Board meeting Minutes/2 Jun 2014

Prior: 19 May 2014

Board meeting Minutes

Next: 16 Jun 2014

Minutes approved: 30 Jun 2014

Present

(Subject to verification) Dan Rich (chair), John Boris, Ski Kacoroski, Matt Simmons, Evan Pettrey,Matt Disney

Apologies

William Bilancio, Martin Gehrke

Opened

8:17 PM Eastern Time

Closed

9:09 PM Eastern Time

Consent Agenda

• Approve minutes of 5 May 2014 Tabled to be discussed on email
• Minutes of 21 Apr 2014 were approved

Standing Reports

Treasurer's report (Pettrey)

• BoA Account: $29,169.58
• PayPal Account: $1,066.60
• TDBank: $1,989.33
• Total: $32,225.51
• +/- from last meeting:$3,460.98

Evan Pettrey found that the Square device was still linked to the TD Bank account. This will be corrected by next meeting.

Membership report (Simmons)

• Previous Month:
  • New: 83 (9 students)
  • Renew: 14 (0 students)
  • Lapsed: 70
• Month to Date:
  • New: 0 (0 students)
  • Renew: 0 (0 students)
  • Lapsed: 2
• Total: 896 (791 paying)

Conference/events activities report (Bilancio)

No report due to William Bilancio's absence.

Local Chapter Committee report (Gehrke)

No report due to Martin Gehrke's absence. Evan Pettrey reported that the Crabby Admins last meeting will be on June 4, 2014 as Evan is stepping down and they have not found a replacement.

Development report (Kacoroski)

Ski did get our logo to MongoDB

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

The LOPSAGram will go out after the meeting. Matt Simmons has created some email groups in CiVi for requests for content for the LOPSAGram. This resulted in some new content for the LOPSAGram. Matt Simmons is working on something new for LOPSA Live but there is a cost and he would like to get back to the board once he gains some sponsors for it.

Craig Constintine has stepped up to handle our social media exchanges. Martin Gehrke is putting together a booklet on how to recruit system administrators.

Project Management report (Rich)

Nothing to report

Liaison reports (LC, etc.)

Technical Services Report (Bilancio)

No report.

Mentorship Report (Boris)

The LMPT core team has sent in the following to the LOPSAGram. The Mentorship Web Pages also need to be updated.

Greetings fellow LOPSA members! You'll recall that we recently made some changes to provide students with discounted memberships and offer complimentary memberships for people in financial need (see https://lopsa.org/about_membership for details). It's important to us as an organization that the benefits of LOPSA are available to everyone, even those who are less able to spend money on professional organization memberships.

In conjunction with this change, we are also making some modifications to the requirements of the mentorship program. We have always required that all mentors be LOPSA members to ensure they shared the same values and ideals that define our mission. We did not require that proteges become LOPSA members because we wanted to offer assistance to professional and fledgling systems administrators who might not be able to afford the cost of membership. Now that we have removed the financial barrier, we will require any new proteges who sign up for the program after June 30th to be LOPSA members as well. Note that this does NOT affect proteges in an existing relationship, though signing up for membership is definitely encouraged.

We intend that this change create a twofold benefit. First, our mentors work hard to provide guidance and insight to help our proteges move forward in their careers. Requiring membership helps identify the proteges who are more serious in their pursuit and will help keep them engaged with the field and their mentor. Secondly, we believe that providing the ability to work with a mentor as a concrete benefit of membership, instead of a service we offer to the public at large, is in the best interest of the LOPSA community as a whole.

There are always proteges looking for new mentors, so if you feel you have experience to share, please take a moment to consider signing up at https://lopsa.org/mentor

With thanks, The LOPSA Mentorship Program Team Changes need to be made to the Mentorship pages on lopsa.org. Dan Rich suggested that a mentorship user be created for that content as we have for lopsawebstaff.

LOPSA Professional Recognition (Simmons)

Matt Simmons reported that there are only a few LPR certificates left to get to the selectees.

Leadership Committee (Kacoroski)

The elections have started, please remind people to vote.

