9 May 2019

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”).

May 9, 2019

Participating:

Board Members: Jane Herriman, Lorena Barba, Katrina Riehl, Sylvain Corlay (late arrival), James Powell (late arrival)

ED: Leah Silen

Board Members not Attending: Andy Terrel, Stéfan van der Walt

Approval of Minutes from last meeting: Approved 4-0-0.

Resolutions Voted on by Email or Github: NA

Treasurer’s report:

Q1 Report - We seem to be on track with our budget through Q1.

Executive Director’s Report:

The Advisory Council discussed strategies to increase funding for Small Development Grants, including creating a SDG funding prospectus (similar to our corporate sponsor version), at its Q2 meeting.

Nominations for new DISC committee members are open!

Google Open Source has renewed sponsorship and Moderna has confirmed sponsorship.

Discussion Items:

a. Small Dev Grant off-cycle requests

i.  We received an off-cycle SDG request from Shogun.
    Voting will take place online as we did not have quorum 
    when it was discussed.

ii. The intent of offering off-cycle requests is to give projects a way
    to seek funds when something urgent comes up that cannot be
    accommodated by the regular SDG cycle. We need to better
    define parameters for applying off-cycle for Small Dev Grants
    so that we don’t immediately get resubmissions from projects
    not funded by the regular cycle. For example, we should have
    off-cycle requests include in their application a
    justification for why they could not apply in the regular
    cycle.

b. We have received requests for fiscal sponsorship from PSL (Policy Simulation Library) and to be an Affiliated Project from PySAL (Python Spatial Analysis Library). Members of the Board volunteered to review these applications and put together recommendations before we vote.

c. Preferred Solutions Provider Agreement Draft - Tabled

NumFOCUS has drafted a “Preferred Solutions Provider
Agreement” wherein NumFOCUS would refer potential clients to preferred
solutions providers, who would then pay NumFOCUS
10% of gross revenue resulting from a successful referral. We’ve
decided to table this discussion while the Board considers the
implications of giving such referrals and possible vetting of
preferred providers.

d. Bylaws - Tabled Discussion and ratification of the Bylaws was tabled until our next meeting (May 16, 2019) as we did not have quorum throughout most of the meeting.