Board meeting Minutes/21 Nov 2011

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Prior:
7 Nov 2011 		Board meeting Minutes Next:
5 Dec 2011



Minutes approved: 16 Jan 2012

Present
Philip Kizer (chair), William Bilancio, Ski Kacoroski, Dan Rich, Matt Disney, Lois Bennett, Jesse Trucks
Apologies
Chris St. Pierre, Nadine Miller
Opened
<9:08pm> Eastern Time
Closed
<10:16pm> Eastern Time

Consent Agenda

Action Items

See RT Board Queue

RT Ticket Status
User Open tickets by queue Totals
Board Customer S Membership Mentorship Tech Team Website
Unassigned 1 7 1 9
drich 7 3 1 1 1 13
jessetruck 3 3
lois 14 1 15
mdisney 2 2
mharlow 5 5
nickanders 7 7
pckizer 4 4
ski 6 2 8
stpierre 6 6
wbilancio 12 3 9 24
zodic 3 3
Totals 55 15 1 11 7 10 99

Standing Reports

  • Treasurer's report
    • Yerkes award is ordered, no other report
  • Membership report
    • See CiviCRM
    • We got a new sponsor at the $250 level - Ian Viemeister
    • 61 lapsed members last quarter, 21 in Oct, 291 year-to-date, 84 month-to-date
    • Need to contact lapsed members to figure out why they are not renewing. RT#33
    • Membership is stable, but barely growing (up 5 since the last meeting). Too many folks are not renewing.
Membership Summary (counts are new / renewed / total)
Members by Type Oct Nov (MTD) 2011 (YTD) Current #
Individual 8 / 4 / 12 12 / 6 / 18 298 / 54 / 352 593
Student 0 / 0 / 0 0 / 0 / 0 16 / 1 / 17 35
Honorary 0 / 0 / 0 0 / 0 / 0 0 / 0 / 0 0
Charter 0 / 3 / 3 0 / 1 / 1 1 / 23 / 24 123
Founding 0 / 0 / 0 0 / 0 / 0 0 / 1 / 1 10
Complimentary 0 / 0 / 0 0 / 0 / 0 1 / 0 / 1 1
Totals (all types) 8 / 7 / 15 12 / 7 / 19 307 / 79 / 395 762
    • Hoping for a lot of members from LISA due to the discount. We have increase our membership, but we have a lot that are not renewing. We need to focus on member retention which means we need more benefits. Discussed a larger discount and the idea of a 25% discount.
  • Technical services report
    • Looking for volunteers for forums and job board.
  • Conference/events activities report
    • SCALE - only 4 classes instead of 8, everything on schedule
    • Cascadia - Everything looking good
    • PICC - Working on keynote speakers
  • Merchandise Report
Shirt Inventory
Shirt Type Open tickets by queue Totals
Small Medium Large XL 2XL 3XL 4XL 5XL 6XL
Bright Blue Mens Polo 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1
Bright Blue Womens Polo 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 2
Dark Blue Twill White Lettering Short Sleeve 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 3
Black T-Shirt 0 0 0 0 3 0 0 1 0 4
Red Ask Me About LOPSA T-Shirts 0 0 0 2 1 1 0 1 0 4
Kahki Twill Tan Lettering 0 2 4 4 1 2 0 0 0 13
Blue T-Shirt White Lettering 0 3 1 0 9 0 1 1 1 16
Maroon T-Shirts White Lettering 0 4 3 1 10 3 0 2 1 24
Maroon Polos White Lettering 1 2 5 9 3 1 1 1 2 25
Kahki Twill Blue Lettering Long Sleeve 2 2 7 9 6 2 1 0 0 29
Dark Blue Twill White Lettering Long Sleeve 1 2 9 9 6 2 1 0 0 30
  • Lisa Stuff
    • Plan to sell all shirts at LISA, everything is ready for them to be sold
    • Plan to announce locals page at LISA.
    • Matt Simmons idea of international greeting card for booth
    • Talking points on what to say at LISA on are wiki page
    • Idea of LISA IRC channel and mail list
    • We will be meeting with some of the Usenix board
    • Plans for Weds LOPSA night out
    • Plan to meet with Thomas of Mentorship
    • We need to update the wiki better so it will be easier next year.
  • Mentorship Status report
    • Still getting new mentors slowly. Hard to get reports from mentors and proteges. Got some gifts for the mentorship raffle.
    • Lois will to talk to OReilly about getting some items for our members at LISA.
    • Matt had idea of pairing technical committee work with the mentorship program.
  • Short discussion on AH Debt. Philip will ask Sam for more information about this.
  • Upcoming LOPSAgram and #lopsa-live
    • Need input from folks for the LOPSAGram.


