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PSF Meeting Minutes for May 21, 2012

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The Python Software Foundation
Minutes of a Regular Meeting of the Board of Directors

May 21, 2012


A regular meeting of the Python Software Foundation ("PSF") Board of Directors was held over Group Video Calling via Skype and Internet Relay Chat beginning at 16:00 UTC, 21 May 2012. Van Lindberg and 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 new Board of Directors (11 of ll) were present at the meeting: Brian Curtin, Steve Holden, Andrew Kuchling, Marc-Andre Lemburg, Van Lindberg [arrived at 12:28], Martin von Löwis, Jessica McKellar, David Mertz, Doug Napoleone, Jesse Noller, and Tim Peters. Also in attendance were Kurt Kaiser (Treasurer) and Pat Campbell (Secretary/Administrator).

2   Minutes of Past Meetings

The 30 April 2012 Board meeting minutes were voted on and approved.

RESOLVED, that we approve the minutes at http://mail.python.org/ mailman/private/psf-board/2012-May/017532.html as representing a true and accurate record of the meeting.

Approved, 10-0-0.

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:

For the month of May 2012, the treasurer provided a sumation of the financial activities by saying:

Our assets were up by 232K in April, reflecting the payments for PyCon registration and sponsorship. This was matched by a similar increase in liability.

Accounts Receivable was down by 115K, reflecting payments by PyCon and PSF sponsors. As of 20May, AR is 126K.

Accounts Payable was up by 162K at the end of April due to several large PyCon invoices received around the end of the month. As of 20May, AP is 30K.

April continued to be extremely busy financially, but the P&L won't show much change until we recognize the results of PyCon 2012. At that point (triggered by settling accounts with the convention center and the hotels, including room commissions) the accrued expense and revenue will move to the P&L and our assets and liabilities will return to normal levels.

He reported on the revenue and expense below:

Revenue:

In the month of April, YTD income was down by 4K, primarily due to payroll. Total equity declined to 458K.

Donations for the month were $11,150, including $905 received during PyCon registrations this year

Grants/Sprints:

Linux AU $1,593 Kiwi PyCon 843 SciKit/Learn Sprint 4,816

Our expense for the SciKit/Learn Sprint will be covered by a $5000 donation to the PSF by Google.

Expense:

Outside Services:
Wendroff / QBOL 1,477

The treasurer goes on to say:

Most of my time was spent on paying PyCon vendor invoices, processing sponsor payments and working on completing the PyCon accounting detail in QBOL. There was also an unusually large amount of Board interface and HR activity related to the organizational turn-over.

PyCon payment activity appears to have wrapped up, and we are very close to being able to recognize the income from a very strong PyCon 2012.

Concerning the Associate Member Program (AM), he said:

Associate Member program:

The website is available to accept Associate Member registrations. Andrew Kuchling has offered to work on improving the site content and the attractiveness of the Associate Membership offering.

We still need to link psfmember.org to python.org, improve the attractiveness of the offering by adding content on python.org relating to the Associate Membership, and make the community aware of the opportunity.

Kurt concluded his report with a list of item the treasurer's office will be focused on, he said:

My focus is on PyCon wrapup, AR/AP reduction, and the increased activity and strong interest in fiscal sponsorship shown at PyCon.

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

B. Curtin, Communications Officer, reported on continued activities from last month. He reported:

Brian is planning an email campaign with the Outreach & Education committee, and the PSF blog may be included in the resources discussed there.

Brian also reported on the new activities for the month. He said:

Two small posts went up this month. One announcing Steve's departure from the chairman position, and a belated announcement of the Q1 Community Service Awards.

Now that the RFP is available, it was announced on the Facebook and Google+ pages.

He reported the following information on the planned activities for next month:

  1. Some form of announcement has been on the status reports of a few groups lately, and with the website RFP being announced this week, I will be putting together a "newsletter"-style announcement for the user group lists.
  2. Via Steve Holden, we have some information to put together a story about Python's use in schools from David Coopersmith along with a student of his named Isaac. The same story involves some praise for the trademark committee, which may or may not go into the same post.
  3. Post information about this summer's PyGames contest for students (http://www.summerpygames.org/)

As far as the ongoing projects for the month are concerned, he reported:

  1. 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.
  2. Recruiting other people to help write for the blog.

