Board meeting Minutes/25 Feb 2013

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Prior:
11 Feb 2013 		Board meeting Minutes Next:
11 Mar 2013



Minutes approved: 11 Mar 2013


Present
(Subject to verification) Philip Kizer (chair), William Bilancio, Ski Kacoroski, Matt Disney, Dan Rich, John Boris, Evan Pettrey
Apologies
Martin Gehrke (vacation), Jesse Trucks
Opened
8:00 PM Eastern Time
Closed
8:58 PM Eastern Time

Consent Agenda

A discussion on the minutes was held and Philip will hold an email vote on Wednesday.

Action Items

Motion submitted via electronic mail on 2013-Feb-12

Motion by Martin Gehrke to approve NC*SA for provisional chapter status, Seconded by William Bilancio

Motion adopted on 2013-Feb-12

Standing Reports

Treasurers report Puppet Labs sponsorship has been received. The account is healthy. The Liability Insurance was paid. One of our sponsors used to donate regularly and his donations seemed to have stopped. It will be investigated to see what was the cause.

  • Membership report
    • Good turnout at SCALE, 5 renewals, 3 new members
    • 768 members
    • 12 lapsed members this month, 35 this quarter
    • I noticed that we have lost a few more founding members, we need to reach out and contact those and our non-renewing charter members
    • We have also had a few notable individual sponsors not give us a sponsorship this year
    • I am once again looking into gift memberships and trying to see what it would take to make a corporate membership possible (i.e. corporation buys multiple memberships for employees, possibly at a discount)
  • Technical services report
    • Monitoring is up and working.
    • Splunk is collecting logs and is working.
    • Pager duty setup is in process. Tech Team members are watching this closely
    • The Jobs board was moved back to Drupal 6 for Development and a report should be sent in soon on the progress and status within a week.
    • The Tech Team will be cleaning up their RT queue.
    • A question was raised as to why we were using a company (Pager Duty) to handle alerts when we could send the alerts to the persons cell via person-phone-number@cell-providor.com. A discussion followed and it was restated that from the minutes the Tech Team was to contact the Pager Company and try to work on a deal for the service. After that they were to consult with the Treasurer and discuss the feasibility of going to this company for Pager alert service. The Treasurer found out today about the costs and nothing has been done as of this moment. No contract or agreement has been made with Pager Duty. The Treasurer will follow up with the Tech team on this issue. The costs for the service is approximately $18 - $36 per month but more information is needed. It was suggested that a justification from the Tech Team would be in order as it would be setting up a recurring cost. The Treasurer and the Tech Team can work on this. As part of the justification it should show the benefits of getting the service.
  • Conference/events activities report
    • SCALE was a good conference. Dan and Ski were there. Our trainer was sick, but Ski was able to take over and had 25 in the vi class and 35 in the Time Management class (people were sitting along the walls and in the aisle). We signed up 6 new members and 5 renewals. Also made contact with a group of students that want to start a student chapter at California State University San Bernandino. We also contacted several potential sponsors. Next year I would like to brand us as LOPSA-U and see if we can get two rooms for speakers. Dan noted if we decide to do SCALE next year we should try to be on the correct spot of the venue for the most foot traffic. We were next to USENIX who normally is on the larger side where more foot traffic existed but this year they were on the smaller side. Since we requested to be near USENIX we ended up on the less traveled side. This will be placed in the SCALE notes (Wiki Page) for next year to consider table placement.
    • Cascadia and LOPSA-East registrations are open. Cadcadia's early bird discount is done on Thursday. Not sure if they will extend it. Crossbow head will be changing. Past attendees from LOPSA-East will be contacted. Cascadia will be sending out a second mailing to past attendees.
  • Mentorship Status report

Short call this week. Snow storm in Central USA hampered two members and Chairman was ill. Lois and John were on Call this week. The team still has to update the procedure into a better guide to make process easier for those that don't do it as often.

  • Communications (LOPSAgram, #lopsa-live, etc) (last meeting of the month only)

Ski had very good talks with USENIX and LINUX New Media representatives. He is working on an ad swapping arrangement with them as well as possibly posting some of their articles/talks (stuff). O'Reilly approached him about posting information about their Velocity conferences in return they will post information about our conferences. Our Tweets are getting out there and we have seen them re-tweeted.