Conference Calling Services... (Ski)

Please see Concall_Requirements_Page for information on the requirements. Once we agree on these, we can start asking companies for some free services or decide which company we want to pay for services.

  • Need the ability for non-board members to join in. This is the audio streaming portion of the requirements. Need to make this more clear.

Square Credit Card Processing... (Bilancio/Disney)

Over the past month or so, I've noticed that a lot of the independent businesses here in Columbus have been switching to Square (https://squareup.com/) to complete credit card transactions. After doing research, I'm convinced that by adopting this, we could eliminate the vast majority of headaches we see when trying to register new and returning members at conferences.

If you're not familiar with Square, it is a very small dongle, on the order of an inch, square, that plugs into the audio port of a smartphone or tablet. Square has apps for the iPhone/iPad and Android platforms, all of which are free. When scanning cards for payments, they charge a flat 2.75% fee, with no monthly recurring charge, and no special fees for rewards cards or American Express surcharges. If a number needs to be entered manually, the fee goes up to 3.5% + $0.15.

It seems like every single time I've worked a LOPSA booth at a conference, we have a very poor scanner which doesn't work, or at least, doesn't work reliably. And that one, we lease from another company. With Square, the dongle is free (although you can buy it in a store for $10, in which case you get a redemption code for $10 credited to your account).

The biggest win that I see is that since dongles are small and cheap, we could own several of them and distribute them easily throughout the organization as necessary. And because everything is tied to the account on Square, not the dongles themselves, we can retain centralized control of the account, so a loss of a dongle isn't a big deal.

What's more, having multiple people signed into the account at once is a fully supported practice, so we could have two or three people at the booth at LISA, all of which are capable of signing up new members without fighting for contention at the the credit card machine.

The way that I envision us using it is with the treasurer being the administrator of the account, and retaining the password along with the president. When the need comes for us to sign up members in person, the account password can be changed to a pre-communicated value. This will allow members working the event to sign into the account only when authorized, because the password can be changed immediately following the event.

Since he's been taking care of a lot of the preparation for LISA, I spoke with Matt Disney about this, and after a brief explanation, he was completely on board. I think that this has the possibility to completely change the way that we take on new members at conferences.

If you agree, I would like to set up a phone meeting with Philip and Lois about getting an account created before LISA, so that we can take advantage of it. Ideally, it would be done earlier this week, rather than later, so the free dongle has a chance to arrive.

Please let me know what you think, and if you believe this has merit, as I do. I'm also happy to answer any questions about it, as I have made a contact at Square Inc to whom I can reach out.

Thanks for your time,

Matt Simmons

  • Decided to give this a try.
  • Dicussed the sign up process on the website as that is really slow. The idea is they enter an email address into square, then we can link it to the website account.

Etiquette Policy Review... (bilancio)

We got an e-mail from Michael C Tiernan about the Etiquette Policy. I am not going to repost all the edits into the agenda. The email was sent on Friday Night to the board list. Do we want to take his changes and incorporate them into the policy and if so before or after LISA.

  • We agreed that we need a committee to review the changes he suggests.


lopsa-live format (disney)

We should change the format of the lopsa-live to be almost entirely Q&A, rather than an announcement forum with very little time for questions. To do that, lopsa-live should be paired very closely with the LOPSAgram. Whatever we want to announce should go in the LOPSAgram rather than being spooled out during the lopsa-live. At the beginning of the lopsa-live, we could have a table of contents recap of the LOPSAgram just to remind folks what some of the recent activity in LOPSA is. Sometimes we'll want to seed the lopsa-live with questions of an interactive nature, e.g. "Do you care about $THIS benefit possibility? Discuss." But otherwise we just open the floor for questions/discussion. And we should have a regular, standing lopsa-live time, e.g., second Wednesday of each month at 3pm Eastern. Maybe the entire board can't attend each one, but that isn't a huge issue.

  • We decided to pick up the pace to have more time for Q&A. We need to have our statements ready to go so there is minimal waiting on typing and keep a short agenda (15 - 20 minutes only). Idea of one person doing the talking during the agenda section and then Q&A section where all board members will talk.

Meet next week (disney)

Can we meet at our regularly scheduled time next week (normally not a meeting date) to finalize LISA plans?

  • Matt will send out short list of what needs to be done and then we will decide if we need to meet or not.

Next Agenda item... (NAME)

New Business

First new item...

Notes/announcements

Adjournment

Adjourned at 10:16pm

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