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PSF Meeting Minutes for Jan. 31, 2014

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

January 31, 2014

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 18:00 CET/ 12:00 EST, on January 31, 2014. 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").

1   Attendance

The following members of the Board of Directors (11 of 11) were present at the meeting: Van Lindberg, Tim Peters, Jesse Noller, Brian Curtin, Jessica McKellar, Alex Gaynor, Brett Cannon, Marc-Andre Lemburg, David Mertz, Lynn Root, and Doug Napoleone (joined after minutes were voted on). Also in attendance were Ewa Jodlowska (Secretary/Administrator) and Kurt Kaiser (Treasurer).

2   Minutes of Past Meetings

The 20 January 2014 Board meeting minutes were voted on and approved.

RESOLVED, that the PSF approve the minutes at https://mail.python.org/mailman/private/psf-board/2014-January/024179.html as representing a true and accurate record of the January 20, 2013 meeting

Approved, 9-0-1.

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   Reports

5.1   Event Coordinator Report

  1. Continued Activities from Last Month
  • Housing Management: I have signed a contract with Marriott Suites for financial aid housing. Since we are almost sold out at the Westin and Hyatt, we may tap into this block for attendee housing as well.
  • AV Management: We have decided to go with Frischkorn. They were competitive on their pricing, detail oriented and offered good quality equipment for the price we were quoted. David W. will be going to Montreal to do a site visit with the Frischkorn team to ensure that they are familiar with our layout/program by the time PyCon roles around.
  • Attendee Registration: The current overview of registration is good. Early Bird Rate is over. If we cap the reg at 2,300 (cannot seat more than that for lunch even with staggered times) we are about 65% full. With all of the sponsors that still need to register, that would put closer to 73% full. This conference will definitely sell out before it starts. We are at 1/3 of where we need to be in tutorial sales in the end. They will definitely pick up pace in the coming months.
  • Childcare: We have signed a contract with Kimberlee for only the three main days of the conference since attendee interest in this has dwindled since the summer of 2013.
  • Sponsor Reg and Housing: This is continuing. I am assisting CTE with special sponsor requests and issues. Every time a new batch of sponsors sign up, I send them PyCon information and also send their info to CTE so CTE may send out their reg instructions and promo codes.
  • Expo Hall: The sponsors have been sent all information regarding the expo hall and deadlines.
  • Budgeting: I continue to invoice incoming sponsors and updating the google spreadsheet with invoice numbers.
  • PyCon Legal: We have been able to determine that no one speaking at PyCon will need a workers permit. There are some people who will need entry visas but the individuals are responsible for that. We are currently working on finding out what we need to do to make honorarium for tutorial speakers legal.
  • Sponsor Management: I am continuing to answer emails and special requests from sponsors. I spend the majority of my time per day going through sponsor emails and updating their dashboards on us.pycon.org per their requests. I am continuing to work with sponsors who request customized sponsorship packages and getting them signed up as sponsors.
  1. New Activities
  • Budgeting: I have been working with Kurt and Jesse to get 2013 invoices paid and also working with CTE to get commission checks in order from 2013/12.
  • Future Planning: Getting details down for the Education Summit. Checked with the convention center to see if coat check could be arranged for PyCon.
  • Convention Center Management: I worked with Karine at the CC to get new space for PSF lunch, Program Committee Lunch, PyLadies lunch, and Tutorial Committee Lunch. I have gone through the entire production manual from the Palais and will ensure in the future that all regulations will be followed, especially by our vendors.
  • Expo Hall: Now that I have the floor plan finalized, I am working on allocating sponsors to specific booths. I have created a page on the us.pycon.org website with all of the sponsor info so they may access it at any time necessary.
  • Attendee Registration: We have launched tutorial registration. I have created a new reg form for CTE to use that includes tutorials.
  • Conference Program: I have taken on the duty to collect the items due for the printed program from sponsors. I have sent out a reminder and will again send one out the first week of February. I have gone through submitted web descriptions and duplicated them into print descriptions if the max words used fit the print desc. requirement.
  • PyCon 5k: I am working on signing a contract for the 5K Charity Fun Run. Kurt has been sent the details for the 5K insurance needs (as well as the convention center issuance needs).
  • Board Game Social: Working with the game store Randolph to get a board game social going April 11-13.
  1. Planned for Next Month
  • Attendee Reg: Make sure we add the PyCon Friday Dinner options to reg ASAP.
  • Expo Hall: Once the allocations on the expo floor are final, I will send out a customized email to all sponsors listing their booth number and directing them to the floor plan. I will also begin working on signage for the event.
  • Conference Program: Once I have all of the sponsor items collected, I will be working with Caktus on the exportation of this info (Diana has provided Caktus with details/code for this deliverable) and getting the info to our designer.
  • Financial Aid: Once the Financial Aid is finalized, I will be taking over to handle to housing. I will have to match up appropriate people based on their requests and dates. After that I will send out the room pairing info and how much PyCon is covering for their hotel stay to each recipient. I will then work with CTE to make sure that they send the appropriate info to the applicable hotels.
  • Convention Center Management: Work on logistics for rigging, for placement of power throughout the sessions, and for placement of registration throughout.
  • Software Carpentry: Help their team finalize logistics and F&B for their event.
  • Internet: I have pinged Sean to see if he is interested in oversight of the internet. I will work with them more this month to get that finalized and properly spec?ed out.
  • T-shirts: Find a vendor for t-shirt printing in Montreal. Compare prices of several vendors.
  1. Ongoing Projects
  • Financial Aid planning
  • 2016/2017 RFPs: Getting Orlando in the mix. Rosen Creek has the availability for hotel, but working on meeting space requirements now.
  • Budget: Updating PyCon 2014 budget ledger with invoices that need to be paid and new funding
  1. Tabled Activities
  • None
  1. Issues / Blockages
  • PyCon Staff: The PSF will have to reconsider how PyCon is run in the future. One person working full time on PyCon is not enough anymore. The conference chair definitely puts in full time hours after a certain point and the co-chair should as well. The PSF needs to consider compensation for these efforts and make sure that the appointed people know of these compensations (based on performance of course) before hand. Some of the staff positions such as Financial Aid and Program Chairs should also be compensated a certain amount. It is not fair to expect volunteer positions to put in so much time and also it is dangerous for the PSF to assume that a volunteer will deliver what is needed in good quality. In some cases it could cause a major disaster for the conference if a volunteer does not do what is needed (ex. FA, program committee). I will be emailing in my detailed thoughts on this to the board hopefully soon.

