PSF Meeting Minutes for July 11, 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 16:00 UTC, on July 11, 2014. Van Lindberg presided over the meeting. David Mertz recorded the call/IRC transcript so the secretary may write up the minutes after the meeting.
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, Brian Curtin, Jessica McKellar, Lynn Root, David Mertz, Marc-Andre Lemburg, Alex Gaynor, and Kushal Das. Ewa Jodlowska (Secretary/Administrator) and Kurt Kaiser (Treasurer) were not in attendance.
2 Minutes of Past Meetings
The 20 June 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-June/025872.html as representing a true and accurate record of the June 20, 2014 meeting
Approved, 5-0-3.
3 Votes Taken Between Meetings
There were no votes taken between the June 20th and July 11th meetings.
4 Votes Taken Over Email
There were no votes taken over email between the June 20th and July 11th meetings.
5 Reports
5.1 PyCon Event Coordinator Report
- Continued Activities from Last Month
- Budgeting: Working on finalizing the 2014 budget and making sure all payments are accounted for in the ledger. I have also created a spreadsheet for KBK that includes all of my pexcard charges from April/May/June with links to receipts. I have started working on the 2015 budget.
- Housing Management: Kurt and I are working on getting old hotel commission accounted for. I have reached out to CTE again for their assistance in this matter.
- Expo Hall: Finished creating a new layout for the Expo Hall. For 2015, we will have breakfast and lunch in the expo hall where the booths usually are. I have checked with several sponsors about the new layout and new expo hall hours and everyone is thrilled about it. GES has worked with me to create a new floor plan drawing based on the concept. See new layout here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8va5o6k9n78749p/2014-06-13%20Plan%20PyCon%202015%20Dim%20%281%29.pdf
- New Activities
- Website Management: We have negotiated a new contract with Caktus to get PyCon 2015 up and running asap. The goal is mid-July. This includes new design. We did have 3 designs to choose from (including from a different source), but we have decided to go with a design created by Caktus. The design portion includes: Logo design, site styled (2 revisions), homepage graphic, fronted Development, tshirt design (2 concepts, 2 revisions). Caktus will also be implementing development changes/additions: Add application id to financial aid export CSV, Add schedules to the website, Add sessions to the talk schedule, Sort user dropdowns alphabetically, Schedule edit dropdowns should be "human readable" including day, time, room, and type, Bulk email bug, Format submitter name on proposal review pages, Add sponsor tutorials to export, Add Job Fair and Conference Breaks as sponsorship categories, Add additional fields to sponsor signup form, Datetime stamp when sponsorship application is approved, More info bugfix, Hotel page should be a CMS page, Add and configure Celery, DevOps Tech Support. Diana and I have weekly calls with Caktus to go over their work.
- Decorator Management (GES/Mendelssohn for 2014 & 2015): Mendelssohn is working with us to get our Canadian taxes back (tax rebate system for conventions/expos) for certain parts of the conference. Kurt was in the process of getting final invoices paid and I have started collecting paid invoices. This process will continue through July.
- Sponsorship Management: I have worked on updating the PyCon 2015 Sponsor Prospectus and also created a fancy PDF version to use that is not just text.
- Housing Management: Signed a contract for hotel block at Marriott SpringHill Suites for 2015.
- Registration Management: Had a conference call with CTE to get the registration process going for 2015. We will implement the following changes to the reg system: better flow for the reg process so people do not miss any components, having the ability for people to go back into their initial registrations and add any/all items available, unicode capability will be fixed, and finally we have addressed sponsor group registration capability. We have set a date to launch registration: September 1st, 2014. I have also created a new registration form for 2015 for those that need to send in check payments.
- Friday PyCon Dinners: I have started looking at new locations for 2015 so we can include them on the reg site from the start. Currently, I have Place d’Armes again and the Intercontinental for the 2nd dinner option.
- Job Fair: I am working on a new layout for the job fair as well to make sure the F&B is integrated into the event and not off to the side like in 2014 (same for poster session).
- Sponsorship: Diana has started collecting Launch Day sponsors and so far has over $200,000! We are both working on collecting new data from the signed up sponsors and also collecting new descriptions and logos so when Caktus gets the site going, Diana and I can populate the sponsor info.
- PCMA: I have signed up to be part of PCMA. Now that I no longer work for a company who is involved with conferences, I feel like I am missing out on the news and innovations. Hopefully some of the things I learn at PCMA can benefit PyCon and the PSF. In June I attended a hybrid meeting (which was streamed from the Education Conference in Toronto). It was very worth my time.
- Mobile Guide: I have started out to reach out to different mobile guide providers for proposals for 2015. I would like to move on from Guidebook especially since there is so much competition out there. A mobile guide app can do so much more for PyCon than it currently does.