For tabled activities, B. Curtin 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.

5.2   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 his project when he said:

We have made progress on getting the layout of the brochure finalized and will actively start a sponsorship campaign once we have the final version ready for public consumption, that is: finished the layout and received approval from the content providers.

In order to help with one-to-one marketing the brochure we will have the remaining teaser versions of the brochure available at the EuroPython PSF Booth.

Here's the link to the PDF of the teaser, in case you missed it: http://brochure.getpython.info/media/flyer/python-brochure-pycon-us-2012-teaser-booklet/view

The online payment solution has been up since the start of PyCon US in March. We do have a few ad and reference sponsor signups, but no where near enough to start going to print. Most of the signups are from Germany. If the US folks don't hurry up, the reference list will be filled with German IT shops :-)

If you are interested in signing up as reference sponsor, please contact us or visit us at the EuroPython conference to get a first hand intro to the brochure.

Once we have the sponsors all signed up, we'll go to print with the brochure and have it distributed to the ad sponsors, reference sponsors, subscription sponsors and Python conferences, user groups, etc. via on-demand shipping.

If you are the lead of a local user group, conference, educational institution and interested in receiving boxes with the brochure delivered to you at no additional costs, please contact the PSF or our team directly via brochure at getpython.info.

5.2.2   Educational Sponsorship

In case you missed it in the last report: we have also added a new sponsor option: the educational sponsorship.

This works much like the subscription sponsorship where a company can order extra brochure copies at very reasonable prices. The difference is that companies can order extra copies for educational institutions of their choice or of the PSF's choice. The bill will be paid by the company and the boxes will go straight to the institution.

5.2.3   Please Help find Sponsors

If you know possible sponsors or are interested in sponsoring the brochure yourself, please check the available sponsorship plans we have available:

http://brochure.getpython.info/sponsorship

If you have questions, please ping me directly or write to brochure at getpython.info.

M.A Lemberg reported on the current issues the project is faced with. He said:

If you know of interesting projects or companies using Python to great things, please contact us and consider signing up as contact scout to provide on-site help at conferences or other events:

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 the future plans for this project are concerned, he reported:

If the project goes well, we'll follow up with a second edition of the brochure, Python flyers using material extracted from the brochure, 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.

5.3   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."

According to M. A. Lemburg, there is nothing new to report for this month. He said:

"I'm beginning to believe that doing a sprint of sorts would likely be the best way to move this forward, but I currently don't have more cycles to spare (the brochure project has turned out to be very work intense), so can't lead such an effort at the moment."

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 the future plans for this project:

"Check to see whether a trigger based approach to S3 syncing wouldn't be easier to implement right from the start."

5.4   PyCon Chair

J. Noller, PyCon Chair, provided us with information surrounding the current status of the PyCon US affairs. He reported on the interim period at the closing of PyCon US 2012 and the gearing up of PyCon US 2013:

"Not much to report this month: We are in the process of closing out the 2012 budget/books so the foundation can recognize the revenue from the conference. We are in the discussion phase of 2013 based on what we learned from 2012, and I am ramping up sponsorship discussions for 2013 behind the scenes.

Until the books are closed for 2012 I am not comfortable with moving forward on 2013.

I have a larger blog post planned to discuss the conference overall - with over 2300 attendees, the conference was a wild success by any measure and feedback has been positive modulo complaints about the food."

5.5   Sprint Committee (SC)

J. Noller &/or B. Curtin, Sprint Committee Chair, reported that there were no issues or blockages surrounding any sprint activities for the month.

As far as the continued activities from last month, he reported:

None

On his report of the new activities for the month, He reported:

We heard back from the Rochester Institute of Technology group who sprinted last month that they had much less people than they planned, so they passed on our sponsorship in plans of going for a bigger event in July or August.

We sponsored another sprint with OpenHatch in San Francisco for which we just submitted the reimbursement request. We also received a reimbursement request for the t-shirt purchase from a PyLadies-related sprint that occurred in Poland some months back.

In terms of the new activities planned for next month. He wrote:

I'll cover this in the Communications status, but I'm rolling up the planned Sprints outreach into a mega-PSF newsletter type thing.

