Hello Pydotorg:
Could you please post the following "PSF board meeting minutes" online,
http://www.python.org/psf/records/board/minutes/ at the usual web
locations:
please see the attachment for the approved board meeting minutes for
November 2011.
If you have any questions, please let me know.
Thanks,
Pat
--
Pat Campbell
PSF Administrator/Secretary
pat...@python.org
Title: 2011-11-21 PSF Board Meeting Minutes
Encoding: utf-8
Author: p...@python.org
Content-Type: text/x-rst
.. declare custom role for action items:
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| The Python Software Foundation
| Minutes of a Regular Meeting of the Board of Directors
|
| November 21, 2011
|
|
A regular meeting of the Python Software Foundation ("PSF") Board of
Directors was held over Internet Relay Chat beginning at 16:00 UTC, 21
November 2011. Steve Holden presided at the meeting. Pat Campbell
prepared the minutes.
All votes are reported in the form "*Y-N-A*" (*in favor ââ¬â opposed
ââ¬â
abstentions*; e.g. "5-1-2" means "5 in favor, 1 opposed, and 2
abstentions").
.. sectnum::
.. contents::
Attendance
==========
The following members of the Board of Directors (9 of ll) were present at
the meeting: Steve Holden, Marc-Andre Lemburg [arrived at 12:10], Martin
von Löwis, Doug Napoleone, Jesse Noller, Tim Peters, Allison Randal
[arrived at 12:10], Jeff Rush, and Gloria Willadsen. Also in attendance
was Kurt Kaiser (Treasurer).
Minutes of Past Meetings
========================
The 17 October 2011 Board meeting minutes were voted on and approved.
**RESOLVED**, that the minutes of October 17, 2011 should be accepted
as a fair and accurate record of the meeting.
Approved, 6-0-1.
Votes Taken Between Meetings
=============================
There were no votes taken between meetings.
Treasurer Report
================
The monthly Treasurer's Report was provided to Board members by K.
Kaiser prior to the Board meeting and produced from Quickbooks Online.
Here is an exerpt from the treasurer's report on a few of the activities
the treasurer has been focused on:
"YTD income was up by 57K in October due to Sponsor invoicing.
AR is down by 7K due to PyCon 2012 Sponsor invoicing/collection
activity, offset by invoicing our PSF Sponsors.
Donations for the month were $817.
Grants:
PyCon UK Sprint $300
PyPy Sprint 300
Outside Expenses:
Wendroff $1,150
We continued invoicing PyCon 2012 Sponsors and collecting receipts.
resulting in an 18K increase in Deferred Revenue.
Invoiced the rest of the PSF Sponsor Members for 2011, and continued
collection efforts on seven unpaid 2010 invoices.
Filed our annual PSF IRS Form 990 return."
Kurt concludes his report with a list of financial business items he will
be focused on, he said:
"My focus is on the Associate Member program and AR reduction. I'm also
looking into fiscal sponsorship issues and working with Python Boston.
We can do this - the question is how do we do it efficiently?"
Progress Reports
================
The following board reports were submitted to the board mailing list
one week prior to this month's meeting. Please see a summary of each
board report listed below and a possible board discussion at the end
of the report(s):
Communication Status
--------------------
D. Hellmann, Communication Officer, reported on continued activities from
last month. He said:
1. Send announcement email about the blog to various mailing lists
(c.l.py, c.l.py.announce, etc.).
*No progress.*
Doug also reported on new activities for the month. The list of activities
included the following:
1. PyTexas Grant post by Mike Driscoll
http://pyfound.blogspot.com/2011/10/psf-granted-pytexas-2011-us750.html
2. 2011 Frank Willison Memorial Award post
http://pyfound.blogspot.com/2011/10/2011-frank-willison-memorial-award.html
He reported the following information on planned activities for next month:
1. Jessica McKellar is preparing a post on the Boston Python Workshop
program and the recent grant.
2. Brian Curtin is working on a post about the video equipment
purchased by the PSF and how it has been used to record conference
talks and other events.
As far as the ongoing projects for the month are concerned, he reported:
1. Recruiting other people to help write for the blog.
A few volunteers have expressed interest, but things are getting
off to a slow start. I hope to have some more interesting topics
to give them after the August Board meeting.
