Board meeting Minutes/4 January 2006

Prior: 19 December 2005

Board meeting Minutes

Next: 9 January 2006

Minutes approved: 9 January 2006

Present

Tom Perrine (chair), Matthew Barr, Trey Harris, Doug Hughes, Chris Palmer, David Parter, Sam Albrecht (note taker)

Apologies

Andrew Hume, Stephen Potter, Pat Wilson

Opened

20:07 Eastern Time

Closed

21:37 Eastern Time

Consent Agenda

• Approve minutes of 19 December 2005

Passes.

Approve Minutes

• MOTION: Amend minutes of 4 December 2005 as follows:
  1. Insert closing time of 17:25 Pacific Time.
  2. In section 13, "Board Vacancy," delete "until later in the meeting".
  3. Add note to Adjournment: Meeting was not officially adjourned; the Board regrets the oversight.

Moved Parter, second Hughes, passes.

Action Items

• Albrecht:
  • Call IRS about the application status
    • Status - called and was told that the package had been received and had not yet been assigned to a case worker. Call back in 120 days to see if it had been assigned and to confirm tha the change of address form had also been received.
  • Work on integrating databases and financial procedures (with Hume, Parter)
    • Status - Had conference call with Parter, Hughes, & Solanki. Outlined changes/additions that need to be made. Typed up outline of financial policy for Hume.
  • Work with Harris on a membership kit
  • Looking into getting a LOPSA Corporate AMEX
    • Status - Not done yet.
  • Consider ways to restructure agenda to minimize his necessary attendance (for budgetary reasons only)
    • Status - I would prefer to be in the entire call, just to know what's going on and to throw in my thoughts. Since I'm calling from home and on a cell phone, it would save some time if someone could be note-taker, as I often take handwritten notes and then go back and enter on the wiki.

• Barr:
  • Move the remaining sage-members.org mailing lists (including the Advisory Council) to lopsa.org (with Hughes) - Advisory Council is only list remaining to be moved
  • Review charter for Conference Committee and propose a structure to address issues related to participating in conferences and trade shows, includng setting criteria for participating, goals. base budgets, etc. (with Perrine, Wilson)

• Harris:
  • Migrate all 3 wikis (Board, Public, and Board-only) to new machine - Board moved, others will move soon, waitng for DB software update
  • Work with Albrecht on a membership kit
  • Draft "welcome" email to new members
  • Draft appropriate policy (set of policies) for the tech team data access and non-disclosure

• Hughes:
  • Work on extended member database (with Albrecht) - in progress, expect first look for Board this weekend
  • Move the remaining sage-members.org mailing lists (including the Advisory Council) to lopsa.org (with Barr)

• Hume: NOT PRESENT
  • Review minutes and provide a list of redactions pertaining to SAGECom that may now be restored
  • Work on integrating databases and financial procedures (with Parter, Albrecht)
  • Contact the individuals who had expressed interest in a life membership and try to sell multi-year instead

• Palmer:
  • Contact other LISA '05 content contributors with hosting offer (with Potter)

• Parter:
  • Work on integrating databases and financial procedures (with Hume, Albrecht)
  • Send "welcome" e-mail (drafted by Harris) to the members. Waiting for text from Harris

• Perrine:
  • Draft a business plan for LOPSA (with Wilson)
  • Write another note to the Advisory Council
  • Review charter for Conference Committee and propose a structure to address issues related to participating in conferences and trade shows, includng setting criteria for participating, goals. base budgets, etc. (with Barr, Wilson)

• Potter: NOT PRESENT
  • Draft more rigorous sponsorship policy (including definitions) (with Wilson)
  • Contact other LISA '05 content contributors with hosting offer (with Palmer)
  • Contact Schwartz regarding possible corporate sponsorship

• Wilson: NOT PRESENT
  • Draft a business plan for LOPSA (with Perrine)
  • Work on a proposal for Google
  • Draft more rigorous sponsorship policy (including definitions) (with Potter)
  • Review charter for Conference Committee and propose a structure to address issues related to participating in conferences and trade shows, includng setting criteria for participating, goals. base budgets, etc. (with Barr, Perrine)

• Solanki:
  • Get membership roll in order (with Parter)

Standing Report

• Treasurer's report
  • Albrecht is working on updated year-end financials and should have in a couple of weeks. Verisign has been ordered and is expected any minute. There is a concern that the credit card numbers collected at LISA have not been processed yet. - test transactions with test MasterCard and test AMEX ran yesterday (1/3), expect to run all LISA transactions by Friday (1/6)
• Membership report
  • as of now: 212 members in drupal. a few more every day.
    • Last meeting's goal: 3.5 new members/day
    • Running average: 1.4 new members/day (below goal) RED
    • New goal: 3.9 new members/day
  • dparter sent email to 6 members about missing paypal transactions
  • See note above about Verisign. Solanki swamped and has not yet updated internal spreadsheet. Albrecht looking for some temp help in order to get the file clean enough to send to Parter, who has offered to update the online records.
• Online report

Tech Team Policies

Instead of the specific and limited NDA policy for just the Tech Team, Harris will provide an overall NDA policy to subsume this and other NDA situations. Overall NDA policy will return this week for email vote.

