Board meeting Minutes/12 Jan 2015

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Prior:
15 Dec 2014 		Board meeting Minutes Next:
26 Jan 2015


Minutes approved: 26 Jan 2015


  • 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, George Beech, John Boris, Ski Kacoroski, Matt Disney
Apologies
Steve VanDevender
Guests
None
Opened
9:03 PM EST Eastern Time
Closed
9:46 PM ESTEastern Time

Consent Agenda

Action Items

No action items

Standing Reports

Treasurer's report (Disney)

  • Balance info
    • BoA Account: $22,684.30
    • PayPal Account: $4,875.81 (STALE)
    • TDBank: $1,989.89
    • Total: $29,550.00
    • +/- from last meeting: -$214.79
  • Summary of expenditures since last report:
    • Budgeted operational expenses
  • Summary of income since last report:
    • Membership dues: Approx $864 (Needs Paypal confirmation)
  • Outstanding liabilities
    • VanDevender (report submitted, William has this)
    • Kacoroski LISA 2014 reimbursement (report submitted)
    • Cascadia startup? (See agenda item about Cascadia below)
  • Top priorities
    • Scott Koch refund
    • F2F reimbursement (VanDevender)
    • Kacoroski LISA 2014 reimbursement
    • $1000 anonymous payment protest filed
    • 2014 budget actuals
    • Transition bank accounts
    • 2013 990
    • Directors insurance
    • Deposit mailed to Evan
  • Misc:
    • Need VanDevender expense report from William
    • Need to fix online account access (reset admin passwords)
    • With the departure of Matt Simmons, the Finance Committee needs a third member. Any volunteers? John Boris Volunteered to be on the Committee.
    • Work on the budget is progressing. The committee needs input from each of the committees on their funding requirements, please use the format from last year's budget. Please also review last years' budget, as much of the requested funding there was not used.

Membership report (VanDevender)

No Report

Conference/events activities report (Bilancio)

SCALE coming up in a few weeks. Cascadia-IT is on track. Ski will be giving a talk at SCALE and we will have a booth there as well.

Local Chapter Committee report (Bilancio)

A lot of Locals did not have meetings over the Holidays. Atlanta will be speaking with William to go over what they are doing.

Development report (Kacoroski)

Nothing to report - waiting on decision on membership definition

Communications (LOPSAgram, #lopsa-live, etc) (Kacoroski)

Nothing to report. LOPSAgram will go out at end of month (1/31).

Project Management report (Rich)

No report.

Liaison reports (LC, etc.)

Technical Services Report (Bilancio)

No report William has a meeting setup with Chan.

Mentorship Report (Beech)

  • Technical:
    • Github - Past member paying for a private repo. Needs temp admin privs to the data over
      • Edward is reaching out to Thomas Leyer to get status on this. Might be a bit since they are both swamped
      • cumbersome to get people accounts on github
        • although this seems to be fixed since simon was able to give me access to the repo
  • SSL Cert - Has that been paid for?
    • Paid for (Last Matt Standing can you confirm?), waiting on the tech team to implement
  • Automation
    • I will step in to try and help with the Automation. Still waiting for full google account access to view the processes and docs as it is now.
  • Non Technical:
    • Marketing
      • We need to pick back up on a marketing strategy for LMPT. Does anyone know if there had been any work done on this?

From Edward:

1) We have the pamphlet Matt Simmons put together for us.

2) We need to pick up with our monthly lopsagram ads

3) There was talk about highlighting mentors who do exceptionally well in the volunteer of the month

4) Having lmpt BoFs to bring together mentors/proteges/others to discuss the program has been successful in the past. We have the powerpoint from last LISA saved somewhere. Give-aways never hurt either. We proposed swag purchases. I don't recall whether that was passed by the board or not.

5) Thomas Leyer had done some research and figured there's a ceiling on the number of people who actively volunteer within an organization. Based on the number of mentors signed up currently and size of the organization, it seems we've reached this saturation point. I don't recall the numbers offhand, or Thomas' documentation. This is something we have to overcome in order to grow the program and help grow LOPSA.

6) I had wanted to team up with the student chapter subcommittee, establish a contact with a few student chapters and try to encourage the students into the program as proteges. I tried to meet with Ski, this fell through because of my schedule.

7) I had also wanted to reach out to local businesses (or coordinate with the advisor of said student chapters to do so) in an attempt to get an arrangement where members of the local LOPSA chapters could get internships (and they could get actual hands on experience).

8) Like 7, there was some talk of reaching out to major companies and asking them to volunteer for the program. Both of these options would (hopefully) get LOPSA more corporate sponsorship and lead to more prestige for the program while overcoming our passive marketing strategies and the awkward question of "Wait, so I need to pay for a membership to volunteer to help someone?" from those who like the program but not necessarily a personal investment in LOPSA.