2. Mike Driscoll is working on a retrospective post summarizing all of
the funding we have provided for conferences over the last year. We
will wait to publish until closer to the end of 2011.
3. Begin transition plan so Brian Curtin can take over as
Communications Director around the time of the next Board elections
after PyCon 2012.
For tabled activities, D. Hellmann said:
1. PyCon video equipment loan/rental program post
There was some discussion of offering the PyCon video equipment to
PUGs for their meetings, but the mechanism to do it isn't in place,
yet.
Honorary Associate Membership WebPages/Links
--------------------------------------------
P. Campbell, Honorary Associate Membership (HAM) WebPages Start-up
Project, reported on the current issues or blockages the project may
be faced with by saying:
"We have been in the technical phase of the Honorary Associate
Membership (HAM) Project for some time now. However, we are inches
away from recruiting our first PSF Honorary Associate member.
Many technical hurdles have been jumped in order to setup the HAM program
and we are now beginning to see some movement toward getting the HAM website
page prepared for membership recruitment and subscriptions. Yes, HAM members
will have their own webpage!"
As far as the continued activities from last month are concerned, she reported:
"Since Kurt Kaiser, our treasurer, has been able to devote more time to the
HAM project implementation and setup, we should be able to set the launch date
soon.
Please see the message from Kurt Kaiserâs November 2011 treasurerâs report
regarding the current status of the technical phase of the HAM program
implementation and maintenance:
The text on HAM signup pages is preliminary and needs
improvement. I'm looking for help here!
Some advancement was made on the HAM project - particularly in how to
enforce user registration before collecting payment. However, the
effort on our annual tax filing and sponsor invoicing took most of my
available time this month.
Continuing work on a front page with Associate Member sign-up
information. Decide how to present the HAM Membership to the world,
probably via a python.org link.
Google Summer of Code (new report)
---------------------
A. Riley, Google Summer of Code (GSoC), reported on the program's new
activities for the month. He said:
I finished the PSF's payment request for GSoC 2011 and passed
the resulting purchase order to Kurt for invoicing. As a change of policy
from previous years this must be invoiced by Dec 31 to receive payment.
The purchase order is for $15000 USD ($500 * 30 students mentored) in
addition to travel reimbursements for the GSoC mentor summit.
Arc also reported on the planned activities for next month when he said:
Complete annual report for GSoC 2011 which I planned to deliver with my
report this month.
As far as the ongoing projects, he reported:
Google Code-In 2011
PSF was not accepted for Google Code-In 2011, the high school program run
over the Winter by the GSoC team at Google. The largest three organizations
which would operate under the PSF (MoinMoin, SymPy, and PySoy) were accepted
individually and there was insufficient interest from python-dev or smaller
Python projects to meet the requisite 40 example student tasks. Three
accepted Python organizations (out of 18 total) is an overall win for the
Python community. Smaller Python projects looking to get involved are
welcome
to contact one of the other Python organizations to get their tasks included
in the December 16th task release.
Infrastructure Committee
------------------------
S. Reifschneider, Infrastructure Committee Chair, reported on continued
activities
from last month. He wrote:
- Hosting Project: Discussions are still ongoing with regards to OSU/OSL
and other hosting provider (whos name I can never remember). Have not
heard any updates on this project, will ask about it.
- Arc Riley is planning to transfer these domains:
jython.com
jython.net
psfb.org
psfmember.com
psfmember.net
psfmember.org
python3.org
Sean also reported on the activities that are planned for the month. He said:
- Continue on migration of services to their new homes.
As far as the ongoing and the tabled activities are concerned, Sean reported:
- None
Marketing Material
------------------
M.A.Lemburg, Marketing Material Project Manager, provided a summary
of his work. He said:
The project is lead by Marc-André Lemburg who is in contact with
the people behind the Plone brochure created by the German Zope
User Group (DZUG): Jan Ulrich Hasecke and Armin StroÃ-Radschinski.
We started working on the concept a few weeks after World Plone Day
in April 2010 and had several meetings and conference calls to take
the idea forward.
For more details, please see the brochure support site at:
http://brochure.getpython.info/learn-more
Marc-André also reported on the progress of this project when he said:
As in the past months, we've been trying hard to get content
collected from the contacts we've made.