5.2   Administrator Report

  1. Continued Activities from Last Month
  • None
  1. New Activities
  • I have created an echo sign form for the sponsor membership application
  • I have taken over the project management of the redesign tasks
  1. Planned for Next Month
  • Finish updating CiviCRM with current sponsors and canceling those that are outdated. This information is current in my spreadsheet I have created to track PSF sponsor payments. Still working on updating CiviCRM; PyCon duties and redesign are getting in the way.
  1. Ongoing Projects
  • Board Agenda / Minutes: I continue to write up the Board Agenda and keep it up to date. I continue to write up the Board Meeting minutes.

  • Grant and Award Notification: I continue to notify respective parties of board resolutions.

  • 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.

  • Contributor Agreements: I continue to collect agreements coming through EchoSign and marking them in bug tracker.

  • PSF Infrastructure (notes combined from weekly meetings):

    Noah - Mailing list wrangling. Investigated corrupt log data coming from Fastly. Coming from corrupted HTTP requests from z3c.pypimirror because it doesn't URL-escape URLs before requesting them. Recommending we ban z3c.pypimirror based on User-Agent and refer people to Bandersnatch. Helping Caktus with DB cloning. Putting in SAN request to Fastly.

    Ernest - Testpypi on RS is close, need people to try it out shortly (this week). Migration will probably take an hour, mostly for DB swapover. Testpypi is deployed on new stack. Working on migration and data copy plan. Testing backup/restore cycle. Moving pythonhosted.com SSL termination to RS CLB.

    Donald - Working on PyPI migration.

    Alex - Starting on analytics tooling for PyPI downloads. Using Postgres, but out of critical path for PyPI web.

    Ben - PyPI outage handling.

  • Bylaws: We had our final meeting January 24, 2014. Van is going to send a final email to the bylaws mailing list with the last revisions. The board should be able to vote on this within one month.

  • pydotorg Redesign (notes from latest meeting): It has been decided that we aim to launch the site February 17.

    Brian will go through preview site and make list of lorem ipsum pages.

    Laurens will get logs from Noah and analyze traffic and long tail, decide what is our 90% of top views.

    Noah (with the infrastructure team) will get in place the Load balancer, ElasticSearch, possibly obtain new SSL Cert, and communicate with Fastly about serving the pages with our certs.

    Ewa will reach out to redesign vendors and set up a meeting, order all lists made by Brian and Laurens and make sure that all of these lists are supplied.

