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PSF Meeting Minutes for Feb. 6, 2013

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

February 6, 2012

A regular meeting of the Python Software Foundation ("PSF") Board of Directors was held over Group Conference Call via phone and Internet Relay Chat beginning at 18:04 CEST/ 12:04 EDT, on February 6 2012. Van Lindberg presided over the meeting. Ewa Jodlowska prepared the minutes.

All votes are reported in the form "Y-N-A" (in favor-Y‚opposed-N‚abstentions-A; e.g. "5-1-2" means "5 in favor, 1 opposed, and 2 abstentions").

Contents

1   Attendance

The following members of the Board of Directors (8 of ll) were present at the meeting: Van Lindberg, Marc-Andre Lemburg, Tim Peters, Brian Curtin, Jessica McKellar (joined after minutes were voted on), Martin v. Löwis, Andrew Kuchling, and Jesse Noller. Also in attendance were Kurt Kaiser (Treasurer) and Ewa Jodlowska (Secretary/Administrator).

2   Minutes of Past Meetings

The January 16 2013 Board meeting minutes were voted on and approved.

RESOLVED, that we approve the minutes at http://mail.python.org/mailman/private/psf-board/2013-February/020694.html as representing a true and accurate record of the January 16 2013 meeting.

Approved, 5-0-2.

3   Votes Taken Between Meetings

There were no votes taken between meetings.

4   Votes Taken Over Email

There were no votes taken over email.

5   Treasurer Report

Treasurer Report January 2013 -(December 2012 Report) was deferred by KBK.

6   Pydotorg/Website Redesign written by Jesse Noller

6.1   Summary

http://dev.projectevolution.com/python/.

Waiting on full report from the contractors of the current back end software.

6.2   Issues / Blockages

  • Collaborating w/ team and the public on good ideas for the community sub site.

6.5   Planned for Next Month

Start getting/tracking public feedback on some of the design.

6.6   Notes

  • Con call w. the team scheduled for this week.

7   PyCon Chair Report written by Jesse Noller

PyCon 2013: March 11th — 21st, Santa Clara, CA Official Site: http://us.pycon.org/

7.1   Summary

We're on track to sell out the conference. We just hit ~2014 registrations. Print program is under great management via Diana, Ewa is doing an amazing job invoicing the sponsors and managing their back end needs. The raspberry.io site work is accelerating.

Free 1.5 hour sponsor tutorials: https://us.pycon.org/2013/schedule/sponsor-tutorials/

Young Coder "Lets Learn Python" Registration Now Available! http://pycon.blogspot.com/2013/01/pycon-2013-young-coder-learn-python.html

PyLadies lunch @ PyCon! http://pycon.blogspot.com/2013/01/pycon-2013-pyladies-lunch-pycon.html

Artwork http://pycon.blogspot.com/2013/01/pycon-us-2013-artwork-by-amazing-idan.html

7.3   Continued Activities from Last Month

  • Sponsorship continues.
  • Raspberry.io proceeding.

7.5   Planned for Next Month

  • Lock down all mobile/print assets; sell last tickets.

7.6   Notes

Ewa's monthly report sent by Ewa to the board.

8   PSF Event Coordinator Report written by Ewa Jodlowska

8.1   Other PSF Conferences

  • Working with PyData and pgDay. Both contracts were signed. I am working on getting them discounted internet by combining it with our costs.

8.2   PyCon AV Management

  • Received proposal from Carl for 2013. Waiting for Carl to send Jesse and I a breakdown explaining the additional charges he wants to impose.

8.3   PyCon Budgeting

  • Sent out 95% of the sponsor invoices.
  • Constantly working on ledger items and payment instructions for KBK.

8.4   PyCon Catering

  • Nothing to report for Jan

8.5   PyCon Contract Negotiations

  • working on getting additional rooms at the Marriott for the Financial Aid group.
  • the Avatar hotel no longer has a shuttle so I am working on taxi vouchers for our attendees to use to and from the convention center.