USENIX (Simmons)

The LOPSA code of ethics has been converted to German and sent to USENIX where they are going to hand it to a German member to review. Casey has asked LOPSA if they would like to co-sign a document for code of ethics for events. They were not aware we have one and it was forwarded to them for review. Consensus of the board is that we don't want to lose the ownership of the document. Dan Rich would like to see the document called the LOPSA code of conduct and other organizations can sign on to it. That way at other events, like O'Reily's, could say sign on for their conference. Matt Simmons suggested if we called it the System Adminsitrators code of conduct with our logo on the bottom in the signature area. Dan Rich was in agreement on that and Matt Simmons said he would continue to work on the document to that end.

WiAC (Boris)

From the email exchanges the stipend winner has been announced and Evan has sent the check. The signup Genius form is up

http://www.signupgenius.com/go/60B0B4BA8AA2AAA8-volunteers

John Boris said the table is all set and will send an email out through CiVi to all members. Ski gave an example how he asks for help at ScALE.

Financial Discussions (Pettrey)

Account Transfers

Need to get at least two Directors access to all of the accounts mentioned in a previous email (we need to get around these single points of failure that currently exist)

• Bank of America
• TD Bank
• PayPal

Dan Rich and Matt Disney will be added to the account. They are members of the Finance committee. John Boris mentioned that due to our election cycle it makes it very tough to keep people with access to the account.

Balance Sheet

I'd like to discuss options for our outstanding debt to AH and money owed to us by PICC. There was a discussion on listing the debt in balance sheet. The proposed balance sheet shows our assets and liabilities. Even agreed that our outstanding debt will appear in the minutes. See below for PICC

Dan Rich restated he will speak to AH to reduce the debt with them.

Budget Proposal

I'd like to propose that we use my amended budget for the budget that we make public. I'd like to put some more time into the formatting before making it public but we should go through things to see if anything needs to be added/removed and then vote on it. The board was asked to review the budget so we can vote on it and get it out. Matt Simmons feels we are overstating our membership income and might be counting people twice due to the way we gain members at conferences. Dan reviewed the original budget and we did count double. There was a discussion on how CiVi calculates and how the actual amount of a $50 membership is less because PayPal skims their payment. Evan will look into this because the LPR payments may be skewing our per member income. A short discussion on how CiVi handles memberships and Dan will look into the imports to make sure there were no errors which would skew the average per member. John Boris asked if we track the discount we give for conference signees and we don't track that. We would have to back into that number.

Everyone should have a proposed public version of the revised budget in their shared documents in Google Docs.

Financial Transparency

Make plans to vote our budget and balance sheet to be fully public at our next meeting.

PICC Membership Funds (Simmons)

Matt Simmons spoke as a member of PICC not the board. PICC is spinning down in the near future. The PICC Board is requesting a monetary settlement for the remaining memberships owed. The PICC board was sent an invoice for 491 members for $19,640 and the PICC board stated this will put a severe hardship on the PICC board due to other outstanding liabilities and owner equity. The owner equity is the last payout. PICC is asking if the $40 per member be reduced to $30 per member for a total cost of $14,730. After that payment the owner equity portion of PICC will be paid out at a drastic lower rate. Also after these payouts PICC will be dissolved as a non profit in NJ.

Dan Rich stated that this would put conferences in the future in a different light.

Evan Pettrey recommended that we accept their offer.

Dan Rich moved that "The board shall lower the past due amount for PICC from $40 per member to $30 per member." Seconded by John Boris. As a point of clarity Evan Pettrey and Matt Simmons clarified the per member cost is being lowered for past conferences and not future conferences (Cascadia 2012,2013, PICC'12 and LOPSA-East 2013) Dan Rich amended the motion to add "for past conferences only" and John Boris Amended his seconded. The motion passed without objection and Matt Simmons abstained.

Professional headshots at LISA in Seattle (Simmons)

Overview explanation, discussion of finances, and a proposal to seek funding / sponsorship to cover costs. Matt Simmons feels he can get sponsorship for the $1500 for the project. He is going to contact LinkedIN as it will benefit LOPSA and them. The consensus of the board was for Matt to proceed. Dan Rich mentioned we might want to take a survey of the members to see how many would like to take advantage of this. Matt Simmons said he would put that in the outgoing LOPSAgram. Matt gave an explanation on how he plans to approach LinkedIN to get them to sponsor the headshots.

New Business

No New Business

Adjournment

John motioned to adjourn Ski seconded