Board meeting Minutes/8 Apr 2013

Prior: 25 Mar 2013

Board meeting Minutes

Next: 22 Apr 2013

Minutes approved: 6 May 2013

• 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) Philip Kizer (chair), William Bilancio, Dan Rich, Evan Pettrey,John Boris, Ski Kacoroski, Martin Gehrke, Matt Disney

Apologies

Opened

8:03 PM Eastern Time

Closed

9:23 PM Eastern Time

Consent Agenda

• Approve minutes of 25 Mar 2013 Put on Hold for redactions with question on voting.

• minutes of 3 Dec 2012 were approved with no opposition

Action Items

Dan reminds the Board to review the Request Tracker Queue for open Tickets they own. They are to update them or close them as needed.

John took ownership of one unowned ticket referring to a Google Voice mail.

William took ownership of Jobs Board.

Standing Reports

• Treasurer's report (Evan Pettrey)

We are current with our current liabilities. The finances from SCALE are still being worked out as there were last minute changes.

• Membership report (Dan Rich)
  • Cascadia 2013 attendees have been imported, 91 new members and 30 renewals (assuming the name and e-mail matching worked correctly)
  • 867 members
  • 8 lapsed members this month, 84 in March, 126 in Q1
  • High lapsed member count is likely due to attendees of Cascadia 2012 who didn't attend in 2013 -- do we have any metrics of that?

• Technical services report (William Bilancio)

The Web Site will be discussed later in the Agenda. Things are running smoothly on the servers.

• Conference/events activities report (William Bilancio)

LOPSA-East closed their Extended early bird discount today and it will not be extended. They have 109 registrants which is ahead of last year at this time.

William is talking with Mike Julian about a conference run by the Tennessee Chapter. Further discussions will be held at LOPSA-East. The Board will be advised after that.

LISA'13 is coming up.

William will be talking with a person to take over Crossbow and getting us into other conferences.

William has met with a Marketing person for next year's conference and also if he will be interested in helping LOPSA do marketing.

Matt Disney was given the go ahead to proceed at SouthEast LINUX Fest with the LOPSA-U venture for two classes. William will set up Eventbrite for that event. The days will be Friday and Sunday with 1 room per day. one full day of Puppet and two half day sessions.

• Mentorship Status report (John Boris)

The mentor program is doing great. Each week we get new Proteges. I haven't seen new mentors sign up but that might be due to the automation. Since we started the Google Docs method of tracking Proteges and mentors we have 12 Proteges, 18 Mentors and 18 Relationships. The Mentors number is low as all of the mentors who have signed up have not been moved from the old document and they are getting moved over. The weekly Mentorship Team meeting has been moved to Tuesdays 2:30PM to 3:20PM Eastern time. As luck would have it I will miss this new time due to work commitments but that time should be better going forward. Thomas spoke with Jesse about the volunteer he has for help with Google Apps programming help but nothing came of that meeting.

• Local Chapter Committee (Martin Gehrke)

The committee met to divide up duties. The charter will be discussed later in the meeting.

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

Ski is working with O'Reilly about getting a free ebook for all of our members. We just have to work out the sponsorship for that benefit possibly a $1,000 sponsorship. Ski is trying to make the communication from the locals easier. He wants to have a place for them to put their updates without him being in the middle. It would put more responsibility on them to keep it updated. The issue is getting it to the Social media sites.

• Project Management report (Philip Kizer)

The standing reports section will be the place to handle reporting the status of projects until a better mechanism can be put into place.

• Liaison reports (LC, etc.) (Philip Kizer)

Philip has been in communication with Mario. William asked if the Leadership Committee could post the dates for the LOPSA-LIVE sessions for the election.

A question came up concerning the order of election announcements. The point being when will the announcement about Self Nominations be announced. It was found that Nominations close 30 days prior to the Elections. Philip will contact Mario about this.

WebSite Reboot (Wbilancio)

It's time to discuss the redo of the website. The Tech-Team and I think we should hit the reset button and start fresh on everything but Civi. Right now the menu system is bad, and trying to fix that with old data is going to be a mess. If we can just do a reset and start fresh the building would be so much easier. William is in discussion with a Drupal 7 designer.

Starting over only pertinent information would come back

• LOPSA-Live Transcripts
• Messages from the President
• LOPSAGrams
• History of LOPSA
• Locals Information
• Civi
• User Table

Blogs cpould be spun off into its own Name space e.g. blogs.lopsa.org

That way the main LOPSA site would be used to promote the Organization.

