Board meeting Minutes/19 Dec 2011

Prior: 5 Dec 2011

Board meeting Minutes

Next: 2 Jan 2012

Minutes approved: 16 Jan 2012

Present

Philip Kizer (chair), William Bilancio, Matt Disney, Nadine Miller, Dan Rich, Chris St. Pierre, Lois Bennett

Apologies

Jesse Trucks, Ski Kacoroski

Opened

<9:03pm> Eastern Time

Closed

<10:09pm> Eastern Time

Consent Agenda

• No minutes yet

Action Items

See RT Board Queue

RT Ticket Status

User	Open tickets by queue							Totals
	Board	Customer S	General	Membership	Mentorship	Tech Team	Website
Unassigned	3	19	3		3	1		29
drich	8	3		1		1	1	14
jessetruck	1							1
lois	14				1			15
mdisney	2							2
mharlow						5		5
nickanders					7			7
pckizer	4							4
ski	6	3						9
stpierre	4							4
wbilancio	12	3					9	24
zodic					3			3
Totals	54	28	3	1	14	7	10	117

Standing Reports

• Treasurer's report
  • Did very well at LISA. Expenses have been for shipping, printing, and the Yerkes award.
  • Discussed quickbooks idea, Lois is still figuring it out and plans to start it on the first of the year.
  • On her list to get a budget made for 2012 by the second meeting of 2012

• Membership report
  • See CiviCRM
  • 116 lapsed members this quarter, 74 in Nov, 296 year-to-date, 22 month-to-date
  • Need to contact lapsed members to figure out why they are not renewing. RT#33

• • Have not imported the members from LISA yet. Will do soon.

Membership Summary (counts are new / renewed / total)

Members by Type	Oct	Nov (MTD)	2011 (YTD)	Current #
Individual	17 / 7 / 24	9 / 31 / 40	312 / 86 / 398	591
Student	0 / 0 / 0	0 / 1 / 1	16 / 2 / 18	21
Honorary	0 / 0 / 0	0 / 0 / 0	0 / 0 / 0	0
Charter	0 / 1 / 1	0 / 0 / 0	1 / 23 / 24	103
Founding	0 / 0 / 0	0 / 0 / 0	0 / 1 / 1	9
Complimentary	0 / 0 / 0	0 / 0 / 0	1 / 0 / 1	1
Totals (all types)	17 / 8 / 25	9 / 32 / 41	330 / 112 / 442	725

• Technical services report
  • Problems with virtual machine at Bitpusher caused our server issues at LISA.
  • Has volunteer to work on the forum project. Looks good so far. Hopes to have something up by the end of January

• Conference/events activities report
  • LISA is done and was very successful
  • SCALE coming along good
  • Cascadia and PICC looking good.

• Mentorship Status report
  • Thomas will be working with William on the RT workflow they want.
  • One more Mentor/Protege set up

LISA debrief/wrap-up (Kizer)

We got a lot of renewals and new members partially due a contest to see if we could reach 800 members. We had a good meeting with members of the USENIX board and staff. There were discussions about a system admin certification, but there is a lot of work that is needed before we are ready to make this happen. The SAGE name is being replace with LISA in all their literature. SquareUp for taking credit cards worked out great. For the next LISA we need to get out a request for booth volunteers.

Welcome committee (Disney)

I propose the Board split up the list of recent new memberships and one Board member contact each new member individually and personally to welcome them to LOPSA, offer to answer any questions, and propose a "seed" question to incite membership feedback about some important LOPSA topic.

• Good idea, but how to make it work (e.g. get volunteers) or figure out low impact way for us to do it. Matt will work on getting this together.

Reddit advertising campaign (Disney)

I propose we engage a reddit advertising campaign (targeting /r/sysadmin and perhaps /r/linux) with a budget of $1000, with potential to expand the program in the future. Someone should be appointed to pursue the details, which could include the amount we want to spend per day, how long, whether we want to target the highest traffic days/times, etc.

• Nadine will check into these possibilities and begin designing an ad campaign.

Safari Books (DRich)

I have talked to a sales rep at Safari Books, they are way out of our price range at this point. Their cheapest library option is $139/person/year, for a 10-slot bookshelf. If we had more members, they could customize an option for us, but it would still likely be at least half our membership cost. I think this would be a perfect thing for us to find a sponsor for, as it would be a *huge* benefit for our members!

We should also pursue a discount for our members, I can work on that with their marketing folks.

• We are not big enough for the bookshelf, so instead we will work on getting a discount on a subset of books as a benefit. Dan will work on this.

Adjournment

William motioned to adjourn, Dan seconded at 10:09pm