- Planned for Next Month
- Launching of 2015 PyCon site!!
- Continue with Canadian “tax rebate”
- Budgeting: Send PyCon’s 2015 proposed budget to board for review.
- Call for Volunteers: We are going to try doing a call for volunteers for the open staff slots. This will come with a description of the role and approximately how much time is needed for the role. If successful, we will continue to use this process for future PyCons but launch it a lot sooner (most likely at the previous PyCon). I will create the descriptions and application form for Diana to look over.
- Ongoing Projects
- None
- Tabled Activities
- None
- Issues / Blockages
- None
5.2 PSF Secretary/Admin Report
- Continued Activities from Last Month
- Worked on putting together all of the 2016/17 Proposals together into useful stats from Philadelphia, New Orleans, San Antonio, Boston, Portland. Created a weighted list of items for each location for comparison and also created mini budgets for each location for comparison. This has also gone through 2 rounds of negotiations for Philadelphia and San Antonio.
- Contacted New Orleans and Boston regarding the bids to let them know that for 2016/17, their locations do not match PyCon’s needs.
- New Activities
- None
- Planned for Next Month
- Sponsor Members need to be contacted about 2014/15 sponsorship. After that, invoices need to be sent out. (Did not finish this task in June)
- PSF Members need to be contacted so they can opt in/out of voting, hopefully directly in CiviCRM. (Did not finish this task in June)
- Help Van with PSF budget for 2014.
- 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: No new reports since end of May from the infrastructure team. Going forward this report will come from a board director.
- Bylaws: No changes since May
- pydotorg Redesign: Working on getting a hold of the specs or contracts that the PSF has for the redesign of python.org. Hoping to get to phase two of the “contracted” work after the 4th of July holiday.
- Tabled Activities
- None
- Issues / Blockages
- None
5.3 Marketing Material Report
- Continued Activities from Last Month
The PSF Python Brochure is now available for shipment
Armin has setup the brochure site to be able to accept orders for brochure shipments:
We have two types of orders:
- community orders which are free
- company orders which are paid at cost
Community orders are accepted for user groups, community conferences and educational institutions. Shipment is paid by the funds we collected from the ad sponsors and by the PSF.
Companies or other commercial users who would like to use the brochure for marketing purposes, can buy copies via the company orders. Brochures are sold at cost prices and the money is used to support the free shipment of the community orders.
If you're interested in receiving some brochures, please order them via the brochure webpage.
You can also get a screen resolution PDF to pass around from the website.
Due to licensing constraints you may not change the PDF or extract data from it. We will setup a special license page to clarify the details. Most of the content is CC licensed, but some images and especially the logos in used on the brochure can not be reused without getting prior permission from the resp. owners.
I plan to do a blog post about the availability of the brochure ordering this week.
Python Stickers / Merchandise
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 EuroPython 2014 in Berlin and put them on the tables we'll have there.
I also regularly send stickers to user groups. If you'd like some, feel free to contact me and I'll get them sent out. I have enough in stock to last for about 2-3 months.
Jessica brought up the idea of creating more such giveaways for conferences and user groups. I had already collected ideas in the PSF wiki:
https://wiki.python.org/psf/Merchandise
The plan is to have the marketing work group create these and, most importantly, sort out the logistics for shipping them. Creation is usually done quickly and is fun, but logistics get difficult once you do them at a global scale and is plain work.
- New Activities
- None
- Planned for Next Month
- None
- Ongoing Projects
- PSF Python Brochure
- Python Stickers / Merchandise
- Tabled Activities
- None
- Issues / Blockages
- None
5.4 Community Relations Report
- Continued Activities from Last Month
PSF Conference Kits / PSF at conferences
I plan on taking the EU PSF Conference Kit to EuroPython 2014 in Berlin and also do a lightning and full talk about the new PSF structure to get people aware of the changes.
See https://wiki.python.org/psf/MembershipModelTalks for the talk slides.
I also plan to hold a PSF members meeting at EuroPython, but still have to check for available rooms and get an invite out.
No updates on the kits in the US or South America.
The US kit was not present at PyCon in Montreal. I guess we should look into finding a champion to manage the US kit to put it to some better use than catching dust somewhere.
PSF Marketing Work Group
Now that the new board is starting work, I'd like to setup a new PSF working group for managing and coordinating PSF marketing activities.
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.
We now have a new team member, Piotr Tynecki, who will be taking care of entering events in Poland. If anyone is interested in helping out with events in a region, please let me know and I'll sign you up.
The new python.org site shows the calendars, but still has issues with the calendar app implementation (for which we've opened tickets on the tracker).