    • The LOPSAGram is coming up and if Board members have anything for it they should forward it to Ski as soon as possible.
  • Project Management report

No report

  • Liaison reports (LC, etc.)

Our LC Chair has been unresponsive to attempts to speak to him. Philip was asked to step in as President to contact him and see where we are. There was a request that by the next meeting someone prepare a timeline and document how hard it was to stay in contact the LC Chair.


LOPSA-U Idea... (Ski)

I would like to propose that we set up formal LOPSA branded training that we do at conferences called LOPSA-U. The idea is to get LOPSA's name out there more so folks hear about it instead of SCALE-U. I have a lead on a company that would be willing to help sponsor LOPSA-U (we are talking about $1000, but maybe more). The idea is that our trainers would have a slide at the start and end of the presentations saying this tutorial brought to you by LOPSA and <Sponsorname>, it would mention our booths (if we have them), and their would be some materials provided by LOPSA and the sponsor at the back of the room.

I met with a person from South East LinuxFest (SELF) and he was open to having LOPSA-U at his location. The potential sponsor is attending that one, Ohio, and the Northeast for sure (maybe more). If we go for this I see us needing speakers (I could do some of these), literature, marketing (yes me again), but I think it would be a good way to get the LOPSA brand out there.

Texas Linuxfest (May 31-Jun 1, Austin, TX) South East LinuxFest (Jun 7-9, Charlotte, NC) (we could get the new local to help out). Ohio Linuxfest (Sep 13-15, Columbus, OH) (we have a local here also)

For the Texas and SELF, we have to contact them soon if we are going to do this as they need to block out the rooms for us (I am not sure that Texas would be willing to do it).

There may be issues with the Conferences changing there names. The thought is to have a LOPSA-U day and hopefully have the sponsor back the trainer which would save us. South East LinuxFest has asked us to get to them within the next few weeks if we are going to go. Ski will contact the sponsor and South East Linuxfest and see what they say. The focus will be South East LinuxFest attending.

Going forward it might be possible to have the LOPSA-U brand on the Local Conferences.

It was brought up having an Online presence of LOPSA-U.


Sponsorships... (Ski)

In addition to our standard media, bronze, silver, gold, and platinum sponsors; I would like to add the following sponsorships and start advertising them to our sponsors:

WiAC: $500 - $1500: LOPSA will advertise and solicit essays from women who want to attend the WiAC workshop at the Federated conferences. The top essayists will win the stipend and are required to write up a blog post for LOPSA after they attend. LOPSA will advertise the stipend as sponsored by <sponsorname> on our website, newsletter, and media feeds.

Group memberships: If a corporation purchases 4 memberships at full price for their staff, they get one membership free (end result is like they are getting 5 at our discounted price).

Sponsor LOPSA conference training: See above. This might help drive sponsorship as their sponsorship money would go directly go to that purpose.

WiAC'13 (Disney)

Prepared to announce stipend in same manner as last year (on lopsa.org with publicity through LOPSA comm channels). Propose using http://www.crowdrise.com/crowdrise for fundraising additional stipend amounts. Announcement for March LOPSAgram. Discussion or questions?

Why wouldn't we just use CiviPledge so it integrates in with the rest of our contact tracking and finances? It is designed to be used like a PBS pledge "I pledge $20." The other third party sites are fine but you get lost in the other drives. It would look better if we have the drive coming from our site.

CiviPledge will be investigated and seen if it will help our efforts. The idea is to keep it easy for our users and members to use.

Everyone agrees to use the crowd funding option as it will aid us in our sponsorship.

An experimental pledge will be put into Civi for testing.

Proposal to promote WiAC

It was suggested that we build on recent video on sysadmins. We start getting a few women involved in scripting the video and collecting videos and pictures and start creating a video on WiAC. A mailing list will be created.

New Business

Notes/announcements

Each board member is asked to update who you think would be a good contact for a sponsorship. Ski explained how he has been approaching sponsorships. Basically he has been sending information to any sales person that approaches him. He entered the template into Civi. He dug around in Civi and found that a large amount of sponsorship have fallen by the wayside and we should try and get them back. He has had only one big response. But is worth the effort.

It was suggested that when we approach a potential a sponsor we should have a purpose so we can go to a sponsor and say "Hey we have this WiAC scholarship would you like sponsor it" as one example.

Adjournment

Motion to Adjournment by Matt Second by William

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