PSF Meeting Minutes for March 28, 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 17:00 CET/ 12:00 EDT, on March 28, 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").
Contents
1 Attendance
The following members of the Board of Directors (08 of 11) were present at the meeting: Van Lindberg, Tim Peters, Brian Curtin, Brett Cannon, David Mertz, Alex Gaynor, Marc-Andre Lemburg (joined after all of the votes, in time for the TM policy discussion), and Doug Napoleone (joined after the Nashville Public School vote). Also in attendance were Ewa Jodlowska (Secretary/Administrator) and Kurt Kaiser (Treasurer).
2 Minutes of Past Meetings
The 14 March 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-March/024771.html as representing a true and accurate record of the March 14, 2014 meeting.
Approved, 6-0-0.
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 Sprint Workgroup Report
- Summary
- No new action.
- Issues / Blockages
- None
- Continued Activities from Last Month
- None, everyone is currently paid and up-to-date
- New Activities
- No movement, but keeping an eye on PyCon sprints, which have been developing over the last few days and should see an announcement next week. Projects are starting to get interested in putting their plans on the wiki, so we're just waiting right now for what we can do.
- It was also mentioned that a historical record of sprints that have been funded would be nice to have on the site, similar to how the board has the resolutions listed. I have the list, just need to find a place and a way to put it into the site.
5.2 Communication Status Report
- Summary
- Since announcing the call for blog help, a few interested people have raised their hands, and several of them are working on posts.
- Issues / Blockages
- None
- Continued Activities from Last Month
- None
- New Activities
- Two new blog posts went out [0][1], and they've both been promoted on Twitter. The Kivy post will be promoted on the other social media accounts shortly.
- 41.8K followers, up from 39.5K
- Lots of people still commenting on the new site, but I'm seeing more requests for help on code problems than I think we should. So far I've just been pointing people to comp.lang.python and/or StackOverflow, which is probably fine for now.
- 104,984 followers, up from 101,849
- Google+
- 91,010 followers, up from 89,700
5.3 Marketing Material Report
- Continued Activities from Last Month
Finishing up the project
We ran a last round of calls for ad sponsors and also contacted a few select sponsors in private emails before the final deadline on Feb 28 2014.
We now have these 8 ad sponsors signed up:
- Python Academy
- DLR
- Continuum
- CyberWeb
- Plone Foundation
- Rackspace
- Flying Circus
- STXnext
and a total of 7 reference entry sponsors.
So after three long years, we have finally reached the printing milestone. Let's just say, it took more than 2 years and probably over a 500 work hours longer to get everything lined up than originally planned. This was mostly due to slow and sometimes difficult communication with the success story providers, legal departments, PR departments and sponsors.
Anyway, we're all very happy and the brochure is now in print. We'll send 6 boxes to PyCon 2014 in Montreal, so you can have a look at the real thing :-)
The next phase will now be distributing the brochures to interested parties such as user groups, conferences, schools and universities.
If you're interested in receiving some brochures, please contact me or Ewa.
Sending stickers to conferences
Other than the brochure, we also have stickers available for use at conferences and user group meetings.
I took a set of stickers to FOSDEM 2014 for the team there to use at the Python booth. They were gone within a few hours.
Ewa and I will each take around 600 stickers to PyCon 2014 in Montreal.
I also sent a few stickers to user groups. If you'd like some, feel free to contact me and I'll get them sent out.
Print more Python stickers for use at conferences, since we're running out of stock
I had 5000 more stickers printed earlier this month.
- New Activities
- None
- Planned for Next Month
- None
- Ongoing Projects
- PSF Python Brochure
- PSF Conference Kits
- Python Stickers
- Tabled Activities
- None
- Issues / Blockages
- None
5.4 Community Relations Report
- Continued Activities from Last Month
PSF at conferences
I took the EU PSF Conference Kit to FOSDEM in February and also did a talk there on the new PSF structure:
http://python-fosdem.org/schedule
See https://wiki.python.org/psf/MembershipModelTalks for the talk slides.
I plan to take the kit to the upcoming PythonCamp in Cologne.
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.
- New Activities
Python Job Board
After Chris left the job board, only very people were left to work on the job board using the old system.
I ran a call for volunteers in February to kick off a new team with the goal of transitioning to the unfinished jobs app on the new python.org website.
Over 30 volunteers responded, which shows what a great community we have. I took over the project management for the time being but will pass this on to the other team members as soon we've reached a stable state.
All the existing and new job postings have been ported to the new database driven system and they continue to get added as new posting arrive via the jobs at python.org mailing list.
At the same time we're moving forward swiftly with implementing the necessary changes to complete the jobs app and turn it into a usable system for the volunteers to run.
More information on the jobs board team is available on our wiki page at:
- Planned for Next Month
- None
- Ongoing Projects
- PSF at conferences
- PSF Marketing Work Group
- Python Events Calendar
- Python Jobs Board
- Tabled Activities
- None
- Issues / Blockages
- None
5.5 PSF Domains Report
- 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.
4 domains are scheduled to automatically renew in April. A larger batch will renew in May.
The account has a balance of over 1000 USD, so no action needs to be taken for the April renewals.
Current status
Please see the wiki page for details on the current status and a list of registered domains:
- New Activities
- None
- Planned for Next Month
- None
- Ongoing Projects
- Maintaining the PSF Gandi account
- Tabled Activities
- None
- Issues / Blockages
- None
6 Young Coders WS in Nashville Public Schools
RESOLVED, that the Python Software Foundation sponsor Young Coders workstations in Metro Nashville Public Schools in the amount of $1000 USD.
Approved, 6-0-0.
7 Green Hope Robotics Team #5190
RESOLVED, that the Python Software Foundation sponsor Green Hope Robotics Team number 5190, in North Carolina in their national competition in the amount of $1,000
Denied, 0-7-0.
8 PyConUK 2014 Teacher Grant
RESOLVED, that the Python Software Foundation grant £4200 (approximately $7000 USD) to PyConUK to cover the costs for 20 teachers to attend PyConUK
Approved, 7–0-0.
9 Other Business
- After heavy discussion of the PyCon trademark policy, it has been decided that more discussion is needed before the board votes on this matter.
10 Adjournment
Van Lindberg adjourned the meeting at 18:00 CET/ 13:00 EDT.