Board meeting Minutes/13 Feb 2012

Prior: 30 Jan 2012

Board meeting Minutes

Next: 27 Feb 2012

Minutes approved: 12 Mar 2012

Present

(Subject to verification) Philip Kizer (chair), Dan Rich, William Bilancio, Ski Kacoroski (may have to leave early), Nadine Miller, Matt Disney.

Apologies

Lois Bennett, Chris St. Pierre, Jesse Trucks

Opened

9:03pm Eastern Time

Closed

9:38pm Eastern Time

Standing Reports

• Treasurer's report
  • I am in the process of sending back the CC machine.
  • I have not made any progress on learning Quick books but I hope to make some time for that this week after I do something about the Tax return.

• Membership report
  • 10 lapsed members this month, 11 in Jan
  • 18 new members since the first of the year
  • Membership is down by 4 since the last meeting. Too many folks are not renewing.

• Technical services report
  • Nothing going on

• Conference/events activities report
  • Cascadia registration is open
  • PICC registration will be opening soon
  • Talked about other conference ideas besides LISA

• Mentorship Status report

• Development report (Meeting focus at first meeting of the month)

• Upcoming LOPSAgram and #lopsa-live (last meeting of the month only)
  • Draft sent out.

Leadership Commitee Touch-base issues ... (Dan)

Several good ideas came out of my last touch-base with TEP that I think deserve more discussion (see my e-mail of 7-Feb-2012 for my full notes):

• Leveraging our membership: We need to know where our members work and where they volunteer -- we need to have a reminder going out to them periodically asking them to make sure their profile is up to date in Civi. This info could also be used if we resurrect sysadmin of the month or start profiling our members on lopsa.org.
• We need to be more involved in social media. We probably have members at Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc; why aren't we contacting them to see if they want to be involved with the communications committee? We need more visibility on social media (heck, we need more visibility *everywhere*!)
• We should look into gift memberships. There doesn't seem to be a way to do it natively, but that might be a good extension for a volunteer to write for Civi.
• We need to be doing more with volunteers and less ourselves in the day-to-day running of the organizations. I mentioned that there was a new version of Civi out, and Tom pointed out that it should be a volunteer doing the upgrade, not me.
• If we need volunteers add them to the Volunteer Needs page which I will forward off to TEP.

• • Decided that we need better communications to members and to get members more involved as we do not have $$$ for staff and bandwidth to do it ourselves.
  • Dan will talk with Tom about LC contacting the board for input.

Benefits Discussion ... (Dan)

• Our three initial focuses based on the discussion at the last meeting will be local groups, community, jobs board
• locals: we need more info out in the public space -- what's involved in creating one and info from the people who have already done it on what works and what doesn't (sort-of a case study on local group creation)
• community: do we have any members working for ServerFault, if so how can we leverage them? Can we get a LOPSA badge for members there to increase visibility? Do we nave an ETA on the forums?
• jobs board: does it make more sense to outsource this by partnering with an existing jobs site? Doing it ourselves is very likely a mistake. Do we have members working for hotjobs, monster, dice, etc. who could help to make this happen? If we outsource, how do we get our branding associated with it and how do we make it accessible to our members as a benefit?

Each of the above needs one or more champions who will build a plan and populate the Volunteer Needs page with needed positions so we can start progress on each of them.

• • William working on locals package
  • Dan will contact folks about jobs board
  • William will work on Forums
  • Nadine will be the champion for the community

Adjournment

Dan moved to adjourn at 9:38pm, William seconded.