17 October 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”).

October 17, 2019

Participating:

Board Members: Lorena Barba, James Powell, Andy Terrel, Katrina Riehl, Sylvain Corlay, Jane Herriman (10:45 PST).

ED: Leah Silen

Not attending: Stéfan

Approval of Minutes from last meeting: Not yet approved: 3-0-0

Resolutions Voted on by Email, Github or additional meetings:

Q3 Financial Report:

• Received the Q3 report yesterday, expect some corrections

• Pydata numbers are misleading

  • Gross not net numbers are reported.

  • Many events got delayed to Q4.

  • Berlin should bring in $65K profit, and New York is anticipated

    at $100K profit.

• We expect to hit our projects with a bit over, projected $130K net

• Summit expenses are not included.

  • The Summit has a separate budget

  • Sloan granted $40K

  • Estimate $50-60K costs from the NF budget

  • Total $100K as an expense

• Why are salary & tax projects off

  • People started mid year which reduced cost

  • Projected cost for PEO was less.

  • So next year we see an increase in this

• Fundraising/soliciting individual donations

  • Raised $50K so far

  • 3 more campaigns this year

    • End of year

    • Py giving

    • Corporate sponsor emerging leaders

• Major grants coming in Q4

• Is there a risk due to staff salary being full year?

  • We will have reviews at the end of the year, but yes

• Observation, project admin fees 20% compared to profit of PyData – projected budget was 800k tickets + 310k sponsors – 700k expenses = profit 410k for Pydata. Compared to 80k income in project admin fees.

  • Good to have these ratios in our head in our discussions with the community. Help correct the general misconception that project fees are what fund the organization.

  • Cost of services provided is higher than project admin fees

    • Having talked to projects about raising their fees:

      • Andy: it is difficult and we used pydata revenue to cover this

      • James: Travis called it the lightweight overhead model

    • Perhaps too much of a burden on PyData to hold up the organization.

    • Projects don’t know that they are not sustaining NumFOCUS operations

    • Communication about the services we provide could be better

    • Raising the overhead rate from 10% to 15% isn’t a huge impact, to be more fair we would need to increase fees to 40%, but that goes against our established model.

    • Need to say “no” to projects more, for example, when we receive requests for custom reports and visualizations to be better.

• Would be good to have more strategic conversation

  • Terry feels we should be able to increase our individual donations by 3X or 4X

  • We should have Terry present his plans to the board

Executive Director’s Report:

We now have a set of case studies published on the website, thanks to some great work from Gina. These include the use of NF tools in first-time imaging of a black hole, curing disease, and ethics in AI/ML.

Discussion Items:

a. Tabled from last meeting - Project Status Criteria for Affiliated and Sponsored Projects

b. New Affiliated Project Application - ObsPy: Stéfan is the champion (Tabled until next meeting)

c. New Application for Affiliated Project Status

i.  [*GeoPandas*]

ii. Champion - Katrina will champion.

    -   (Sylvain) Question: how do we communicate about subprojects of large
         projects such as jupyter (jupyterlab, jupyterhub, binder).


    -   (Sylvain) Should we consider GeoPandas as part of pandas?

a. Retiring Inactive Affiliated Projects: Stéfan (Tabled for next meeting)

b. Twitter policies

 Recent tweets may have left NumFOCUS’s relationship to Anaconda
 ambiguous. We discussed being more mindful of how NF communications
 may impact public perception of this relationship.