Board meeting Minutes/30 Jan 2012

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Prior:
16 Jan 2012 		Board meeting Minutes Next:
13 Feb 2012


Minutes approved: 12 Mar 2012


Present
Philip Kizer (chair), William Bilancio, Ski Kacoroski, Dan Rich, Jesse Trucks, Nadine Miller, Matt Disney, Lois Bennett
Apologies
Chris St. Pierre
Opened
2103 Eastern Time
Closed
2226 Eastern Time

Consent Agenda

Action Items

Standing Reports

  • Treasurer's report
    • We have switched to using quickbooks for 2012.
  • Membership report
    • 11 lapsed members this month, 20 in Dec, 276 in 2011
    • Need to contact lapsed members to figure out why they are not renewing. (Disney - prioritize to charter members first)
    • Membership is up but not growing. Too many folks are not renewing.
  • Technical services report
    • No new projects.
  • Conference/events activities report
    • SCALE done. Considering not doing the Expo next year as we may be better off circulating around. We need to have more control over SCALEU classes as many folks in classes did not pay.
    • PICC closed CFP, 24 submissions for talks. Registration open on the 13th. Great crew working on the conference
    • Cascadia schedule ready. Registration opens on the 6th.
    • Next LOPSA conference would be OLF.
  • Mentorship Status report
    • They would like to update the Mentorship web page with more current information.
  • Development report (Meeting focus at first meeting of the month)
  • Upcoming LOPSAgram and #lopsa-live (last meeting of the month only)

Aleksey's idea of marketing to companies... (Ski)

Hi. I talked to a couple of organizations at SCALE 10x in Los Angeles that employ tens of sysadmins (DreamHost, Gator.com).

I think it might be worthwhile, as a promotional action, to promote via institutions -- i.e. have company's forward to their sysadmins an invitation to join LOPSA, or else buy LOPSA memberships for their sysadmins as a benefit of employment.

An institutional discount (something like 40% off if you buy ten or more memberships) might make this even more attractive.

I don't know the financials of LOPSA close enough to judge what sort of discount would be viable for LOPSA; I mean I don't want to give away the farm, but I do want to offer an attractive discount.

I'd like to see us start marketing LOPSA memberships to companies and via companies.

What do you think of that and would somebody like to work with me on that?

    • We decided this is a good idea. Ski will look into membership classes and see if I can add it in as a corporate membership class. Draft proposal to do this.

Benefits Discussion (Dan)

In surveying other similar organizations, I have found that the benefits they offer fall into the following general categories:

  • Publications - magazines, on-line publications, newsletters, etc.
  • Digital Library - typically a past collection of publications, sometimes additional materials
  • Safari Books - ACM and IEEE both have a custom bookshelf for their members
  • On-line training
  • SIGS
  • Career & Job Center - job and resume postings, career resources
  • E-mail forwarding - username@org aliases
  • Discounts - products, services, memberships, and other individual discounts
  • Awards Program
  • Chapters
  • Tech committees / Standards - only IEEE
  • Certification Program - only IEEE
  • Conferences
  • Legal Hotline
  • Insurance
  • Networking
  • Sample Documents
  • Mentoring
  • Speakers Bureau

We should pick a few of these and assign champions to them so we can increase the benefits we offer to our members.

    • Idea of Sponsor profiles in LOPSAGram. Consensus was to focus on community by focusing on local chapters, conferences, jobs board, and sigs. We also need to jump on opportunities when we hear about them (e.g. Hostgator looking for system admins). Dan will followup on this.

Charter Members... (Ski)

Question from Justin Filoseta who was set up as a charter member in 2009 and then demoted to individual in 2011 even though he kept his dues paid up. Membership policy says charter members are folks who joined before 2007. Any ideas on what to do.

  • Dan will followup on this

Mary... (Ski)

Started her working on cust service queue. She has emailed Lois to help her out. Need access to Civi for many items (e.g. pending payments list). I would like to start a list of tasks for her on the wiki. Any other ideas.

Volunteers (Dan)

In order to get more volunteers we need to let the LC know exactly what we need and what we expect them to do. As an attempt to get us moving on this, I have created a page on the board wiki that I will pass off to the LC when I next talk to Tom

2012 Board Elections (Dan)

The LC is starting to prep for the 2012 LOPSA Board elections. They would like to know if our board members whose terms are expiring are interested in running again and if we have other ideas for possible candidates.

Adjournment

Motion to adjourn by Dan, seconded by Lois. Meeting adjourned at 22:26.

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