Meanwhile, we are getting a constant stream of listing requests to the events mailing list and via events at python.org:
https://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonEventsCalendar#Mailing_List
It seems the calendars are now reasonably well known and people are putting them to good use.
The Twitter account is also being used a bit, but could need some more followers:
https://twitter.com/pythonevents
It gets all newly added events as tweets.
I guess doing a blog post about it will likely bring in more followers, but I haven't had time for this yet.
Given the success of the Twitter account, we may setup additional streams on e.g. Facebook and Google+.
I am also thinking about adding additional calendars for e.g. Python training sessions - perhaps with some form of payment added for commercial entries and having someone paid to enter the data and keep the calendar up-to-date.
Python Jobs Board
Work on the jobs app is moving forward, albeit more slowly than we originally planned due to real life kicking in.
Jon Clements, who led the dev team for several months, had to cut down his efforts in recent weeks. We have a few new developers on board, but things are still moving much slower than we want.
At the same time we are getting exceedingly frustrated with the state of the jobs app. The jobs app was designed without taking the actual needs of a job board team into account. It was missing several important features and had conceptual and schema issues.
The dev team did manage to fix some of the problems, but we're constantly hitting new walls whenever we try to kick off the review process to finally get the first version of the job board activated on the site (we've tried this twice thus far, with no success).
In addition to these problems, the development cycle leaves much to be desired. We have no test installation of the site where we could test the app with live data. Getting patches on the live site requires several layers of processing pull requests and once on the site, we can't even do proper live tests due to the heavy caching used on the python.org site.
To work around at least some of these problems, we have created a separate org account on github, to make it easier for the dev team to work on the jobs app:
https://github.com/python-jobs-board/pythondotorg
Issues are managed here:
https://github.com/python-jobs-board/pythondotorg/issues/
More information on the jobs board team is available on our wiki page at:
- New Activities
- None
- Planned for Next Month
- PSF Marketing Work Group
- Ongoing Projects
- PSF Conference Kits / PSF at conferences
- Python Events Calendar
- Python Jobs Board
- Tabled Activities
- None
- Issues / Blockages
- Job board issues (see above)
5.5 PSF Domains Report
- Continued Activities from Last Month
Register pycon TLDs
No progress, since the board hasn't yet decided which domains to register.
Note that we now have a trademark policy for the term "PyCon" in place. See https://www.python.org/psf/trademarks/pycon/ for details.
User groups who want to use the term for Python conferences will have to get approval from the trademark committee before they can use the term. This includes using it in a domain name.
Monitor domain renewals
All renewals except for three python domains renewed fine in the last batch.
These three domains had problems:
python.tl python.af python.vg
The automatic renewals did not run through as planned and Gandi support did not manage to fix the renewals in time before their expiry date.
According to Gandi support there were a number of serious issues with the registries for these TLDs which resulted in the problems.
Fortunately, escalating the issue with our Gandi contacts resolved the issue quickly and Gandi also paid for the reactivation fees.
The overpaid renewal fees for those three domains were also refunded to our account.
Kurt has added another USD 1000 on May 7 to the account. The account now has a balance of over 1677 USD.
The next few renewals are due in September and October.
Current status
Please see the wiki page for details on the current status and a list of registered domains:
- New Activities
- python.io was registered by Cory Benfield <cory at lukasa.co.uk> to protect it from domain grabbers. We will transfer the domain to the PSF after the 60 day waiting period early in June.
- Planned for Next Month
- None
- Ongoing Projects
- Maintaining the PSF Gandi account
- Tabled Activities
- None
- Issues / Blockages
- None.
6 HP Pending PSF Sponsor Member
RESOLVED, that the Python Software Foundation recommends Hewlett-Packard Company as a pending PSF Sponsor Member
Approved, 8-0-0.
7 Fiscal Sponsorship - Chicago Pythonistas
RESOLVED, that the PSF provide fiscal sponsorship for the "direct project" Chicago Pythonistas. 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.
8 PyPy 2014 Matching Grant
RESOLVED, that the PSF will match PyPy fundraising via the Software Freedom Conservancy at a ratio of 1:1 for up to USD 10,000 within 30 days of the announcement on the PSF blog
Approved, 7–0-1.
9 Other Business
- The board discussed Q2 Community Service Awards and also if the current policy on how many times the CSA is given per year should be changed. No decisions were made on either topic. Discussion will continue on mailing list.
- Van also proposed that the planning budget be changed from January - December to July - June. No objections were made. The reporting to the IRS will remain as is, this is only for internal planning.
10 Adjournment
Van Lindberg adjourned the meeting at 17:00 UTC.