Board meeting Minutes/23 Sep 2013

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Prior:
9 Sep 2013 		Board meeting Minutes Next:
7 Oct 2013




Minutes approved: 18 Nov 2013



  • 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.
Unspecified
Move your name to Present or Apologies prior to the meeting!
Present
(Subject to verification) Dan Rich (Chair), William Bilancio, John Boris, Ski Kacoroski, Evan Pettrey, Mike Julian, Matt Simmons, Martin Gehrke, Ski Kacoroski
Apologies
Matt Disney,
Opened
8:03 PM Eastern Time
Closed
8:31 PM Eastern Time

Consent Agenda

Action Items

No items to report on.

Standing Reports

  • Treasurer's report

We are current on our liabilities.

  • Membership report
    • 827 members, down 26 from last meeting
    • 6 new, 5 renewals in September,
    • 10 lapsed this month, 83 for the quarter, 286 for the year

Matt will be sending Welcome emails to new members and hopes to have this automated shortly. The Board was sent an email last week to approve the content. There were no objections to the email.

Ski asked about a lifetime membership and William stated we are waiting for the check.

  • Conference/events activities report

William needs to contact ScALE to see what we are doing this year. Cascadia and LOPSA-East will be kicking off their preparations shortly.

  • Local Chapter Committee report

The team will be meting nest Wednesday. Warner and Craig have responded to be on the committee. Martin contacted Scott Murphy but he hasn't heard back. Matt Simmons stated that there may be confusion as Scott seems to send him items. Matt will send both Martin and Scott an email to make sure they are on the same page.

  • Development report (Meeting focus at first meeting of the month)

No report.

  • Communications (LOPSAgram, #lopsa-live, etc)
    • Matt's new submission system is working great - I have had good feedback on it.

The next LOPSAGram will be produced with the new automation. Matt has done some updates to the automation.

  • Project Management report
    • Dan has started using Web2project and has setup the board with logins. The board was asked to go to the site and review the projects and make any additions or corrections.
  • Liaison reports (LC, etc.)
    • Technical Services Report (William)
      • William has been trying to get with Jess over the past two weeks but they haven't been able to sync up. William will contact Jesse again so they can setup a mutual meeting time.
    • Mentorship Report (John)
      • The core team is working on revamping their meeting schedule. After operating for a long time with Thomas as the chair and dealing with the time difference it may be a while until a time that fits everyone's schedule. It does look like the team will move to biweekly meetings it is just the time frame they have to agree to. Amy Rich has agreed to be the Co-Chair with Ed. They have developed a new Minutes procedure and Amy has been busy cleaning up the teams documents. The problem with Google Docs ownership still remains a problem. This ma be a Tech team issue but we have to get this resolved so we can remove past core team members. The team also changed the frequency of changing the On call personnel to be monthly instead of every week. The team would like to nominate Thomas as Volunteer of the month. They are working on the message for the LOPSAGram and the a good message for Thomas' goodbye to the program. With LISA on the short term horizon they are working on the slide presentation for the Mentorship BoF. I reminded them that we should coordinate that with the LOPSA Town meeting. This brings up the usually question about raffle giveaways. The team wants to start using PGP keys in emails between everyone. That has forced me to learn how to do that. Do to my illness and my constant issues with camera/audio devices I could not discuss the use of Github or RT. I will add this to the next meetings agenda. Ski reminded to get the info in for Volunteer of the month by October 1st
    • Leadership Committee
      • Ski initiated contact with Mario and is waiting to hear back from him.
    • USENIX Liaison report
      • Matt Simmons spoke to David Blank-Edelman about LOPSA translating the Code of Ethics into German. David has forwarded that request on to the USENIX board.

LOPSA Professional Recognition Program - further discussion & voting (MPSimmons)

Last meeting, we discussed the LPR program and tabled it until this meeting. I wanted to give everyone the chance to ask any final questions, and then vote on the program. The consensus of the board was in favor of the program.

Matt made a motion to approve the policy and charter for the LOPSA Professional Recognition Program: Seconded by William https://board.lopsa.org/LOPSA_Professional_Recognition_Program

The motion passed with no oppositions or abstentions.

Yerkes Award... (Ski)

We only have 2 choices that I can see: Both are good choices but a third person was brought up and Ski will research this new person and get back to the board.

