Board meeting Minutes/14 Mar 2016

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Prior:
22 Feb 2016 		Board meeting Minutes Next:
28 Mar 2016




Minutes approved: 28 Mar 2016

  • 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) Ski Kacoroski (chair), Matt Disney, Paul English, Steve VanDevender, John Boris, Atom Powers, Thomas Uphill


Apologies
?William Bilancio,George Beech
Guests
?
Opened
9:01 PM Eastern Time
Closed

Consent Agenda

Action Items

No action Items

Standing Reports

Treasurer's report (Disney, Kacoroski)

  • Balance info
    • BoA Account: $48,553.59
    • PayPal Account: $36,464.35
    • TDBank: $2,001.53
    • Total: $87,019.47
      • +/- from last report: $25,610.46
      • LOPSA Balance: $51,165.98
      • CasITConf Balance: $35,853.49
  • Summary of expenditures since last report:
    • Budgeted operations
  • Summary of income since last report:
    • Membership dues
    • Cascadia 2016 Registrations and Sponsorships
  • Cascadia summary and questions:
    • Starting balance for 2016: $5,918.39
    • Cleared registration income (66 registrants?): $27,497.95
    • Cleared sponsorships: $2,437.15
    • Expected expenses: $29,126 (apowers)
      • Pending expense reports and payment to teachers (apowers)
    • Gap in registrants and cleared payments?
      • About 12 students will be paid for by the school district when invoiced (apowers)
    • Were the Square transactions in Feb and Mar recorded in WildApricot?
  • Top priorities
    • CasITConf accounts payable
    • EIN for LOPSA East
    • Transition bank accounts
    • 2014 990
    • Assuming HootSuite charges
    • Finances committee charter
    • Locals financial management
  • Comments:
    • We are currently paying both $178 monthly for our web hosting/colo and $130 for WildApricot. When do we expect these costs to decrease?
  • Matt stated that we are doing good. CasITConf is doing well and some registrations need to be cleared up. Matt, Atom and Ski discussed the reconciliation of sponsorships and registrations that were not matching up between Square and Wild Apricot.
  • Atom has to get expenses from Teachers to Matt for CasITConf. Atom wants to send Welcome emails to all new members.
  • Matt stated that the money from CasITConf has to be marked correctly for tracking purposes.

Membership report (VanDevender, Bilancio)

  • Total active members: 624 (previous report: 661, change: -37)
  • Paying: 402 (13 new in last 30 days)
  • Non-paying: 222 (19 new in last 30 days)

Paying members include Individual, Charter, Founding, and Lifetime memberships. Non-paying members include Student and Complimentary memberships.

The drop in paying members probably corresponds to expiring Cascadia 2015 members from last year.

Let's try to get the Cascadia 2016 member import going as soon as we can (ideally before the grace period for members added from Cascadia 2015 runs out). Do we have an attendee list? Do I need to work out how to extract the information from Wild Apricot?

  • Steve and ATom discussed the attendee list.
  • Ski spoke about the bulk membership by Sony. The Invoice has been sent and is waiting for payment.

Committee reports

Conferences/Events/Chapters activities report (Bilancio, Powers)

We need to do a LOPSA Local "inventory" to find out who is still meeting and if they want to stay as LOPSA Locals and what their plans are for the future. (BIlancio)

  • Cascadia plans to purchase three video cameras for the conference next year. Should these be LOPSA cameras that can be used by LOPSA East? (apowers)
    • A short discussion on cameras and needed accessories followed. John recommended that an extra Microphone is needed to pick up the audio.
  • John spoke on LOPSA-East that the break even attendee number is 60. LOPSA-East is using Eventbrit and not WildApricot. John suggested that a Policy be developed that will govern the Conferences held by the Locals.
  • A Cascadia Attendee approached Ski about a local in Kentucky. The attendee was from Louisville and Matt asked to have the information sent to him so he could help him get started.

Education (Kacoroski, Boris)

Nothing to report

Speakers Bureau (Powers, English)

This has become one of my priorities before CasITConf 2017. (apowers)

Ideas to make this work? What do we provide: 

 * a place for people to register their interest in speaking. In return we would contact them about CfPs & Locals
 * a middle-man for conferences to contact about their CfPs
 * coaching (ie: basically mentoring) for speakers
 * topic ideas
  • John suggested that a request go out to the locals for contacts of their past speakers to see if those speakers want to be on the speakers list.
  • Thomas asked if there was any room in the budget for an enticement for speakers with some type of rembursement for speakers. A short discussion followed on speakers. Thomas stated that the possible local in Kentucky may need help and we might be able to help. Ski stated that it would be on a case by case basis

Marketing/Communications (LOPSAgram, #lopsa-live, etc) (English, Uphill)

(Ski): Adam Boulware offered to set up a process where people can post to blogs.lopsa.org, pick the category sysadmin-news, and the post will show up on our front page under System Admin News. This will help to keep new content on our main website. I have provided him the credentials to the wordpress site and hopefully this will be working by the next LOPSAgram.