As far as the ongoing projects and the tabled activities for this committee, he reported:

None

5.6   Google Summer of Code (GSoC)

A. Riley, Google Summer of Code (GSoC), reported on the issues and/or blockages this program is currently faced with. He said:

  1. A handful of students requested by mentors did not fulfill the required first patch. I worked with some of them in the final hours of selections to get this fixed, students who did not respond or were unable to do this were removed from consideration. No exceptions were made.
  2. We had three students selected who were also selected by other Google Summer of Code mentoring organizations, all three were for GNU Mailman. Terri Oda (Mailman's lead mentor this year) negotiated with the mentors for the other organizations to keep all three.

Arc also reported on the continued activities from last month when he wrote:

  1. Student selections finished. Despite low application number this year I worked with the team at Google to get us an additional 6 slots (total 31) beyond our initial allocation of 25. Almost every student requested by a project under the PSF which met our requirements was approved.
  1. Riley reported on new activities for the month. He said:
    1. Community bonding period for accepted students. This ends today (5/20) as students prepare to begin their projects on Monday May 21st.
    2. Updating http://soc.python.org/ for this year's students, this should be complete this week.

As far as the planned activities for next month, he reported:

1. Keeping an eye on student blogs and email for any problems that arise as students are now working with their mentors.

Additionally, Arc reported on "ongoing projects" with the GSoC project and on "tabled activities", respectively:

5.7   Ongoing Projects

Summer of Code 2012 will be ongoing until August.

5.8   Tabled Activities

  1. Discussion with rejected mentors regarding why they were not accepted this year.

6   Board Resolutions Formally Incorporated & Ratified

RESOLVED, that the Python Software Foundation Board of directors formally incorporate and ratify all board resolutions on the resolutions page (http://www.python.org/psf/records/board/resolutions/) and as performed via email votes in between meetings as made in good faith as of 5/21/2012.

Approved, 11-0-0.

7   RFP to Redesign Python.org Website

RESOLVED, that the PSF accepts (OPTIONAL: revision 4f5516bdccb7 of) the Request For Proposals (RFP) document outlining the requirements for an redesign and refresh of the current Python.org website, including front-end user interface, back end publishing, and content creation system. The RFP will be published publicly for solicitation, and submissions will be accepted per the "Proposal guidelines" section within the RFP itself. This resolution does not bind the PSF to the acceptance of any single proposal.

Approved, 11-0-0.

8   Membership Class Renamed

RESOLVED, that the "honorary associate member" membership class, created by Board resolution on 2010-06-21, be renamed to "associate member".

Approved, 10-0-1.

RESOLVED, that the Associate Member [membership] class shall be added to the Bylaws as described in the board resolution of June 2010, defining the Associate Member [membership] class as per-term membership with no voting rights.

Approved, 10-0-1.

9   Membership Application for Hood Media GmbH

RESOLVED, that the board recommends Hood Media GmbH as a pending sponsor member.

Approved, 11-0-0.

10   The Appointment of a PSF Vice-Chairman

The board discussed the appointment of a Vice-Chairman for North America and a Vice-Chairman for Europe, Middle-East and Africa (EMEA).

RESOLVED, that Jesse Noller be appointed Vice-Chairman of the PSF for North America, and Marc-Andre Lemburg be appointed Vice-Chairman of the PSF for Europe, Middle-East and Africa (EMEA).

This discussion was deferred to email.

11   2012 PythonBrazil Conference Funding

RESOLVED, that the PSF provide funding of USD 3,000 to sponsor the PythonBrazil 2012 Conference to be held in Rio de Janeiro.

Approved, 10-0-0.

12   Infrastructure Committee Appointed Chair

RESOLVED, that the board reauthorizes the Infrastructure Committee consisting of Chair Noah Kantrowitz, Vice-Chair Sean Reifschneider, and core members Arc Riley, Martin V. Loewis, to establish, maintain, and upgrade computer and networking infrastructure related to the PSF and python.org missions on the Internet.

Approved, 10-0-0.

13   2012-2Q Community Service Award Nomination

Board members discussed and selected the two 2012-2Q recipients of the Community Service Award.

[Details temporarily omitted from the public minutes, to be restored after the announcement.]

Approved, 10-0-0.

15   Adjournment

  1. Holden adjourned the meeting at 17:14 UTC.