1   Attendance

The following members of the Board of Directors were present at the meeting: Brett Cannon, Stephan Deibel, David Goodger, Raymond Hettinger, Steve Holden, Martin von Löwis, Tim Peters, and James Tauber. Also in attendance was Kurt Kaiser (Treasurer; arrived 16:58).

2   Minutes of Past Meetings

The 14 April 2008 Board meeting minutes were approved by a vote of 8-0-0 (in favor – opposed – abstentions).

3   Status of Past Action Items

(Pending action items appear like this.)

4   Outstanding Receivables

K. Kaiser was not present at the beginning, but he sent a report on accounts receivable to the Board list: $14K outstanding for 2007 dues, $6K for PyCon 2007, $12K for 2008 dues, $63K for PyCon 2008.

S. Holden:

This does not substitute for a Treasurer's report, but it's of great concern. We can't claim to be fiscally responsible with a receivables situation like this. We need to get this in order quickly if we are going to be soliciting increased contributions from sponsor members as a part of the general bylaws reorganization.

I have put a lot of time into it. But we also need to be more systematic, so it doesn't recur.

D. Goodger noted that "having regular reports from the Treasurer is important."

S. Holden: "So far everything's been done by email. Next job is 'phone calls and letters." M. von Löwis volunteered to help with letters, and R. Hettinger volunteered to help with phone calls.

[Later, after K. Kaiser joined the meeting:]

R. Hettinger reminded K. Kaiser that he (Hettinger) is now the Assistant Treasurer and stands ready to help.

5   Hostway Sponsor Membership Termination

S. Holden reported that Hostway has dropped out of PSF membership.

They were valuable early PyCon sponsors, but the interest has dropped with the departure of the individuals concerned. I think no further action is required, unless someone feels they should be emeritus?

S. Deibel:

In general I'd prefer to use emeritus only for individuals. For example, Archaeopteryx is emeritus for no reason I can think of. Note that there is a "Former Members" section on http://www.python.org/psf/members/.

6   PyCon 2009 Venue Update

D. Goodger:

We've chosen the Hyatt as the venue. It has advantages over the conference center: all in one place, most people will stay there. It's more expensive than the Crowne ($135/night vs. $109 at the Crowne). We still have an obligation for rooms at Crowne, which is still the budget option. Also catering: we'll have one reception there, which will cover the $65K obligation. The bottom line is that we'll need some growth to meet the room obligation.

There are two contracts to sign:

RESOLVED, that the PyCon Chairman be authorized to sign the necessary contracts for PyCon 2009.

Approved 7-0-1.

7   PyCon 2010 Bids Summary

D. Goodger:

We have 3 bids: San Francisco Bay area, Atlanta Georgia, and Cleveland Ohio. The next step is to get CTE's input on rates, venues, etc. That's ongoing. There's no decision yet.

We should be getting info in a few days to a couple of weeks from CTE. Then RFP's go out. We're scheduled to make a decision by August 1st.

The bid process is described here: http://wiki.python.org/moin/PyConPlanning/BidRequirements

The PyCon organizing committee, led by the PyCon Chair, will prepare a recommendation for the Board, who will make the final decision.

D. Goodger will inform the members of the bids for PyCon 2010 as well as the bid process.

8   2008 Frank Willison Award

The Board reviewed the nominations solicited from past winners and from the PSF members. A winner for the 2008 Frank Willison Award for Contributions to the Python Community was decided.

RESOLVED, that the Board recommend Martin von Löwis as the 2008 Frank Willison Award recipient.

Approved 6-0-2.

It was noted that last year another PSF Director was chosen, and "we may not want to give the idea of always patting ourselves on the back". However it was felt that Martin is clearly overdue for recognition of his well-known and wide-ranging contributions, including recent infrastructure work.

[Decision details were initially omitted, and restored after OSCON 2008.]

D. Goodger will inform Guido van Rossum, O'Reilly Media, and the PSF members of the Board's recommendaion for the winner of the 2008 Frank Willison Award.

9   2008/2009 Budgeting

S. Holden:

Directors present last year will remember David [Goodger]'s attempt to budget. This is becoming increasingly important. As a first step, I would like you all to consider what you feel the Foundation should be spending money on through the end of 2009.

R. Hettinger asked "How can you budget 2009 when you have [accounts receivable] from 2007? ;-)" S. Holden replied, "Agreed, but that issue is being addressed".

S. Deibel noted "I'm much more concerned about failure to track down unpaid dues than our lack of budget." S. Holden: "Which is why the unpaid dues are taking priority. But we can't suspend the budget process in the interim."

M. von Löwis: "I think we should plan for one permanent employee. I think everything else follows from that (e.g. the amount of donations needed)." R. Hettinger: "A permanent employee is going to become a must-have." See PSF Employee below.

