17 November 2022

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”).

November 17, 2022

Attending: Logan Kilpatrick, Larry Gray, Sylvain Corlay, James Powell

Executive Director: Leah Silen

Not attending: Rosie Pongracz, Katrina Riehl, Stéfan van der Walt

Executive Director's Report:

• Update on Noa's onboarding process

  • Noa has accepted!

No Quorum so we will not be voting

Discussion Items:

• Board Retreat

  • Are we having one in Dec or Jan?

  • Will it be in-person or online?

  • Need to discuss at next board meeting

• John Hunter Fellowship

  • Can we vote to approve the funding for this?

  • How much needs to be set aside?

    • We are going to support a small dev grant every year for

      John Riehl, we can also do the same for the John Hunter Fellowship. We can officially vote on this next meeting.

    • Originally rolled out in 2014, last time it ran was 2018

      John Hunter Matplotlib Summer Fellowship Program

• Vote on the switch from “Fiscally Sponsored” to “Hosted Project”

  • Leah suggested that we look into more options, taglines, and

    work with our marketing contacts.

  • We might need to maintain fiscally sponsored agreements on the

    backend but also keep a different name as part of the public program.

  • Another example: https://www.codeforsociety.org/become-a-fiscally-sponsored-project

    • “NumFOCUS is the legal and fiscal host of the xyz project”

    • Rollout the name change Jan 1st

    • Tell projects our intent to change this after the board

      approves so they can give any necessary feedback

    • Acknowledge: this will be a decent amount of extra work on

      the NF team as we need to update language on the website and other documents. Goal would be to have this fully synced up by end of Q1 2023.

• 2023 goals / programs / budget planning

  • Do we need to schedule an additional meeting to do this?

  • More context on this below.

• Proposal from Logan following Stefan's letter to the board:

1. Get a system online to capture service requests from the projects

   (ticket system) so we have stats on usage and turn around / feedback from projects on individual services

   a. Today, we have a freshdesk setup which we use for internal > tracking (not project related)

   i.  Events, emails, etc are all ticketed in freshdesk
   
   ii. help at umfocus.org is the
       > main project point of contact email right now
   
   -   Goal: Have this online by the end of Q1 of 2023
   
   -   Acknowledge this will add a bit of overhead for the NF staff
       > and projects. There will be a learning curve but this
       > should help better operationalize NF.
   
   -   The dashboard needs to include a pull-down with projects
       > names and an option to choose the type of request or need
   

2. See what stats we can collect on payment turnaround times (what is

   the common bottleneck, how do we get to sub 2 days on all payments).

   a. Does Open Collective collect these stats? Can we work with them > to create a system to do so?

   b. We should set a goal once this is in place for how quickly we > turn around these payments. Otherwise, we have no idea where > we are in providing this core service to projects.

3. Ensure all services / initiatives have clear goals going into 2023.

   If we don't have a goal and metrics, then we should evaluate whether we provide that service or not.

   a. This includes PyData (and lots of sub components of PyData), > small grants, staff happiness, project happiness (NPS), etc.

   b. Note: Since some initiatives might not have a clear path to > collect metrics right now, we may need to have our initial > goal be the setup of metric tracking.

   c. Once we have metrics in place around usage, time taken to > provide that service, etc, we should conduct a services review > and talk about what we provide and if we should continue doing > so (or how to make it leaner).

• Website work:

  • We should have high level metrics to track NF projects impact.

    The Linux Foundation has a great section on the homepage which makes it very clear what the impact of their projects are. We do not have this but should.

  • Do we have a timeline on when we want this to be done by?

  • Do we have a specific set of stakeholders (projects, funders,

    contributors) who can give feedback on the site as it is being developed?