29 Aug 2018

Minutes of a Regular Meeting of the Board of Directors of NumFOCUS. All votes are reported in the form “(Y/N/A)” (in favor-Y‚ opposed-N‚ abstentions-A; e.g. “4-1-2” means “4 in favor, 1 opposed, and 2 abstentions”).

Participating: Ralf Gommers, Andy Terrel, Lorena Barba, Jennifer Klay, Leah Silen, Didrik Pinte

Not Attending: -

Approval of Minutes from last two meetings:

Resolution to approve the minutes for:

Approved (4/0/0)

Items Voted on by Email: none

Executive Director’s Report: no report this time

Discussion Items

1. Endorsement/Election results

A joint meeting of the Board and Advisory Board discussed the results of the endorsement process and made recommendations to the Board about candidates for Board positions, as well as about the selection process.

i. Post the endorsement vote results publicly?

After a long discussion, we felt that it is already challenging to present the deliberations of the group when deciding the new board and releasing the raw endorsement votes would detract from the positive conversation. We fear that the legalistic conversation that happens in web based communities would actually hurt the organization more than help. We also agree with the spirit of the joint board and advisory board recommendation that more transparency is good. We resolved to release the names of the group earning at least 5% of the vote and a small bit of information about each new director.

ii. Approve the 5 recommended candidates

  1. Sylvain Corlay
  2. James Powell
  3. Katrina Riehl
  4. Jane Herriman
  5. Stefan van der Walt

Approved by board vote (5/0/0).

iii. Letters will be sent to: Community, those newly elected and those endorsed but not selected as board members

iv. The Advisory Council and current Board of Directors would work to make a recommended set of directors, but the Advisory Council itself would not vote to avoid the conflict of interest since many on the council have a paid seat.

v. Recommend to add Peter Wang to the Advisory Council.

Approved by board vote (5/0/0)

Deferred decision about improving the governance of the Advisory Council. Need to list purpose, and how members get selected (and possibly rotate out).

vi. The hand over to the new board will happen at the Summit (22-23 Sep 2018).

2. Code of Conduct Approval

A new CoC that applies to NumFOCUS activities and events as well as all PyData events has been drafted by the DISC committee, staff members and reviewed by the board. It is proposed to accept this CoC.

Approved (5/0/0)

3. Yellowbrick as an Affiliated project

This was discussed, and more information requested.

4. Partner request for JROST

Parter request sent by Andy for http://jrost.org/ (Joint Roadmap for Open Science Tools).