Board of Directors Meeting Minutes, February 23, 2009

Meeting start time: 7:00PM
Location: Santa Clara, California

Attendees:

All attendees of this meeting were local except where noted "via IRC" (Internet Relay Chat). Meeting motions and decisions were recorded to IRC to keep a record to simplify writing the minutes.

Craig Anderson chaired the meeting.

Ian Kluft recorded to the IRC channel and acted as Secretary for this meeting.

Agenda: election of Treasurer
Background: the Treasurer is elected by the board each calendar year
Result: Warren Turkal was elected Treasurer for 2009.
Agenda: election of Secretary
Background: the Secretary is elected by the board each calendar year
Result: action postponed - T R Fullhart could not attend due to illness. Ian Kluft performed the duty of acting Secretary for this meeting.
Agenda: adding a donate button to the web site
Background: We had been waiting until the California State tax exemption was complete to do this. The corporation received it in December.
Result: A committee consisting of Craig Anderson, Heather Stern, Ian Kluft and Warren Turkal is authorized to make this happen. Warren declined voting rights on the committee when it meets due to a potential perceived conflict of interest since his employer offers a method for non-profits to do this.
Agenda: accounting software and inventory management
Result: Warren says he will enter the records into GnuCash for now. But it won't meet the needs of the corporation even with near-future plans, which needs to include an inventory tracking database. The board agreed that the development and maintenance of Open Source software to meet the corporation's needs will be an ongoing project led by the Treasurer.
Agenda: status on search for liability insurance
Background: Heather Stern and John Delaney were assigned the task in 2008 to shop for laibility insurance for the corporation and its SIGs.
Result: Heather reported some responses received which the board did not consider satisfactory. The search will continue.
Agenda: status on web server authentication upgrade
Result: The web server is currently running a Perl-based Apache module for web authentication. It keeps separate authentication for each domain, and many of us are in all the SIGs. Also, there's other software besides Apache which could use a central authentication system. We're planning to migrate to LDAP to unify the logins on the server.
Agenda: status on providing source code repositories for the SIGs
Result: We have a Subversion server installed on the server for each SIGs domains. These are currently unutilized but available. It would be easier to access after the authentication upgrade.
Agenda: SBAY web site and marketing development discussion
Result: Craig would like to improve the SBAY web site. One possibility that was brought up was to install Movable Type Open Source (MTOS), since the software was already installed on the server in preparation to upgrade the web site. Some on the board would like to merge the corp.sbay.org web site into the main www.sbay.org web site. This remains open for discussion.
Agenda: SIG status report for SVWUX
Result: SVWUX had a Catch 22 in its charter which required meticulous accounting of meeting attendance to maintain a list of members, otherwise their memberships would expire. SVWUX could not hold an election for its Coordinator for lack of an accurate list of members. A proposed charter amendment/rewrite to make the membership list sustainable was presented to the board. Instead of having memberships expire due to lack of attendance, the model would now follow the SBAY corporation's example where, once voted in, membership is perpetual. But in order to be current for voting (and being counted toward 2/3 requirements, etc), each member must have declared themselves current within the past 12 months. SVWUX considers casting a vote as renewing voting currency. In order to help SVWUX out of its dilemma, the board unanimously approved the following actions that were requested:
  • Approved the SVWUX charter amendment.
  • Installed Craig Anderson and Ian Kluft as the new SVWUX membership, with instructions to take the list of attendees of the previous SVWUX meeting and vote them in as members immediately. From that point others who express interest may be admitted by the membership. (Anderson and Kluft abstained from the vote because it affects them.)
Agenda: SIG status for Linux Picnic
Result: Heather Stern reported that at the SBAY Pizza meeting she had accepted the position of Linux Picnic Coordinator for 2009. The financial status was discussed at some length to help bring the new Treasurer up to speed.
The 2008 picnic turned out not to have raised enough funds to cover all the volunteer out-of-pocket expenses. This is the first time the picnic did not have enough to cover volunteer out-of-pocket expenses. This was due to a late start on posting the need for sponsors and asking around.
Heather Stern and Ian Kluft had allowed their expenses to go unreimbursed to protect the other volunteers from that. (Heather's unreimbursed expenses were for food and Ian's were for the park reservation.) At the time of the meeting, the park reservation for 2009 had not yet been made, since Ian was not willing to pay for it and no one else had yet stepped up for it. [Note: after the meeting, Heather made the reservation for August 15, 2009.]
Warren said we need to handle things differently this year to make sure all volunteers get their expenses reimbursed, including the coordinators. Other financial aspects of the picnic will be reviewed to see how we can make it work better to avoid this and other problems.
Agenda: SIG status for Direxant
Result: Direxant is forming as an expert community to bring together mapping, geospatial and GIS expertise from Stratofox and SVWUX. A meeting will be held soon where the SIG charter will be approved by the initial members and submitted to the board for its approval. The group already has several projects in the pipeline.
Agenda: SIG status for RadioExam.Org
Result: RadioExam's web site continues to run. No other activity has occurred.
Agenda: SIG status for Stratofox
Result: Ian Kluft will make a presentation about Stratofox at the Space Access '09 Conference in Phoenix in early April.

The meeting adjourned at 9:23PM.

 
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