Board meeting Minutes/22 Feb 2016

Prior: 8 Feb 2016

Board meeting Minutes

Next: 14 Mar 2016

Minutes approved: 14 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.

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Move your name to Present or Apologies prior to the meeting! ,

Present

(Subject to verification) Ski Kacoroski (chair), Steve VanDevender, Paul English,George Beech, Atom Powers (Left Early)

Apologies

William Bilancio,John Boris,Matt Disney, Thomas Uphill

Guests

?

Opened

9:04 PM Eastern Time

Closed

9:39 PM Eastern Time

Consent Agenda

• minutes of 8 Feb 2016 approved

Standing Reports

Treasurer's report (Disney, Kacoroski)

No report or questions

Membership report (VanDevender, Bilancio)

• Total active members: 661 (previous report: 663, change: -2)

• Paying: 444 (12 new in last 30 days)

• Non-paying: 217 (13 new in last 30 days)

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

Committee reports

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

• Cascadia is moving along. A bit behind than last year.
• Ski asked about contacting the local groups and Atom has sent that out emails and will be going to the DevOps meeting. A suggestion was to use Meetup and Paul suggested that it be run through the SASAG meetup. A sponsor is needed for Thursday night. Paul will send out a notice for a SASAG meetup for Thursday. He will also do a meetup for Friday and Saturday.

No report on LOPSAA-EAST

Education (Kacoroski, Boris)

No report

Speakers Bureau (Powers, English)

on hold

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

No report

Technical Services Report (Beech, VanDevender)

Nothing new

Mentorship Report (Boris, Beech)

[Boris] George stated there is an issue with the Google script failing as we no longer use Civi. I have to be honest I have no idea about the automation part of mentorship. I took my role on this as a liaison between the team and the board. Once Amy and Simon dropped out Ed took over as chair and then his job got the best of him and it fell into Craigs lap. The LMPT was a member driven team that we need someone to chair again. I have a hard time with this because of work and another part of my life where I coach. Maybe it is burnout but I just can't get people together or for that matter find the time to even hold a meeting.

[Beech] On the plus side I've fixed the bugs. 1) New automation script (running on my own server for now until I can get it on a LOPSA server) using the Wild Apricot API and 2) The google apps script was pointed to @lopsa.org for the mailing lists, instead of @lists.lopsa.org so things broke when we moved to gapps, and the listserv did not.

Ski asked about documentation on the automation and George explained it is probably over documented in Google Docs. The documentation is located in the lopsa.org google docs in the mentorship directory

Atom asked about migrated to a hosted service or does Wild Apricot support it. George doesn't think it can be ported to Wild Apricot as it is a workflow tool. George will look further into it.

Paul asked about the people in the queue who might have been waiting and if they should be notified. Paul suggested that an email to all those in the queue might be a good idea to let them know there has been a glitch and we are working to fix it. George did push a few through and will look through the queue and try to get the queue clear.

Recognition (Uphill, Disney)

no report

Leadership Committee (Warner, Kacoroski)

Ski will be talking to Warner and asked the Board to let him and Warner know of any possible candidates.

Chapter Support... (Ski)

We have been having a great discussion online about chapter support. Questions that have come up are:

• How should we support chapters - swag, speaker resources, paying for facilities and equipment, meetup fees, etc.
  • [Boris] I don't support blanket statements or payments for equipment/facilities. The meetup fee where we have a meetup account and they can have a portion of it is a good thing. Handling of finances for them is another. Startup loans to run conferences. Also giving some funds for events like Sysadmin day, Chapter anniversary dates etc.
• Should we guarantee a minimum number of $$$ for each chapter to spend as they want, if yes does this require a separate line item in the budget
  • [Boris] As stated above we should not put any $$$ amounts or percentages for them to spend as they want. We have just got out of debt so lets not be like a lottery winner. But putting a $$$ amount for contingency for short term. Example he Local has a sponsor that funds them to have a nice venue with a/V and the sponsor leaves in a lurch maybe a one month aid and set the limit to an annual amount for such a case.
• Should we give back to chapters a percentage of dues that the chapter's LOPSA members pay
  • [Boris] No we already do this with what we do with USNIX discounts and other discounts a member may get from a sponsor. On this do we still get the free O'Reilly book per month/year?

• Overall Comments
  • [Steve] Steve is supportive of supporting our chapters especially when an emergency comes up. He is for coming up with some type of formula for doing financial support
  • [Atom] Atom is for associating the type of support for chapters to the number of LOPSA Members in the chapter. He supports the idea of giving non monetary support but we don't have the resources for that. Maybe providing a stipend or buying equipment.

[Paul] Paul agree with Atom's comment about associating the type of support for chapters to the number of LOPSA Members in the chapter. Also it is worth funding stat up or struggling chapters as long as they have a certain number of LOPSA members that are dedicated to improving and bettering that chapter.

[George] George agrees with some type of monetary support for locals. Also he feels that we should have a plan as to help to start up a local where it spells out we will do X,Y and/or Z to get started. But there would not be an automatic payment. The idea of providing equipment is a good idea and just pouring money into a local is not the best route to take but helping them bring more members in is what we should be doing. As to making it mandatory for a person to be a LOPSA member to attend a meeting is the wrong approach but to tell them that if you have x amount of LOPSA members we will expend x amount of funds. This might be a good incentive for the Local to gain more members.

[Atom} Maybe a tiered membership dues might be a legal quagmire. Maybe helping a local get connected to a sponsor would be a help.

[George} Some local groups charge a higher amount where some money goes to the national and the rest stays locally and then we would handle their finds if they want.

There is a consensus that some type of monetary support should be developed for the chapters but the mechanism and criteria for that needs to be developed. We will also handle each case on its own merits until we can develop a procedure that is fair and equitable.

Corporate Meetup Account... (Ski/George)

George had the idea that we should get a corporate meetup account that all our chapters can use. Cost would be $180/yr.

• [Boris] I am for this
• [George] He looked into the Meetup Pro and it looks like i is for organizations like ours. He is waiting to hear back from them and hopefully it will allow us to assign sub accounts under ours for the Locals to use. When he hears back he will inform the board.

Ski will put together a plan for review on how we will deal with locals and then when approved it will be published. Some of the items in the plan will be turned into a formal policy.

DC Chapter... (Ski)

Discuss the email from Roger about difficulties he is having keeping the DC/Baltimore chapter going and what we can do about it.

• Ski suggested we sponsor that chapter for a few months to help Roger get the group back moving.
• Ski will notify ROger he will send out a blast to look for a speaker for them.
• George suggested we get back with him to see what he actually needs from us.

Community Manager... (Ski)

NOTE: At this point of the meeting Atom had to leave so discussion continued but the Board can't act on anything as the quorum was lost on Atom's exit. Any motions needed will be entered here but voting and discussion on the motion will be held in Email

I have sent out the community manager ad to everyone in email. I feel we need to make the change from a totally volunteer organization to a group that has some staff responsible for making sure things are getting done as many items are getting dropped. I would like to place this ad on craigslist in areas where we have board members (Seattle, Portland, New York, Philadelphia, Knoxville).

The consensus of the remaining board members was for this idea. The Community manager position is a big plus for the Board and for the Chapters.

New Business

No New business

Notes/announcements

No Announcements

Adjournment

 George Motioned for Adjournment
 Paul Seconded