Ratification of Bylaws Amendment (Name)

MOTION to ratify amendment to the bylaws, first approved 14 November 2005:

Amend Article 1, Section 1 of the Bylaws to read "The name of the organization shall be the League of Professional System Administrators, incorporated as The System Administrators Guild, Inc.... " (continue as in the current Bylaws).

Moved Harris, second Palmer, motion passes.

Code of Ethics

Discussion of Code of Ethics, USENIX/SAGE and LOPSA relationship, ownership of CoE intellectual property.

According to Alva Couch and Jane-Ellen Long, the old "SAGE Code of Ethics" has been debranded into the "System Administrators Code of Ethics" with sponsor/signatories of USENIX and SAGE. USENIX has invited LOPSA to become a sponsor/signatory of the SA-CoE, as well as become the official review committee.

Perrine will call Jane-Ellen ASAP to seek clarification of these issues:

• The poster has USENIX copyright, including "all rights reserved". What does this mean? Should this be Copyright USENIX and LOPSA?

• We believe that it is the intent or USENIX and LOPSA that the LOPSA CoE review committee continue its work to revise this Code for all, and that USENIX makes no claim of copyright beyond the poster, e.g. the license and copyright of the results of the LOPSA committee are LOPSA's issues.

• It is intended that USENIX and LOPSA will endorse the results of the CoE committee, and encourage other like-minded groups to do the same.

There is a press/printing deadline, which is belived to be 9 Jan 2006.

Volunteers

(dparter)

Hans Kugler is our volunteer coordinator. He will send a report, and asks that we prioritize the projects that he thinks have enough interest to start. We also need board contacts for each (and will, of course, need to give some definition to the projects)

see https://lopsa.org/volunteers as well

After discussion, the Board needs, for each project:

• a more specific charge/charter or project specification
• a Board member responsible for monitoring and providing guidance
• two "co-leaders" for group projects OR
• a project coordinator for a collection of individual efforts (such as the group of topic area editors)

listing of member benefits

We need a place on the website where we can list (maybe more of a foreward looking discussiong than a list) the member benefits we currently have, short term (3 month) plan, 6 month plan, etc. Basically a nice culmination of all the things we've discussed including the postits, member feedback, priorities, and bullet points from the LISA BOF.

Palmer takes action item

Some outstanding issues (Perrine)

Some of these need a board (or other) shepherd. Some of these might have fallen through the cracks, since they aren't on anyone's specific Action Item list (that I can find).

• membership numbers - especially for Charter members, and so we can use for "referred by" in some upcoming membership drives - will be result of database project

• need to update the "postcard" - Palmer will take action item
  • typos - on the back, last sentence: "You sponsorship" s/b "Your sponsorship"
  • Need black/white version for locals (and others) to print themselves
  • Need online version for linking to and sending to potential sponsors - it's a pretty good one-page "Backgrounder", until we get around to writing a real one

• need to update Cafe Press store
  • should remove "and all I got was this t-shirt" shirt from the store - yes, delete
  • should update prices so we actually make a little money - Parter will define and adjust prices

• really need the "welcome kit" - some people have been waiting for over a month, almost 6 weeks? - see action items above

• Action Items for Committees - should each committee have its own section in the actions items agenda item? - Perrine will re-organize action items for next few meetings by committees, noting that it is important to retain individual responsibility for each action item

New Business

Locals relationships

Discussion of locals, and how we want to relate to them. Options range from loose affiliations and ad-hoc partnerships, to chapters that are legally part of the corporation.

Sense is that we would prefer to have strong relationships with local organizations that are chapters in name, but may or may not be their own legal entities. Will need to seek legal advice. Need to look at other organizations that have "local chapters" for examples.

May have relationships with locals that are not our chapters, but they will receive different benefits and have different obligations to us. Might expect these to be a more arm's length relationship and perhaps on an event-by-event basis.

SPLUNK's CAMP Sysadmin

SPLUNK wants to talk to us about co-sponsoring their vendor-neutral event. Albrecht has been trying to reach them, but having difficulties due to holidays. Event is 14 Jan 2006. Sense of the Board is for Albrecht to seek sponsorship, offering advertisement to our members via email and web content (including "calendar of events" and perhaps a front page story) in exchange for being named a co-sponsor and getting our logo and name on materials, such as web pages.

(Side note: need more information about NaSPA)

Online info for Camp Sys Admin

Notes/announcements

• HAPPY NEW YEAR!