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PSF Meeting Minutes for Nov. 21, 2011

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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 — opposed — abstentions; e.g. "5-1-2" means "5 in favor, 1 opposed, and 2 abstentions").

1   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).

2   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.

3   Votes Taken Between Meetings

There were no votes taken between meetings.

4   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?"

5   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):

5.1   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.

5.3   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.

5.4   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

5.5   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 Stroß-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.

5.6   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.

    1. 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."

5.7   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 — 15th, Santa Clara, CA PyCon 2013: March 11th — 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:

  1. 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."

5.8   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.

6   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."

7   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.

8   Adjournment

  1. Holden adjourned the meeting at 16:59 UTC.