    Here is a list of items discussed by the redesign team that the vendors have been waiting on: The PEPs should be rendered from the mercurial rep. The workflow for the PEPs will not change. The code snippets need to look good.Ewa will be asking Martin how much of this task he wants to do and Jessica will be assisting with data mining through the old job posts and coming up with new categories and what should be in the site tree.Ewa is waiting for clarification on this from the vendors. We should have PyVideo content highlights. The vendors should suggest and spot for this. This is not important for release. Brian will double check the PSF?s social media accounts, but not important for launch. Ewa will check with vendors as to what needs to be done to get social login/openID going on the site. Should not block the 17Feb release. Ewa will be getting logins setup for the redesign group via vendors.Ewa will ask the vendors about offline editing capabilities.

  1. Tabled Activities
  • PSF Budget: Update the PSF budget with recent spending (since the last time we edited it). I am not going to update the budget because Kurt and I are working on a solution to use from QBOL, which will always provide the current data. We are thinking that this report would be generated monthly and sent to the board.
  1. Issues / Blockages
  • None

5.3   Treasurer Report

  1. This report will be distributed at the upcoming Members’ Meeting April 12, 2014.

5.4   Outreach & Education Report

(This report covers activities since the previous report on 2013-07-12)

It has been a really slow couple of months, and this is despite a) me reaching out to every PyLadies group and slowly working my way through every user group on https://wiki.python.org/moin/LocalUserGroups and encouraging folks to submit requests, and b) many folks evangelizing the committee in various conference talks. I suspect that after PyCon we'll see a surge in requests.

  1. Grant awards
  • $600 for the San Diego Python Web Workshop, requested by Kendall Chuang
  • $550 for an intro to Python workshop with Bangalore PyLadies, requested by Annapoornima Koppad
  1. Grant updates
  • After not completing his user group meta outreach goals in the allotted 6 months, we've extended the duration of the initiative by another 6 months and Asheesh now provides weekly reports.
  1. Other discussions
  • There was a lengthy discussion about a large grant request for CodeChix. After an initial rejection a revised proposal was approved by the Board: RESOLVED, that the Python Software Foundation grant $2,000 to CodeChix Bay Area for providing resources to conduct CodeChix events and for providing resources for marketing of the events
  • Code Club (https://www.codeclub.org.uk/) reached out about the potential for sponsorship
  • Elio Qoshi checked in after receiving some Python stickers for a developer group in Albania

5.5   Sprint Workgroup Report

  1. Summary
  • We sponsored one sprint in early January, which was very quickly requested for reimbursement, and promptly paid. Currently no outstanding issues or payments.
  1. Issues / Blockages
  • None
  1. Continued Activities from Last Month
  • None, everyone is currently paid and up-to-date
  1. New Activities
  • For this month, the OpenHatch group in San Francisco, CA got together to work on the OpenHatch website and documentation. They expected 4-8 people, and based on their receipts, it looks like they had 6-7 people.
  • We're going to start pushing sprint proposers that we get some form of a writeup out of this, and try to get the blog more active. Hopefully putting that info out there can help us with a little publicity to get people thinking.
  • Also need to keep an eye on PyCon sprints and see if there's anything we can do as far as funding, coordination, etc. We'll probably try to do some minor publicity (posters/fliers) at PyCon to get this committee's name and ideals out there to the community.

5.6   Communication Status Report

  1. Summary
  • Two posts were made this month on a year-end summary and on the event calendars
  1. Issues / Blockages
  • None
  1. Continued Activities from Last Month
  • None
  1. New Activities
  1. Planned for Next Month
  • We haven't been making much use of the social media accounts over the last few months, so I'm going to look into making sure they get the same or similar news disseminated to them. The @ThePSF twitter account now has 37K followers and a lot of people mention it, so we have a lot of reach there.

5.7   Marketing Material Report

  1. Continued Activities from Last Month
  • Finishing up the project

    After almost three years, the team really wants to finish up this first edition of the brochure and go to print.

    I will do another round of public calls for ad sponsors. We'll then set a deadline for ad sales (probably end of February) and then use the money we've collected so far to print the brochure and start sending out the boxes.

    Depending on how well this last call for ad sponsors works out, this may mean that we have to rearrange the shipping of the boxes or to ask the PSF for additional funding.

    The original plan was to have no shipping costs for conferences and user groups requesting copies.

    It may also mean that we will not be able to pay back the seed funding from the PSF (EUR 13250 paid in 2011/2012) in full. Perhaps not even partially.