In order to put more pressure on the contacts, we set a deadline
for content submission to this Friday, Nov. 18th, and ran another
round of emails by the contacts we'd most wanted content from.
We also ran an email campaign by the various press offices of
companies where we knew that getting management approval of
the case studies/success stories can be difficult. We're still
waiting for feedback from them.
Some of the larger companies we had contacted, already told us
that they won't make the deadline and so they'll have to wait
for the next edition of the brochure.
In the meantime, Armin has been busy getting the credit card
acceptance setup for his production company Evenios, so that
he can accept credit card payments from the brochure sponsors.
Once that's complete, we'll start to contact companies about
possible ad sponsorships.
Our texter Jan Ulrich has already started working on putting
the various stories we did manage to collect together and will
continue with this work for the next few weeks.
In December we'll then hopefully finalize the content and
get it ready for print in January.
These are the available sponsorship plans we have available:
http://brochure.getpython.info/sponsorship
and here's the media data for the brochure:
http://brochure.getpython.info/mediadata
Esp. the reference entry sponsorships should be interesting for
smaller Python companies:
http://brochure.getpython.info/mediadata/reference-entry-guidelines
M.A Lemberg reported on the current issues the project is faced with.
He said:
As always, additional help in finding interesting projects
would be greatly appreciated. Please consider signing up as
contact scout:
http://brochure.getpython.info/signup/contact-scout-signup
and, if you're interested in the project, please consider signing
up to our newsletter:
http://brochure.getpython.info/
Thanks !
As far as future plans are concerned, he reported:
If the project goes well, we'll follow up with a Python flyer,
translated versions of the brochure and also consider creating
marketing material more targeted at specific user groups or
application fields.
In the long run, we'd also like to take the idea of producing
marketing material beyond printed material and develop booth
setups, giveaways, CDs, etc. to support conference organizers and
local user groups wishing to promote Python at their events.
Moving PyPI to Amazon CloudFront
--------------------------------
The project leader, M.A. Lemburg, Moving PyPI to Amazon CloudFront,
reported on progress for the month:
"The project is currently on hold, since the team members don't have
time to put into this."
In terms of having any issues surrounding his project, M. A.
Lemburg reported no issues except one: he said, he just does not have
enough time to devote to his Moving PyPI to Amazon CloudFront project.
M. A. Lemburg also reported on future plans for the project:
"Check to see whether a trigger based approach to S3 syncing
wouldn't be easier to implement right from the start."
PyCon Chair
-----------
J. Noller, PyCon Chair, provided us with information on when and where
the next two PyCon US conferences will be held, in addition to the web
location of the official PyCon 2012. Please see below:
PyCon 2012: March 7th â 15th, Santa Clara, CA
PyCon 2013: March 11th â 21st, Santa Clara, CA
Official Site: http://us.pycon.org/2012
He also provided "notes" for this month. He said:
We are officially capping registration at 1500 attendees. The team feels that
this is beneficial to the conference as a whole, and allows us to maintain
the
feel PyCon has grown into. We also feel this will encourage other regional
conferences to grow in turn.
I am working on a draft document to present to the board of directors that
clarifies PyCon's position as a key fundraising entity for the Foundation. As
the planning and execution of PyCon 2012 has continued, this has become more
and more true. More later; some thoughts here:
http://jessenoller.com/2011/09/23/pycon-2012-sponsorship-making-the-case-for-sponsorship/
For the month of October, Jesse reported on "Issues and blockages." He said:
1. We are still waiting on AV/Recording vendor responses to our request for
quotes. This is a concern - I'd like to lock these contracts down quickly,
but
can not make the bidding parties move more quickly. I have seen partial
initial
AV bids, but nothing concrete.
As far as the continued activities from last month, he reported:
1. We continue to sign up sponsors at a healthy rate; we have several waiting
corporate paperwork.
2. Financial updates will be sent to the private board list. We now have 69
sponsors.
3. Integration with CTE for registration has been completed by Eldarion. The
registration component for PyCon 2012 is now in private testing and approval
for a launch within the next 1-2 weeks.
4. Management of the program guide has been passed off to Yannick, Ewa, Van
and
Doug N. Idan Gazit has been tapped to do the artwork for the Program Guide
and
T-Shirts. Work on this progresses slowly.
