Board meeting Minutes/24 Feb 2014

Prior:
10 Feb 2014

Board meeting Minutes

Next:
10 Mar 2014

Minutes approved: 10 Mar 2014

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, Mike Julian, Evan Pettrey, Matt Simmons, Matt Disney, Martin Gehrke

Apologies: ?

Opened: 8:02 PM Eastern Time

Closed: 9:15 PM Eastern Time

Consent Agenda

Minutes of 10 Feb 2014 were approved without objection

Action Items

Standing Reports

Treasurers Report

We are current with out liabilities. We are waiting for conference data to come in. Scale will be sending in a check to help for training.

Membership report

Matt thanks the people that worked the table at Scale which showed a big influx.

- Renew: 4
- Lapsed: 19
- For the quarter: +8 (38 full, 23 student, 42 lapsed)

Conference/events activities report
- LOPSA-EAST has opened registration so pass the word. Ski will start posting it to the social networks.
- SCALE was a huge success, 21 new or renewed members at the booth and quite a few contacts with potential members. Dan has a list of e-mail addresses from conference badges that were scanned, he will create an e-mail to send to them thanking them for stopping by and inviting them to join LOPSA. Thanks to the volunteers who helped out in the booth as well!
- Both Ski and Florian had good attendance and feedback on their Friday Classes. Florian as offered to teach classes in the future.

Local Chapter Committee report
- Wrote a letter to Northeastern University supporting the start of a student chapter
- Continued work on financial support of locals
- Working to get DC chapter back on its feet

Development report
- Ski met with a few possible sponsors at SCALE. Will follow up with them this week.

He is working on getting sponsors to sponsor training, conferences and the Women in Advanced Computing. We did get a request for a conference in Florida to supply training but we need a sponsor before we can do that. William questioned the conference and said that they have approached us in the past but they have never followed up for some reason.

Communications (LOPSAgram, #lopsa-live, etc)
- February's A/B testing both had the highest open rate of any LOPSAgram in the history of the organization.
- LOPSAgram going at at the beginning of March.
- Have asked chapter leaders to provide photos of their meetings for web / lopsagram updates
- Social Media:
  - Twitter is at 1,088 followers, Facebook has 386 likes, 45 Klout
- Martin raised a question about LOPSA-Lives if we will be having them. There was a discussion on how we want to proceed in the future with them. This is an item that needs to be talked about with the TSC. It will be discussed under new business. A note about elections was noted.
Project Management report

Moved to new business

Liaison reports (LC, etc.)
- Technical Services Report (Mike)
  - With feedback from many board members and non-board committee chairs, I've begun work on a TSC Internal Operations document. The document is not governing policy, but merely an internal operations guide. Thus, it is here only for informational purposes:
  - I reached out to the existing tech-team members concerning the Drupal upgrade, and only one person responded, and it wasn't in a positive direction. I think the current guys are demoralized. No status update available on progress of Drupal upgrade, because there hasn't been any.
  - Leading into the next point, I think we need to send out a call for volunteers to membership and the local chapters (who are chock full of non-members that may want to get involved).
  - No one in the TSC has volunteered to be TSC Chair. We should start considering good candidates, and perhaps send out a call for volunteers as well.

Mike will work with the Communications committee in promoting our need to the members.

- Mentorship Report (John)
  - The LMPT are in discussion with the TSC about their Google Apps domain.
- LOPSA Professional Recognition (Matt Simmons)
  - Followup letters and verification requests have all gone out. Meeting later this week to finalize recipients and send out notices prior to March 1.
  - The design for the certificate stamp seems final and it will be ordered shortly.
- Leadership Committee (Ski)
  - They are still looking for more candidates
- Educational Committee (Ski/Matt)
  - Had one person interested (Cole Levallee) - Matt will follow up.