S. Deibel:

One note from another non-profit I'm on the board of: major donors tend to not give to foundations that are entirely volunteer run; in general having employees is seen as the only way to be effective as an organization (and they're probably right).

S. Holden will write to the members asking for input on a budget for 2008-2009.

10   Sponsor Member Application: Propertysold.ca

The PSF received an application for sponsor membership from Propertysold.ca. On 24 April 2008, Boris Michailov of Propertysold.ca wrote:

We began our business in early 2004 with the goal of saving people money by creating a website and home marketing system that people could use to sell their homes for themselves.

We thought this was a great business idea but as a start up we were looking for ways to keep costs down while we developed our business model and website functionality.

Naturally, we turned to the Open Source community for help running all of our development on inexpensive Dell laptops with RedHat Linux, Apache, MySql, PHP and Python software.

Challenged to produce a system quickly and at a low cost we turned to Python to develop and test features and functionality for our website. Our programming team was already familiar with it and explained that Python had a reputation for being powerful while getting the job done quickly. They suggested we develop our first models using Python and so that's the route we decided on.

After 6 months of hard work in our basement we launched our business online in no small part to Python and the ease with which we were able to get our ideas from our head into actual functional modules. Three years later our programmers are still using Python as our development platform of choice. Thank you for being an integral part of our success making it a pleasure for us to give back to the Open Source community whose hours of hard work have helped make our business possible and will continue to make it possible moving forward in partnership.

It was

RESOLVED, that the Board of Directors recommends PropertySold.ca to the membership, as a future sponsor member of the PSF.

Approved 7-0-1.

11   Developer Documentation Project/Bounty

S. Holden reported that there were suggestions that we might incentivize development of better documentation. Essentially, pay for documentation.

B. Cannon: "Problem with this is you will need a core developer to write those docs."

R. Hettinger: "I don't see the point. We're getting more and more doc patches. Georg made it pretty easy to update."

S. Deibel: "Maybe the goal should be to eventually be able to hire a few core developers full time."

Further discussion was deferred.

12   Choice of PSF Logo

A logo for the PSF was discussed on the PSF-members list recently. The two options discussed were: a candidate logo derived from the Python logo with added human figures (from Marc-André Lemburg), and the Python logo itself (but with PSF-specific text). The discussion did not result in a clear consensus either way.

S. Deibel:

The message (in my mind) is that the idea of expressing "community" in a logo graphic is good but it needs more thought and until we can do it in a compelling way we [should] just use the existing logo and text.

The Board decided to adopt the existing Python logo with the words "Python Software Foundation". However the Board is open to considering other designs.

1. S. Holden will write to the members to describe the Board's decision regarding the PSF logo.
2. D. Goodger will prepare logos for the PSF, based on the Python logo graphic with the text "Python Software Foundation".

13   Trademark Issues

S. Holden reported that Van Lindberg has raised serious concerns about non-approved logo usage, about EuroPython and especially PyCon UK.

14   PSF Employee

D. Goodger reported that he has begun working on a rough job description. S. Holden has also collected a few tasks such a person could do. Also see 2008/2009 Budgeting above.

S. Deibel:

What made ... (the other group whose Board I sit on) work was the first employee they hired was this woman who is just amazing. Her vision and effectiveness has turned them into a very successful non-profit with a budget in the millions from being very tiny at the time. So ... I'm not interested in ... task lists [but] the opportunity to hire someone with vision.

D. Goodger will send the PSF employee job description (work in progress) to the Board list for further discussion.

15   Renewal of the PSF Board Server Domain

K. Kaiser reported that this is being done. DNS is renewed, and the domain transfer is in progress. The domain is owned by "Kurt Kaiser for the PSF".

16   PyCon Singapore Support

The PSF was contacted by Dr. Liew Beng Keat of the Republic Polytechnic school, who is interested in holding a Python conference in Sinapore, possibly in August 2009. There is no action to take at this time. The Board encourages and supports the formation of PyCon Singapore.

17   License Simplification

S. Holden:

Van [Lindberg] is attempting to track down relevant people to allow us to remove various oddities like the BeOpen license from the stack. He is keen to see it as untrammelled as possible.

Van also has some interesting ideas about how tactial rewrites might remove license restrictions.

The Board agreed that this is worthwhile to try, though the results of previous efforts do not leave it hopeful.

S. Holden will have Van Lindberg report on Python license issues to the Board mailing list.

18   Infrastructure Committee Report

B. Cannon:

XS4ALL is moving a machine to another rack. [We're] understaffed as always in terms of volunteers. If MvL fell off the face of the earth we would be screwed.

19   Adjournment

S. Holden adjourned the meeting at 17:24 UTC.