    Regardless of the outcome with respect to reaching our original goal of making the brochure a zero sum investment for the PSF, we still think that it was a really good investment and we're sure that people around the world will love the brochure once they can actually hold it in their hands.

    Some groups are already using the brochure to attract sponsors for conferences, so the positive PR effect is working out already.

  • We're still in the process of selling ad spaces to get the finances all setup for going to print.

    We've had a couple of inquiries for ads, but no additional sales.

  • Current statistics

    6 half page ads sold and paid

    0 half page ad reservation

    5 half page ads still available

    2 reference entries sold and paid

    4 reference entry reservations

    6 reference entry still available

  • Sending stickers to conferences

    Other than the brochure, we also have stickers available for use at conferences and user group meetings.

    I'll take a set of stickers to FOSDEM for the team there to use at the Python booth.

  • Print more Python stickers for use at conferences, since we're running out of stock

  1. New Activities
  • None
  1. Planned for Next Month
  • None
  1. Ongoing Projects
  • PSF Python Brochure
  • Python Stickers
  1. Tabled Activities
  • None
  1. Issues / Blockages
  • The only issue at the moment is the slow progress in signing up ad and reference entry sponsors.

5.8   Community Relations Report

  1. Continued Activities from Last Month
  • PSF at conferences

    I will take the EU PSF Conference Kit to FOSDEM in February and also do a talk there on the new PSF structure:

    http://python-fosdem.org/schedule

    No updates on the kits in the US or South America.

  • PSF Marketing Work Group

    Going forward, I'd like to setup a new PSF working group for managing and coordinating PSF marketing activities. This will hopefully happen in the next few months, available time permitting.

    If anyone is interested in joining such a working group, please let me know.

  • Python Events Calendar

    I'm continuing discussions with national and local groups, encourage people to make use of the Python events calendars:

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

    and help maintain it, along with a team of volunteers.

    The team now uses a mailing list instead of the email alias list. It's public and anyone can subscribe to it:

    https://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonEventsCalendar#Mailing_List

    Submissions sent to events at python.org are forwarded to this mailing list.

    I ran a blog post and announcement earlier this month to call for submission of events for 2014. This was well received and we're getting a continuous stream of additions.

    I also setup a new feed for the calendars on Twitter using IFTTT:

    https://twitter.com/pythonevents

    This gets all newly added events as tweets. It's still in beta, but we'll announce it soonish to the Python community.

  1. New Activities
  • None
  1. Planned for Next Month
  • None
  1. Ongoing Projects
  • PSF at conferences
  • PSF Marketing Work Group
  • Python Events Calendar
  1. Tabled Activities
  • None
  1. Issues / Blockages
  • None

5.9   PSF Domains Report

  1. Continued Activities from Last Month
  • Register pycon TLDs

    No progress yet, since the board hasn't yet decided which domains to register.

  • Monitor domain renewals

    Gandi.net will inform us renewals that need to be processed in due time, so no extra action is needed on our part.

  • Current status

    Please see the wiki page for details on the current status and a list of registered domains:

    https://wiki.python.org/psf/PSF%20Domains

  1. New Activities
  • None
  1. Planned for Next Month
  • None
  1. Ongoing Projects
  • Maintaining the PSF Gandi account
  1. Tabled Activities
  • None
  1. Issues / Blockages
  • None

6   Libre Graphics 2014 Sponsorship

RESOLVED, that the Python Software Foundation sponsor Libre Graphics Meeting 2014 in Leipzig in the amount of $1,000 USD

Approved, 11-0-0.

7   Cyberjutsu Girls Workshop Grant

RESOLVED, that the Python Software Foundation grant $1500 to the Cyberjutsu Girls Academy Python Programming Workshop happening March 8-9, 2014

Approved, 11-0-0.

8   PyPI Package “slut” Removal

RESOLVED, that the Python Software Foundation request the PyPI administrators to remove the package "slut" (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/slut)

Approved, 6–4-1.

9   Other Business

  • The board has decided to table indefinitely: RESOLVED, that the Python Software Foundation grant EUR 750 to the EuroPython Society for registering the EuroPython CTM trademark in order to protect the IP rights to the EuroPython conference series.
  • The board of directors will come up with a new policy on how to fund grant requests for workshops such as Cyberjutsu and Teen Tech Camp. This policy will include an amount per person the PSF will grant for each request. This amount will depend on whether the workshop attendees get to take certain hardware home and how many hours they spend teaching the attendees Python on the said hardware.

10   Adjournment

Van Lindberg adjourned the meeting at 19:08 CET/ 13:08 EST.