  • John asked if that setup could work for the jobs maillist.
  • John asked Paul if he setup anything for Hootsuite to send out notices for CasITConf. John will setup a spreadsheet of items for LOPSA-East and get that to Paul. Paul stated he had an email from William on this so John agreed to get with WIlliam and develop the spreadsheet.

(Paul): I missed Warner's election announcement in the LOPSAgram - we need to promote this, so I'll put it out via HootSuite (Twitter at least), and on the front page?

Technical Services Report (Beech, VanDevender)

No report

Mentorship Report (Boris, Beech)

George did get the api working and it looks like the mentor requests are going out. John will get with George on some other tweaks of the API to see if all parts of the automation are working.

Recognition (Uphill, Disney)

Sysadmin day is coming up.

Leadership Committee (Warner, Kacoroski)

Warner has started reaching out to folks and plans an email to all members soon on elections.

Sysadmin Day July 29 2016

SAGE-AU... (Ski)

Mike Ciavarella is now a member of the SAGE-AU board and he reached out to me wondering if there are ways that we can work more closely together and perhaps formalize our ties a bit more. So what are your thoughts on how we could coordinate more with SAGE-AU? A short discussion followed on SAGE-AU. Ski will start an email thread on this to gather ideas.

LISA SIG... (Ski)

USENIX announced here (https://www.usenix.org/blog/refocusing-lisa-community) that they will be shutting down the LISA SIG. What is the impact on LOPSA? What should LOPSA do about it? I feel we should make some statement on our website and to our members about it (perhaps in concert with SAGE AU). Thoughts?

  • Setup website for materials?

Community Manager... (Ski)

I have reworked the position announcement a bit. I plan to post it this week to craiglist in Seattle and Portland.

  • Matt asked about how to handle being an employer. John stated he will ask about 1099 requirements.
  • If we keep it a 1099 then we don't have to handle Social Security and other taxes.
  • Ski suggested Matt discuss this with an accountant about it.
  • John will ask at work how they handle this and basic requirements.
  • It was suggested we contract with the person and handle it as a consultant.

CasITConf Retrospective (Atom)

Good

  • It felt like a successful conference. We had more attendees than last year and received more compliments than criticism during the conference.
  • I expect a net surplus of about $5k this year.
  • Some talks were recorded, which will help expand awareness of CasITConf and LOPSA when they can be published.

Bad

  • This was a bad year for the volunteers.
    • I, Atom, was extremely late in getting the conference together, which created a lot more stress on everybody involved.
    • Paul was too busy with $dayjob
    • Thomas was unclear on his responsibilities.
  • Videographers did not behave as expect. I expected three videographers with three cameras in three rooms. We had three videographers with one camera.
  • We would have crashed if not for Ski's heroism. Again. He brought in about 30% of the attendees and at least 50% of the sponsors.

Ugly

  • About 30% of the attendees were students, who pay less than our per-person break-even cost. I believe having them is still better than not having them.
  • The catering was more expensive and of a lower quality than last year.
  • Several sponsors "abused" their registration by coming on Friday.
  • We have a critical shortage of volunteers. We will be losing Paul and we need at least 9 people to run the conference (3 chairs, 3 under-chairs, and 3 booth-volunteers).

Learnings

  • We have a very low "bus factor" with Ski holding more than his share of effort. This has been a problem since at least when I started helping with CasITConf.
  • We don't have a solid task schedule and every year we miss some tasks or do them late.
  • We appear to have the kind of conference that people want to attend, but most people don't know about it. If we can market better we could double attendance.

In addition to volunteer recruiting and task schedule creation I imagine three key projects for next year:

Participant Pipeline - The Speakers Bureau

This will help us generate speakers and trainers not just four CasITConf but within our industry as a whole.

Attendee Pipeline - Marketing

Our target audience are local tech companies and tech schools. We need to develop:

  • Communication templates that describe why people should come to CasITConf
  • Media lists of places to recruit attendees.

Location - Bellevue College(?)

If moving to Bellevue is logistically possible (catering, class conflicts, lodging, etc.) then this could help us reduce the cost of the conference and give us room to grow. Neither of these benefits are existing problems; we are not running a deficit and we don't have enough participants to expand our schedule. This is a lower priority.

  • John ask Paul if CasITconf ever saw the spreadsheet on running the conference. John will ask William for the link on that.
  • Thomas recommended the get the dates for next year so we can announce them at the other conferences.
  • Ski asked Thomas to check into Bellevue College for CasITConf next year.

New Business

No new business

Notes/announcements

No announcements

Adjournment

 John Motioned for Adjournment
 Paul Seconded
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