8.6   PyCon Electrical

  • Nothing to report for Jan

8.7   PyCon Exhibit Hall

  • Draft of the expo hall layout has been sent to all the sponsors. The final layout should be finished this week.
  • Need to work on signage for Start up Row

8.8   PyCon Financial Aid

  • Emails, emails, emails
  • Answering many financial aid emails regarding housing and how certain funds will be applied for people. There seem to be many special cases where funds have to be reallocated.
  • keeping a spreadsheet up to date with everyones housing needs. Cut off is in a week and after that I will begin to pair people up and reserving rooms.

8.9   Future Event Planning

  • Finalized things for PyLadies Lunch Saturday March 16
  • Finalized order for rasps and power
  • finalized order for Young Coder tutorial books
  • finalized shipping instructions and holding area for poster sessions.

8.10   PyCon Hotel/CC Management

  • working on floor plans for all of the meeting room space.

8.11   PyCon Housing Management

  • Housing is beginning to sell out. As mentioned previously, I am working on getting rooms at the Marriott for $99/night.

8.12   PyCon Internet

  • Starting to finalize the internet needs for 2013. Working with SmartCity on this.

8.13   PyCon Printing

  • Initiated contact with printer in CA for 2013.

8.14   PyCon Registration Management

  • I have daily communication with the registration bureau regarding special requests and general questions.

8.15   PyCon Site Visits

  • Nothing to Report for Jan

8.16   PyCon Sponsors

  • Emails, emails, emails
  • I continuously assist sponsors with any questions they may have when Jesse is working on getting them signed up.
  • I continuously respond to sponsor emails that have questions about logistics/general things.
  • The sponsor workshop has been finalized and announced.
  • Answering emails from Sponsors about items needed for PyCon and shipping logistics involved.

8.17   PyCon Website Management

  • Nothing to Report for Jan

9   Administrator Report written by Ewa Jodlowska

9.1   Board Agenda / Minutes

  • I have continued to control the Board Agenda for the PSF Board (at least for the time it was working and replacing it when it was not working)
  • I have continued to control the minutes for the meetings (including drafts).

9.2   Grant and Award Notification

  • I have been notifying groups about the Board's resolutions.
  • I have notified Community Service Award winners for Q4 and collected invoicing information for KBK.
  • I have been assisting with sponsorship requests.

9.3   Email and Communication

  • I am continuing to monitor all PSF Board/Members mailing lists also making sure emails are being answered/followed up on.
  • I am continuing to read through all of the email threads that occur on the board/members mailing lists.

9.4   Document Creation

  • The letters for PSF Sponsor Members has been created. KBK has sent me instructions for sending them out. They will be going out this week.
  • I have been creating a series of reports for Van to assist with the PSF budget for 2013.

9.5   Research and Review

  • nothing to report for Jan

9.6   Contributor Agreements

  • I recently entered in all the contributor forms received in the past few weeks and sent people acknowledgments.

9.7   Documentation Upkeep and Wiki

  • nothing to report for Jan

9.8   Election Management/Membership

  • nothing to report for Jan

9.10   Other Conferences

  • Please see the Event Coordinator Report for the detail.

10   Associate Membership Program Report written by Kurt Kaiser

(see Treasurer's Report - section, "Associate Membership")

11   Marketing Material Project Report written by Marc-Andre Lemburg

The marketing material project aims to design, produce and ship professional quality marketing material for Python.

The first goal is to create a Python brochure which show-cases Python's application spaces, how it helps users to achieve their tasks and what its benefits are in a professional and educational setting.

11.1   Summary

The project is led 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.

The project has been running for more than two years now, making slow, but steady progress. It's one of those projects that take time and lots of effort to get to the finishing line.

For more details, please see the brochure support site at:

http://brochure.getpython.info/learn-more

11.2   Progress

We have worked with and received approvals from OpenStack, CERN, ILM in the last month.

We're still trying get the last two approvals from SurveyMonkey and Side Effects Software (Houdini software) and will start with a more aggressive ad campaign in the coming weeks (using a PDF with those two stories hidden by an overlay).

Ad space is almost sold out. We're finalizing the last remaining reservations.

There are still a lot of the smaller reference entries available. These provide a great value for money and are especially designed to be of great benefit for the many SME Python service companies in Python land. Please see the "Sponsor Options" below for more details.

If you are interested in signing up as reference sponsor or know someone who might be interested, please refer them to the brochure site:

http://brochure.getpython.info/

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.