Dan stated The award selectee should meet this criteria : "Each year, an awards committee selects someone who followed Chuck's example in the prior year in their contributions to system administration online forums—whether mailing lists, web forums, or chat rooms." I think we need to dig through the IRC logs, reddit, the mailing lists and/or stack exchange to see who has been not only the most active but also who has done the best job of helping their fellow sysadmins. The award does have a very specific target, not just who has contributed the most to sysadmin

Computer Associates (CA) Sponsorship... (Ski)

This came from the phone call they left about a sponsorship. It is a new product that they will not tell me much about. They are definitely very interested. Questions they had are:

  • Click throughs on the puppet ad
    • A discussion started on the Puppet Ad traffic. Up until now, we have not tracked outbound links. An RT ticket was created to modify the Google Analytics / Theme code to allow for this in the future.
    • Puppet hasn't been a sponsor for a full year. Their stats are::
      • 136,000+ page views in 2012
      • 107,000+ page views so far in 2013 (on track for 150,000+ views)
  • Placement of the CA ad:
    • Above, below or rotated with the puppet ad
    • A short discussion on the pros and cons of rotating rather than static placement ensued and it was suggested that this be handed off to the Tech team for them to resolve this.
  • CA asked if we could get people to blog about their product.
    • The consensus of the board was that blogging in that nature was disingenuous without the standard blurb "This is a paid advertisement."
    • Ski stated that since they do get an email to our membership introducing themselves, they could put something in there that they are looking for folks to try the product and provide them feedback (possibly even write about it)
    • A comment about sponsors banners that the banners should be single rotating sponsor banner and a sponsors page. There is too much cruft on the page already and it will look even more out of place when we re-design the site.

LOPSA Student Chapters (Evan)

Evan feels LOPSA needs to place a focus on building chapters at local community colleges and universities. Aspiring IT professionals are the future of our industry and getting them involved early on is not only vital to the long term success of LOPSA, it also provides us with the best opportunity to serve our mission: to provide education to the sys admin community and to stake out our place in society.

This is the best way to foster goodwill and an atmosphere of learning and to show students we care. Offering membership at no cost to students is a good way to begin what we hope will be a life long membership. This will also offer a side benefit of being able to pitch to potential sponsors a higher membership count.

Even proposes that we amend our membership dues for students to $0 provided they provide us with some sort of evidence that proves they are a full-time student. Unpaid student memberships will not include voting rights nor will they include the right to any services which cost LOPSA money.

Martin raised the point that the Locals Policy requires at least one Full time LOPSA member. It would have to be determined if we are going to change that policy or amend it somehow. The question being that we are going to let random students become student members but to form a local chapter at the school they will need at least one paying member to LOPSA.

A discussion started on this and it was decided that this discussion be moved to email between the board and Evan would have time to rewrite his proposal for inclusion at a future meeting. Evan agreed with that.

LOPSA Educational Leadership - SkillsUSA

Evan has been trying to find ways for LOPSA to live out its mission of providing education to the professional community in ways other than conferences and training. I believe I've found a good way to get started with this in SkillsUSA.

SkillsUSA is a nationwide program designed to bring together students, teachers, and industry to help build a skilled workforce.

There are nationwide competitions that begin at the local levels and the winners progress on until they finally reach the national competition for both Secondary (high school) and Post-Secondary (college) for students interested in various fields, IT included. This is a great opportunity to get involved with the brightest young minds interested in the field.

The proposal is for LOPSA to seek to become a sponsor of SkillsUSA by sending a LOPSA representative each year to the nationwide competition to serve as both a judge and an advocate of LOPSA and our profession. In addition to the LOPSA presence, we should sponsor a prize for top finishers in the area we choose and that top finisher be given a trip to the nearest LOPSA regional conference.

This would be money well spent, far more effective than the sponsorship we've done with similar initiatives as it will reach a broader audience and an audience who is more likely to get involved with LOPSA.

Dan stated we can provisionally approve this, we can't pass it as a motion until we have an idea of the cost and a full operations budget

A short discussion ensued that further explained the contest, how much money is being projected to be spent etc.

Dan mentioned that we should also look into other ventures like this for example "Olympics of the mind" and he will contact Rob Kolstad to see what that contest has evolved to these days.

It agreed that this is not ready for a vote and Evan will come back with more info after he gets more cost information from the SkillsUSA site.

Adjournment

Motion to adjourn Ski William Seconded

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