Board meeting Minutes/5 May 2014

Prior: 21 Apr 2014

Board meeting Minutes

Next: 19 May 2014

Minutes approved: 30 Jun 2014

Unspecified

Move your name to Present or Apologies prior to the meeting!

Present

(Subject to verification) Dan Rich (chair), William Bilancio, John Boris, Ski Kacoroski, Matt Disney, Matt Simmons

Apologies

Martin Gehrke, Evan Pettrey

Opened

8:00 PM Eastern Time

Closed

8:45 PM Eastern Time

Consent Agenda

• Approve minutes of 21 Apr 2014

Action Items

• No specific action items to review

Standing Reports

Treasurer's Report (Evan)

• BoA Account: $26,103.04
• PayPal Account: $1,420.44
• Total: $27,523.48
• +/- from last meeting:($1,073.25)

Membership report

• April:
  • New: 29 (20 students)
  • Renew: 6 (0 students)
  • Lapsed: 32
• May To Date:
  • New: 58 (0 students) (LOPSA-East)
  • Renew: 1 (0 students)
  • Lapsed: 48
• Total: 886 (792 paying)

Conference/events activities report

• Linuxfest Northwest was a good conference for us this year. They had around 1500 people attend over the two days. I had 38 good contacts at the table (by good I mean system admins or students working to become a system admin) and another 30 contacts with people who knew a system admin and took information for them. I sold 2 tshirts and 1 membership for $80 total. Mentorship may get a boost of proteges as I talked about it. Also, a good way to get people to stop by the table is to give talks (I gave two talks). It was great to have people search out LOPSA rather than me trying to start conversations and they walked by. Also want to thank Paul English of the Seattle chapter for his help at the table. We need to get the LPR info up on the website as people were interested in it.

Project Management report

• Nothing to report

Liaison reports (LC, etc.)

Mentorship Report (John)

• The Mentorship Core team held a BoF and IT Careers panel at LOPSA-East 2014, The BoF was well attended and we received great feedback from the attendees. I explained the following points the core team was working on:
  • A new automation document is being created and is currently in testing.
  • Recognition for Mentors
  • Recognition for Proteges
• A major issue that a majority of the mentors met was knowing when the protege/Mentor relationship was over. Some reported that usually the Protege would just no longer respond so they would figure the relationship was over. I made some suggestions where the Core team could periodically ping the Mentors and Proteges to see how things are going. One of the attendees asked how to become a mentor and he was given the process. Also one attendee said he had went through the process multiple times and never heard back. This will be addressed witht the core team. The IT Careers panel was very well attended. The Panel was made up of Edward D'Azzo-Caisser,Adam Levine, Adam Crdega and Tom McLaughlin. I was the moderator. The discussion was lively and there was constant discussion to the point we had to break off discussion and the panel continued talking with the audience during the Hallway track at Break.

LOPSA Professional Recognition (Simmons)

• The certificates were handed out to those recipients that attended LOPSA-EAST 2014. The award pictures will be posted to lopsa.org.

Leadership Committee (Ski)

• Election is progressing with dates set for LOPSA-Lives.

WiAC (Boris)

The Keynote Speaker at LOPSA-East, Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph , gave a very good and well recieved talk on diversity. I saw this as an oppurtunity to promote our scholarship for WiAC. I met with her after the talk and at dinner later. I explained what we do for WiAC and she knew a few possible candidates. I will be sending her the link to the entry form and information and asked her to diseminate it to her womens' groups and also to her collegues. She was asked from the floor during her Q&A session if she would like to be a LOPSA Mentor which she said she would gladly do that.

Planning Calendar (Disney)

The planning calendar is up in its nascent wiki form. Any comments or additions to Planning_calendar before we actually put it into a better calendar format? Dan noted he had submitted implementation suggestions via email. There were no other suggestions. Disney will review and test options.

SysAdmin Day (Rich)

System Administrator Appreciation Day is fast approaching, what do we want to do for this year? Who is willing to head our planning for it?

Matt Simmons will e-mail out information about what he has done in the past with local get togethers.

Trademark Refusal: The Mark is Merely Descriptive (Simmons)

We received the final notice of our trademark application for "The League of Professional System Administrators" today:

FINAL REFUSAL TO REGISTER – Mark is Merely Descriptive

Registration is refused because the applied-for mark merely describes a purpose or use of applicant’s services. Trademark Act Section 2(e)(1), 15 U.S.C. §1052(e)(1); see TMEP §§1209.01(b), 1209.03 et seq. For the reasons set forth below, this refusal is maintained and made FINAL.

Applicant’s proposed mark is THE LEAGUE OF PROFESSIONAL SYSTEM ADMINISTRATORS for “Educational services, namely, conducting conducting classes, seminars, and workshops in the field of computer system administration; Providing on-line digital publications in the nature of training manuals and newsletters in the field of computer system administration via the Internet.

The USPTO has already determined that LEAGUE is a merely descriptive term. See third-party registrations attached to the previous office action with LEAGUE disclaimed. Third-party registrations featuring goods and/or services the same as or similar to applicant’s goods and/or services are probative evidence on the issue of descriptiveness where the relevant word or term is disclaimed, registered under Trademark Act Section 2(f) based on acquired distinctiveness, or registered on the Supplemental Register. See Inst. Nat’l des Appellations D’Origine v. Vintners Int’l Co., 958 F.2d 1574, 1581-82, 22 USPQ2d 1190, 1196 (Fed. Cir. 1992); In re Box Solutions Corp., 79 USPQ2d 1953, 1955 (TTAB 2006); In re Finisar Corp., 78 USPQ2d 1618, 1621 (TTAB 2006).

Applicant provides educational services and publications for “professional system administrators.” See website image from applicant’s website attached to the previous office action. Applicant is a league of professional system administrators. Therefore, the proposed mark THE LEAGUE OF PROFESSIONAL SYSTEM ADMINISTRATORS merely describes the source of the applicant’s services and is accordingly refused registration on the principal register.

After thoroughly discussing the issue, it was decided not to appeal the trademark rejection as this only affects "The League of Professional Systems Administrators" as a tradmark, not LOPSA and the arrowthorpe.