Due to the delays in getting the final approvals, we'll miss the opportunity to have printed copies of the brochure at PyCon US 2013 for distribution at the PSF booth, but we'll hopefully have them ready for the many other Python events scheduled for later this year:

http://pycon.org/#calendar

11.4   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.

11.5   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.

11.6   Issues

Since we'll be continuing to work on the brochure project and also continue to collect success stories, we're always interested in getting in contact with people behind interesting projects and companies using Python to do great things.

If you know such people, 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 !

11.7   Future plans

If the project goes well (and things look great at the moment), 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.

12   Community Relations Report written by Marc-Andre Lemburg

12.1   Summary

With the PSF Community Relations we aim at creating closer bindings with the world-wide Python communities.

One of the ways we're trying to do this is by showing more presence at international Python conferences and moving the spending side from conference grants more towards signing up for sponsorships which allow us to present the PSF at the conference using the conference kits we created in the last few months and which are slowly being extended to include more versatile setups as well:

http://wiki.python.org/psf/PSF%20Conference%20Kit (*)

Another way is to have regional PSF representatives which can help give the PSF a closer relation to local groups. We're trying to find such representatives and work out a strategy for the local representation with them.

(*) The URL currently doesn't work, since this is one of the pages that was permanently deleted in the Jan 5 wiki attack.

12.2   Progress

Progress in the last month has been slow due to holidays, vacation and work on things like restoring the wikis after the attach on Jan 5. See http://wiki.python.org/moin/WikiAttack2013 for details.

Here's a summary of what's still on the agenda:

12.3   Conference Kits

The conference kit for South America is managed locally by Luciano Ramalho and Mariano Reingart.

The conference kit for North America is managed by Jesse Noller. It will be used for the upcoming PyCon US 2013. Please contact Ewa if you're interested in helping with staffing the PSF booth.

We will be creating more of the portable smaller popup display kits that Ewa used for PyCon ZA 2012. To reduce shipping costs, we'll have some produced in the US and some in Europe.

For more details on the kits, please have a look at the conference kit wiki page:

http://wiki.python.org/psf/PSF%20Conference%20Kit (*)

12.4   Local PSF Representation

After the last PSF meeting at EuroPython, Duncan McGreggor has kindly initiated a discussion with the Indian Python community. We will be following up with this and hope to arrange one of the first regional representations there. Progress so far has been slow on this due to many other PSF activities.

12.5   Events Calendars

In order to make it easier for the community to find Python related events, I've setup a team of volunteers to manage two new event calendars. One for larger events and another one for smaller events:

  • Python events calendar
  • Python user group events calendar

The calendars are displayed on the http://pycon.org/ site and in the sidebar of http://python.org/.

Details about the calendars are available on the wiki page we have for them:

http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonEventsCalendar

There are plans to add the user group events calendar to the python.org sidebar as well.

12.6   Issues

The budget the board approved for the conference kits is fully used up. I'll propose a budget position for marketing activities in the next few weeks.

Until then, I'll use my directors expense allowance to have low-cost marketing items such as flyers, stickers, etc. produced and sent to conferences.

12.7   Future plans

Have more conference kits for e.g. India, Australia and Asia.

Have more lightweight kits to enable easy ad-hoc setups.

Have more marketing material readily available.

13   Part Time System Admins for PSF

RESOLVED: That the Python Software Foundation hire Benjamin W. Smith and Ernest W. Durbin III as part time systems administrators to join the foundation infrastructure team based on the rates and proposal located here: http://mail.python.org/mailman/private/psf-board/2013-February/020684.html. They will perform 130 hours of paid work per quarter, with a dedicated 24 hour on call rotation

Approved, 8-0-0.

14   Fiscal Sponsorship for IndyPy

RESOLVED: RESOLVED, that the PSF provide fiscal sponsorship for the "direct project" IndyPy. The PSF will collect targeted donations and reimburse properly receipted expenses on their behalf up to the level of the donations made to this project. This project must not represent that they are independent legal entities

Approved, 8-0-0.

15   Other Business

15.1   CTM App 10848208

The board directors had discussed the CTM application and where it stands. It was decided that the PSF would not take the settlement offered by Veber.

16   Adjournment

Van Lindberg adjourned the meeting at 19:00 CEST/ 13:00 EDT.