An email was sent out asking for input.

There will be a proof of concept on the demo server.

There was a unanimous approval of this project.

990 Plan/Timeline and Financial reporting(Matt Disney, Evan Pettrey, John Boris)

A discussion on financial transparency ensued. A consensus was reached that we should create a budget, usually at the Face to Face meeting. Also we should continue to post the 990s as soon as practical after they are filed. We also can report on finances at the Community Meeting at LISA and possibly use those slides from that meeting as an annual report. Each Non Profit handles financial reporting differently, most report their finances at their meetings.

Matt will meet with Evan and come back to the board with suggestions on how to handle this.

Local Chapter Committee Charter (Martin)

See Locals_Committee/Locals_Committee_Charter The Locals Committee Charter was discussed and was approved.

Martin made a motion to approve the Locals Committee Charter Seconded by William

Motion passed unopposed.

Member Suggestion: Lifetime Memberships (Philip Kizer)

A long-time supporting member has suggested we consider adding a membership category: Lifetime Membership. He stated that a life time membership is something that an older organization would have. The Member's suggestion is that we offer a lifetime membership with a set fee of possibly $1,000

So, I'm at least bringing that for board discussion. * Should we or shouldn't we conceptually?

• Evan and Matt related their opinions of their brief financial-related chat with Philip.
  • Evan doesn't see an issue that it would relate to a 20 year enrollment. It may cause some recording issues when we give out memberships at our conferences.
  • Matt likes the idea and understands that if we go with it there will be initial issues but he is fine with that. He feels we also need to consider how automatic renewals affect interest in lifetime memberships.
    • Some organizations make you a Lifetime member after you have been a member for a long time. (See the links below). This also may be an inscentive for some of long time members to stay and it may end up spurring sponsors and donations.
• Ski likes this idea and feels we should do it.
• William stated (which aligns with Matt) that we have to correct our renewal reminders if we do this. Also if we do this and start adding benefits ex: digital library, would the lifetime member get that benefit as well?
• Philip recommended that as we add the new benefits benefits be added to the Lifetime membership. But that would be for the Board in place at that time to decide.
• Dan recommended that we don't just pick a dollar figure but price over a certain number of years. Example. If we pick 20 years and at our current membership that would be $1,000. If 10 years from now membership goes to $100 a lifetime membership would be $2,000. That way we don't policy ourselves into a corner.
• Dan would like a tiered system so that a member who is ready to retire could purchase one at a decent rate. We have to keep in mind that the price right now doesn't cost us anything but it will impact future boards and we have to keep that in mind.
• Dan did state we already have autorenewal, and if a member selects that option they do not get any renewal notices.
• Martin likes the idea as it locks them in and the price is where most of the work has to be done so we select the correct figure. He suggested that we may have to put that money somewhere and actually make it work for the organization.

A discussion followed on ways to handle the membership at conferences.

Matt stated that we should consider if it's a great idea, but could be more advantageous to enact at a later time. His opinion is that it is better for the organization if we do this now.

Matt queried the board for ideas and data they would need to make an informed decision and he, Evan and Dan could develop a report bring that data to the board.

• Data requested was:
  • Average Age of our members
  • Average length of membership
  • members who were enrolled for 5 years, 10 years etc.
  • Duration of memberships before they lapse
  • History of yearly membership rate

• Dan stated that the board has a consensus that Lifetime membership is good for the board and we should form a committee to flesh this out and come back with a report that the board can vote on and implement.

Philip will forward the original email to the board email and we will form the committee from the responses. Philip will get back to the member who initiated the idea and also invite him to participate in the committee.

Benefits Discussion (Dan)

I really need everyone's input on the benefits Google Doc. I would like to kickstart this project so we can get some real benefits for our members within the next few months, or at least get a schedule put together of what we think we can provide as benefits and when.

Some people have commented on the document, but very few have fleshed out the list with actual benefits (like the O'Reilly eBook idea I floated in e-mail earlier today).

Dan would like to survey the members at the end of April about the benefit ideas we come up with.

Web2Project

Dan has started Web2Project and has added projects. He asks the board to go into the site and start populating their projects.

William asked if we could segment it for the Tech committee.

Adjournment

Dan moved to adjourn Seconded by William