups. Atlanta is still working.

Development report (Kacoroski)

Nothing to report.

Communications (LOPSAgram, #lopsa-live, etc) (Kacoroski)

LOPSAGram will go out this week. No other news on this front Ski looked into Mailchimp and will try that for the next LOPSAGram. A discussion followed over the reasons Civi is not being used. The main issue is with getting the HTML designed LOPSAGram in the mailing. Both programs track the emails. William, Dan and Ski will get together on developing the LOPSAGram in Civi. A key plus for Civi is in handling issues when users say they did not get the latest LOPSAGram where Civi allows you to drill down to that level and see what happened

Project Management report (Rich)

No report

Liaison reports (LC, etc.)

Technical Services Report (Bilancio)

Dan spoke to Chan and there is no Drupal 7 on the dev server. He (Chan) was waiting for Dan to confirm Civi was working. Dan has confirmed that CiVi is working on the Dev Server. Chan can now work on the upgrade to Drupal 7. William will contact Chan for status and also if he has contacted the people interested in helping with the Drupal upgrade and also the TSC

Mentorship Report (Beech)

The LMPT has told George they are taking a break for the holidays and will get with people after the start of the new year. John will check to see if George is on the LMPT mailing list.

LOPSA Professional Recognition (Simmons)

LPR program on hold pending information from the lawyer on how this could affect our 501(3)(c) status.

Leadership Committee (Kacoroski)

I have talked with Warner about the board vacancies and passed on to him the names of some possible candidates. I expect him to have something for us by mid Jan so we can have the positions filled by the end of Jan.

Membership vs. Sponsorship Discussion (Rich)

Should we make every registered person on lopsa.org a member of LOPSA and add existing members as sponsors? This would mean changing Individual membership to have no cost.

Concerns/Issues:

1. We need to clean up bogus registrations in CiviCRM
2. We need to potentially write software to send reminders to sponsors, or do it via. the membership system in Civi. This will need to be reviewed by the Membership Committee before we can make the change.
3. The Membership Committee will need to rewrite the Membership policy and Sponsorship policy/levels to reflect this change.

This was tabled for the strategy meeting on January 12, 2015. Ski mentioned that this move will aid us when going to sponsors and also seeking benefits.

What do we want from our web presence? (Rich)

Do we want a static page that represents LOPSA with all of our "dynamic" content on a separate server still under Drupal (Civi, Blogs, Surveys, etc)?

What are the next steps to get our web site updated? This has been tabled to the January 12, 2015 meeting.

Board Vacancies (Rich)

Dan wanted to start a discussion on the issue of losing Board members. Question raised "How do we motivate people or keep them motivated?" William asked if Matt's leaving was due to not being motivated? Dan replied that Matt's reasons were totally different from that. Dan's feelings are that we talk about doing things at our meetings and then go away and don't think about LOPSA until the next meeting comes up. There is a lot of truth in that statement. Dan feels this lack of getting things done is a large reason people are leaving the board.

• Ski feels that since we are a volunteer board and that is a big reason. We are spread thin. He feels we all should just take one thing and do that and get that done.
• Steve feels we need to really prioritize on one thing and get it done. We have that large list of projects and should just pick one to get it accomplished.
• Matt agreed that Matt's leaving was not the lack of getting things accomplished but the other two members that left their reasons were more in line with Dan's reasoning. Matt feels that we should leave people dome room to work on projects they are excited about and have energy for as well as the the projects that we must get done. An example would be financial projects where we can't fail with those projects.
• John agrees with Matt that we should allow people to move along with a project they have energy for instead of being negative about it. Little successes will bring in more people.
• Dan agrees with this and asked the Board to look at the list of projects and just pick one of them and get working on it.
• Steve brought up how the board should be getting out of the actual working part and get volunteers to do that work.
• Ski commented he has found more information on getting a paid aide to help with some of the day to day tasks. But as far as motivating the members to step up is a question that is hard to answer.
• Steve asked is there a vehicle that members can go to see that we need their help.
  • Dan restated that he has asked for help in the LOPSAGram and also direct letters.
  • Ski mentioned that it is inherent in volunteer organizations looking for volunteers.
• Matt asked for a description of our recent Call for Volunteers.
  • An example would be asking for help revamping the Drupal site.
• Matt stated that people will not volunteer for boring mundane projects.
• Dan summarized that the LC is working with a few candidates for the board and we recognize that motivation is an issue..
• William asked about the terms of office for the two open seats on the board. They are both for the unexpired terms.
• Steve asked if there was a way to attract more female board members to which Matt stated the LC has approached female members to run for office and they have declined.

Subsidiary (Rich)

This is waiting for responses from the lawyer. There was concern that we lost our biggest proponent for this project. Ski asked how this effects Cascadia and William stated Matt Simmons agreed to help out.

New Business

No New Business

Notes/announcements

No Notes/announcements

Adjournment

Ski motioned for adjournment Seconded by William.