5. Negotiations with Elegant Stitches are ongoing.
6. The Program Committee is going full steam - due to the sheer number of
proposals and the amount of work required, they are missing the original
delivery dates however, and are adjusting as best they can.
7. Tutorial selection/discussion is ongoing, and making excellent progress.
8. Negotiations between PyCon and O'Reilly and Pearson are complete.
Jesse also listed a new activity for the month. Please see below:
1. Get solid quotes on t-shirt costs.
The last two PyCon US items reported on by Jesse were the "planned for next
month" where he listed six(6) items and included a list of the "current
Heads/Staff
for PyCon 2012."
[see above]
1. Continue sponsor drive.
2. Continue to push hard to get the program committee work completed.
3. Work on wrapping up tutorials selection thanks to Stuart and team.
3. Once 2 and 3 are done, begin organizing the on-site and other volunteer
staff.
4. Get financial aid program up and active.
5. Get Startup row announced and launched (call for applications)
6. Wrap up plenary talk selection.
Current Heads/Staff for PyCon 2012
------------------------------------------
Chair: Jesse Noller
Co-Chair: Yannick Gingras
Accountant/Sponsors: Van Lindberg
Event Coordinator: Ewa Jodlowska/CTE
Public Relations Lead: Brian Curtin
Tech Lead: Doug Napoleone
Tech Co-Lead: Noah Kantrowtiz
Volunteer Lead: TBD
Program Committee Chair: Jacob Kaplan-Moss
Program Committee Co-Chair: Tim Lesher
Tutorials Chair: Stuart Williams
Tutorials Co-Chair: TBD
Posters Chair: Vern Ceder
Tutorials Co-Chair: Zac Miller
Financial Aide Chair: Peter Kropf
Financial Aide Co-Chair: TBD
However, under "tabled activities," he provided the following:
None
Board Meeting Discussion:
S. Holden: "PyCon 2012 sponsorship seems to continue to grow like a monster"
J. Rush: "Longterm, with the wonderful increase in funding regarding sponsors,
what are we as a board going to do with the extra funds?"
J. Noller: "I plan on proposing to the board we continue on our path: outreach,
education, conference funding, etc. There's also the proposed revamp of
python.org
and it's properties."
M.v Löwis: "I think the PyCon sponsorship should be spent on PyCon."
S. Holden: "I'd certainly suggest an increase in the sprints budget, and
possibly
an increase in the maximum award. That seems to have got help to people writing
Python."
G. Willadsen: "Can you afford captioning at some level? I know we talked about
this,
but limited captioning, not for all talks, maybe is possible."
D. Napoleone: "I have been pushing for Nuance to sponsor captioning for some
time, but
a project which could have handled it at a more reasonable cost was cancelled."
J. Noller: "Before anyone proposes we add another dime to the budget - myself
included -
we need to have solid [PyCon 2012] registration and tutorial attendance numbers
and to
fully close the books on this year."
Sprint Committee
----------------
J. Noller, Sprint Committee Chair, provided a summary of activities for
this month, he reported:
We had two sprints occur this month: The Plone Conference which was
organized months ago, and Open Hatch which was a last minute group.
Both events went well and we should be receiving some type of report
from both groups to publicize how their sprints went.
As far as the continued activities from last month, he reported:
Reimbursement for PyCon Finland and the Boston Twisted sprint are
still needed. I will re-send the details to Kurt so we can get them
covered.
On his report of the new activities for the month, J. Noller said:
The Plone Conference and Open Hatch sprints we sponsored this month
just sent in their reimbursement requests those will begin processing.
Redesigning Python.org Website
===============================
Since there was no "new business" to be discussed or voted on in the November
2011 board meeting, board members discussed the status of and the on-going work
to be done on the Python.org website redesign via an RFP, which has been lead by
J. Noller.
J. Noller: "My next steps are this: Edit the RFP to include the mailing list
address,
issue it for a 2 week call for comments, asking those with feedback to direct
that
feedback to the list. The list will collect: but not respond."
Other Business
===============
Board members were reminded by S. Holden that planning will soon begin on the
2012 members meeting to be held at PyCon 2012 in Santa Clara, California and
also the 2012 members election which will take place online two weeks following
the members meeting.
Adjournment
===========
S. Holden adjourned the meeting at 16:59 UTC.
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