CA Proposals... (Ski)

As I mentioned in email, CA would like to do some things that we have not done before with their sponsorship. I need to get agreement on what we should do with:

Co-Branded Tshirt
Pay for quarterly emails to members
Interview for a blog with one question being how CA product works
Advertise their contests to our members

A discussion followed on the proposal from CA. The board is concerned about putting our name to sponsors products. Although the sponsors are supporting our goals and initiatives we can't have our named tied to a company where it implies we are endorsing their products. As a result of the discussion Ski agreed to go back and research more on the income tax possibilities if we agree to their requests and also work out a better pricing layout for their extra requests.

Palo Alto... (Ski)

Palo Alto would like a quote on how much it would cost to just put an ad on our site. Right now that is part of our Gold Sponsorship package ($6000). Looking at the difference between Gold and Silver Sponsorships, I am estimating the ad should be between $750 - $1250 for a year. A short discussion followed. The outcome of the discussion was that this is a way to go for the time being and it seems to be in line with our sponsorships. Ski motioned that based upon our current traffic we sell ad space to Palo Alto for $1,250 per year. Matt Simmons seconded Motion Passed with one objection

Use of a Paid Accountant (John)

With Evan not returning our focus was turned toward a replacement and the possibility of contracting that position out. I did some investigating and found that a part time Accountant can run us approximately $50/hour. Evan should have input as what an Accountant would do but here are the things I feel the Accountant would do:

On an Interval basis meet with the Treasurer and review the transactions that occurred since the last meeting. Interval to be setup by the Treasurer but not to be longer than one month.
Fill out the 990 reports and any other Required Financial Form/Report to maintain our Non Profit Status
Assist in formulating the Budget
Provide a Monthly report on the state of the accounts to the board
Be the Subject Matter Expert for the Treasurer and the Finance Committee

That is a start. The Treasurer should be handling the Day to Day operations of the Finances of the organization with the Accountant as the first oversight of the operations. This will be discussed by the Finance Committee immediately after the Budget is finalized.

Use of a Mail Handling Service (John)

As the organization starts to get more mature we have to start looking at having certain services handled by a constant. Even though we are a Volunteer organization, run by Volunteers that only goes so far. This past year I know of two issues where checks were lost. These checks were never cashed so it is an issue for the Post Office. But it brought up the idea of having a Mail Handling Service. This is the initial step to that ens. It starts the conversation. No one hates spending money like me but there comes a time when you have to pay for something to have it always there. I loaded a Proposal from Regus (www.regus.com) to Google Docs and sent it to everyone in email. The cost of this service would be $69 a month plus the cost of shipping our mail to a designated person plus 20% of that postage to cover the materials for repackaging the mail into one package. The frequency is based on our preference but at a minimum it would be once a week. We should start looking at this type of service as it will be easier going forward as the board changes over the years. This will not cure losing any mail but it will ease the burden of board members getting to the Post Office during business hours, while on vacation or on travel for business.

A discussion followed on pros and cons and different ways to handle this issue. Matt Simmons will contact USENIX to see if they can provide us this service. As an outcome John was tasked to go research this service and come back to the board with proposals.

Strategic Board Meeting Scheduling (MPS)

At previous meetings and over email Matt proposed a Strategic Board Meeting. It was decided that the first meeting in March be set as a strategic meeting. Matt explained to the group that we would be speaking on goals that are 6 months to a year out. Dan will also go over the projects from the face to Face.

New Business

LOPSA Live - What do we want?

A discussion on what we want the LOPSA-Live to be and let the Communications Committee and the TSC decide how to do the LOPSA-LIVE. Matt Simmons polled the Board to get a sense what everyone was looking for in the LOPSA-Live. The consensus of the Board was that it should be interactive where we can get feedback from the members. IRC is not the way to go as you don't have time to answer or read the questions. The Communications committee and TSC were tasked to come up with an interactive way other than IRC for the next LOPSA-Live.

Notes/announcements

Adjournment

Motion for adjournment by Ski

Seconded by William