21 April 2020

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”).

April 21, 2020

Participating:

Board Members: Jane Herriman, Stéfan van der Walt, Andy Terrel, Sylvain Corlay, Lorena Barba, James Powell, Katrina Riehl (arrived late)

Executive Director: Leah Silen

Not attending: N/A

Email/Github Voting:

April 7 minutes - Approved (4-0-0)

Financial Report:

IBM needed to cut funding from 100K to 50K. Leah is concerned that more sponsors will be forced to reduce funding.

James proposed that we track fiscal years of our sponsors so that we can better time funding requests. (Most of our sponsors follow the calendar year, as NF does, but a few do not.)

We may have a global virtual PyData, which would bring in some additional revenue.

Small Business Administration loan application for covid-19 relief: our contact says it looks like we made it into the first round, but Leah isn’t independently able to get meaningful information about the status of our application or the amount we could possibly receive.

Executive Director’s Report:

We may be able to get funding from the Sloan Foundation for our online educational/event platform. To let Sloan know what we need, we would need to quickly together put together a budget.

Discussion Items:

a. Per last meeting's discussion, the CFP for Round 2 SDGs has opened and projects have been notified. Submissions are due on the 30th. (TABLED)

i.  Guidelines for the SDG program to be included in the operations 
    manual have been drafted. The following items are needing board
    input/decisions:

    1.  Should there be a limit on the number of off-cycle proposals
        submitted per project for each calendar year?

    2.  Should committee members have term limits? A suggestion was
        made last year that committee members serve for one year
        with the option to roll on/off as needed. We would like to
        involve as many community members as possible.

b. Moore Grant will be used for work on increasing and retaining project contributor diversity. Moore has been providing feedback on ways to structure our budget justification to maximize the help they can provide us.

c. Collecting Grant Admin Fees

One of our projects is questioning whether NumFOCUS admin fees should be 
applied to subcontracts.

To ensure subcontractors wrap their overhead into the costs allotted for the 
services they provide and to avoid confusion, budgets for grant proposals 
have to be approved by NF going forward. (This has already been standard 
practice but recently a couple grants were submitted without NF review.)

d. Online Educational Platform

 Leah has started drafting notes on deliverables and budget for such a platform.