[pydotorg-www] PSF- Board Meeting Minutes -Approved- October 2010

Mon Dec 6 20:33:27 CET 2010

Hello:

Could you please post the following "PSF board meeting minutes" online at
the usual web locations:

please see the attachment for the approved board meeting minutes for October
2010.

If you have any questions, please let me know.

Thanks,
Pat

-- 
Pat Campbell
PSF Administrator/Secretary
patcam at python.org
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Title: 2010-10-18 PSF Board Meeting Minutes 
Encoding: utf-8
Author: psf at python.org
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| The Python Software Foundation
| Minutes of a Regular Meeting of the Board of Directors
|
| October 18, 2010
|
| 

A regular meeting of the Python Software Foundation ("PSF") Board of
Directors was held over Internet Relay Chat beginning at 16:00 UTC, 18
October 2010. 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").

.. sectnum::
.. contents::

Attendance                                  
==========

The following members of the Board of Directors were present at the
meeting: Steve Holden, Marc-Andre Lemburg, Martin v. Lowis, David Mertz, 
Doug Napoleone, Jesse Noller, Tim Peters, Jeff Rush, Greg Stein, James 
Tauber, and Gloria Willadsen. Also in attendance were Kurt Kaiser 
(Treasurer), and Pat Campbell (Secretary & Administrator).

Minutes of Past Meetings
========================

The 20 September 2010 Board meeting minutes were voted on and approved.

Approved, 8-0-2.

Votes Taken Between Meetings
============================

There were no votes taken since the last Board meeting held on 20
September 2010.

Treasurer Report                                                                                              
================

The monthly Treasurer's Report was provided to Board members by K. Kaiser
prior to the Board meeting. There were no major changes in the PSF's 
financial position since the last Treasurer's Report a month ago. 

However, the treasurer did report that we will be moving away from the usual
Google Checkout system to CTE's Registration processing system for PyCon.
In addition, the treasurer will be soliciting the aid of our secretary to
help with AR and our new Quickbooks system.

M.A. Lemburg also suggested the use of a Quickbooks emailing feature to help 
reduce the on-going AP and AR issues by routinely emailing out reminders to
concerned parties.

Progress Report                                                                                                                                                                                             .
===============

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:

Communication Status
--------------------

D. Hellmann, Communication Officer, has recruited volunteers to help 
write for the blog found at http://pyfound.blogspot.com/. For instance,
Paul Nuin will be writing about the PyPi Mirroring Project and Engelbert 
Gruber is constructing interview questions to use to inquire about the 
new PyCon website.

Core Development Tasks
----------------------

B. Cannon, Core Development Tasks Project, will begin working
on this 2-month project in January 2011.

HAM WebPages/Links
------------------

P. Campbell, Honorary Associate Membership (HAM) WebPages Start-up 
Project, is currently working with our treasurer, Kurt Kaiser in
order to setup the new Honorary Associate Membership fee payment 
system that will interface with the Python website.

Board Discussion:

S. Holden: "We really need to treat this as important, since it
will generate additional revenues to spend on sprints and the like."

K. Kaiser:  "We are setting up a new processor, FirstData. So between
them and "classic" PayPal (money by email) we should be able to handle
the payments.

Marketing Material                                                                 
------------------

MAL provides a brief introduction into his marketing project:

"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
(http://rheinland.worldploneday.de/) and had several meetings and
phone conference calls to take the idea forward."

PyCon US Website
----------------

D. Napoleone, PyCon US Website Project, says that the new website for
2011 has been launched and that calls for proposals, tutorials, and 
posters are currently being accepted:"The website us.pycon.org/2011 is
live with complete information, including sponsorship, and blog 
integration on planet python. Calls for proposals, tutorials and 
posters have been sent out and the website is now accepting all three. 
The review system is in place. We have already received proposals in 
all three categories."

In addition, D. Napoleone also reported that the registration launch
has been slightly delayed due to issues with PSF accounting and CTE.

Board Discussion:

S. Holden: "I see we chose to use CTE's registration system. I am
surprised that registration has been such a time sink over so many
years."

K. Kaiser: "Yes, we change every year but hopefully, this is it for
awhile..."

J. Noller: "Because registration and accounting is a h"ard problem, 
we've been unable to get a volunteer pool to address fully, completely, 
and with a code base that's actually maintainable."

D. Napoleone: "Registration is very hard to get right, especially when
everything including the kitchen sink is wanted. We are rather liberal
when its comes to things like refunds, and unlike some other conferences,
we have add-ons like tutorials which are announced AFTER registration
opens."

J. Noller: "Therefore, outsourcing it makes the most sense."

S. Holden: "A small concern that it ties us to a third party that's 
shown evidence of instability in the last year."

K. Kaiser: "Yes, outsourcing registration is a good idea because it 
provides continuity across volunteers."

D. Napoleone: "When you look at the history of trying to do registration 
with a volunteer based system, we have had to rewrite it every year. One 
massive problem with this is integration with the hotel registration which 
is something impossible for a volunteer effort to manage. As well as, we
change hotel vendors as we move locations."

pyOpenSSL Status
----------------

J.P. Calderone, pyOpenSSL Project, has been working to improve the
coverage provided by pyOpenSSl's test suite and one such improvement
would include having addressed all known issues with the port. 

Sprint Committee
----------------

J. Noller, Sprint Committee Chair, provides a brief summary of the 
Sprint Committee's current activities and progress:

"We still don't have the number of sprints we want lined up - on the other
hand, we do have a donor who has sent money to the PSF for further sprints funding:
http://pythonsprints.com/2010/10/11/trading-technologies-sponsors-python-sprints/"

Board Discussion:

S. Holden: "Thanks for your work on sprints. I see this as a good practical way 
to support grass-roots development work.

Host OSX Buildbot Slaves
========================

Motion from Martin v. Lowis:

   **RESOLVED**, that the PSF buys one Mac Mini computer, for a total
   of no more than 1200 USD, to be used for Python core development;
   usage details are determined by the infrastructure committee.

Approved, 11-0-0.  

Community Service Award Nomination for 2010-3rd Quarter
=======================================================

Michael Foord was selected for the 2010-3rd Quarter PSF Community 
Service Award.

   **RESOLVED**, that Michael Foord receives the PSF Community
   Service Award Q3 2010.   

Approved, 11-0-0.

Other Business                                                               
==============

S. Holden reminded members to utilize the board mailing list more often
per month to discuss board matters that are subject to be voted on during 
the monthly board meeting.

G. Stein will be providing a new template to be used by writers when 
they are drafting their monthly board reports. The new template will 
include an additional section to the board report to be used to 
summarize the report.

Adjournment
===========

S. Holden adjourned the meeting at 16:59 UTC.