I've made no meaningful attempts at (6) through (8). My life went crazy before I could start planning. From a few cursory conversations, there was usually a concern about the lack of volunteers on the front and back end. Could the program afford an influx of students? Without a ton of proteges, what's the point of a major corporation investing resources to help? But, I still think it's possible. Especially if we perform controlled pilots. I also think it's the best shot the program has of getting to the next level. Of course, the automation would have been necessary before moving on regardless.

    • Charter
      • in progress


  • Are there any outstanding tickets that have not been addressed by the tech team?
  • People:
    • Simon and Ed are overwhelmed and need to step back.
      • For now John and myself (when I get up to speed) will step in an take a more active role in running the LMPT program until we can find more volunteers
          • We should send out a request to mentors
        • Possibly something in the upcoming LOPSAGram as well.
      • I will work on the automation to help alleviate the amount of work it takes for volunteers to run the LMPT program
  • Communication:
    • Open up an IRC channel to help with communication
  • On Going
    • Nothing to report.

Leadership Committee (Kacoroski)

Warner has 3 candidates for the two open board positions. He will finish talking with them and we will be able to fill them on Jan 26th. I have a meeting set up for Friday with him to talk about the role of the LC. He would like to attend the 26th meeting.

Cascadia... (Ski)

At SASAG meeting last week, Lee mentioned that SASAG's nest egg for running a conference is gone. This means that if they cannot get around 15K in sponsorships in 2 - 3 weeks, they will need to cancel the conference. This would be a major bummer as they have a really good set of speakers this year and the conference fills a local need.

  • Further emphasizes our need for a real Marketing person. (Boris)
  • A discussion followed on seed money for Cascadia.
  • William Bilancio made a motion to loan Cascadia up to $10,000 as seed money. Seconded by John Boris. Motion passed unanimously

Trenton Computer Festival/IEEE IT Professional Conference (Boris)

The deadline is missed. I contacted the committee and they said we could still submit a proposal if we wanted. This session is on Friday and Saturday. I will be there in the Vendor area on Saturday with my Son. Sessions are 55 minute. Friday is full but there may be room on Saturday.

Here is the link:

http://princetonacm.acm.org/tcfpro/

I will send a proposal to the coordinators for a session.

SCALE... (Ski)

I am giving a 30 minute talk at SCALE this year. I signed us up for a booth from Friday to Sunday.


Membership vs. Sponsorship Discussion (Rich)

Should we make every registered person on lopsa.org a member of LOPSA and add existing members as sponsors? This would mean changing Individual membership to have no cost.

Concerns/Issues:

  1. We need to clean up bogus registrations in CiviCRM
  2. We need to potentially write software to send reminders to sponsors, or do it via. the membership system in Civi. This will need to be reviewed by the Membership Committee before we can make the change.
  3. The Membership Committee will need to rewrite the Membership policy and Sponsorship policy/levels to reflect this change.
  4. Do we set a date for this to take effect or do we move all current paid members to sponsors? (Boris)
  5. How do we deal with conferences (Cascadia/LOPSA-East) were we get money for each attendee. That would have to be a separate fee structure for the sponsorship. As a sponsorship becomes deductible under a different part of one's tax form. (Boris)
  • A discussion followed on the above topics. The consensus of the board was to go to this model. We would have to run the numbers and see the impact. Dan Rich suggested that this go to the membership committee and have them write up the proposal and have them survey the paid members for their feedback.
  • Matt Disney would like to see some focus groups testing on this idea. Even looking at other fund raising models eg. Crowd sourcing.
  • Ski is for this from the development aspect as our actual numbers would be higher and we would become more viable for a sponsor to put money into our organizations.
  • A short discussion followed on ways to trim down CiVi so that it will contain valid names and contacts.
  • George Beech stated he would want to make sure we have enough benefits for people to sponsor us instead of being paid members. Dan replied that this will require us to explain our mission therefore people who pay to us are helping us complete our mission.
  • Dan made a final statement that he will pass this on to Membership to get started on writing the proposal.

What do we want from our web presence? (Rich)

Do we want a static page that represents LOPSA with all of our "dynamic" content on a separate server still under Drupal (Civi, Blogs, Surveys, etc)?

What are the next steps to get our web site updated? Who is going to drive it? What resources do we have on the TSC?

  • (Boris)
    • Front page that feeds the drupal stuff.
    • Can be on any web server/CMS platform that is quick and easy to add items.
  • Dan Rich will write up a proposal for the new Web site design and get it to the board.

New Business

No new Business

Notes/announcements

No announcements

Adjournment

Ski Motions for Adjournment

William Seconds Motion

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