24 May 2023

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 24, 2023

Attending: Larry Gray, Logan Kilpatrick, Rosie Pongracz, Katrina Riehl

Executive Director: Leah Silen

Not attending: Stéfan van der Walt, James Powell, Sylvain Corlay, Noa Tamir

Consent Agenda:

• Approval of [Security Committee Charter Draft]

  • Joe Lucas has volunteered to chair a Sponsored Project Security Committee to improve the safety of research, data, and scientific computing communities by assessing and making recommendations to address cybersecurity-related risk in NumFOCUS sponsored projects.

  • Defer to next board meeting since we don't have quorum

Action item:

• Add discussion items for board retreat: Notes for Task-Oriented Planning Session

Discussion Items:

12. Summit Dates (Tentative)

    a. September 11-13 (PyData Amsterdam is 14-16 Sept 2023)

    b. October 4-6

13. When will the website be done?

    a. We started the conversation about this ~ 1 year ago

    b. Unclear what the timeline and status are

    i.  We have ended the relationship with the previous web
        designer
    
    ii. Exploring other options, Leah to meet with the other
        providers
    
    iii. Ended up paying \$9,000 to the original web developer
    
    iv. Relationship ended \~2 months ago
    
    v.  Desire is to move to square space
    

14. When can we move forward with the name change to “Hosted project” instead of fiscal sponsor? We agreed in 2022 that this change would help us but no movement on it since then.

    a. There was no consensus on this

    b. Leah chatted with projects and they did not like “Hosted”

    c. Marketing agency came up with “Sustained”

    d. Board will vote at retreat

15. When is Intercom being stood up? This should be less than a 1 week project. (Staff OKR's say end of Q2, what is slowing us down?)

    a. On target for end of Q2

    b. Nicole focused on finance director hiring

    c. Demo next week

    d. Longer time investment is loading in all the help center articles and such

16. John Hunter Fellowship and John Riehl Fellowship, when will these be listed on the website under the small development grants sections?

    a. Jon Riehl Fellowship is pending additional funds

    b. John Hunter Fellowship will be under the SDG program, once a year, $10k, visualization project.

17. Anaconda pays for a “Dashboards to view community health”, what is the status of this?

    a. Dashboard is up and running

    b. In beta with a few projects

    c. Arliss is working on a report for this

    d. Leah will get links

    e. Funding for 2 years, closing our the first year

    f. After 2 years, will review ROI and see if we want to continue

18. Why do many staff OKR's have no timeline?

    a. Staff tracks progress on Asana, the board copy was an initial draft, not the final copy.

    b. Staff had an OKR meeting on Monday

    c. Leah can try to match the Asana board to external sheet

19. OKR feedback: 2023 OKRs - Board Copy

    a. Many of the proposed items are common sense things we should be doing (or should have already done), why are we making these OKR's instead of just doing them?

20. OKR check in, are we on schedule:

    a. By April 15th 2023, create templates for contracts, budgets, invoices, and grants.

    b. By April 13, the first call to review the current state of NumFOCUS marketing analytics

    c. By end of May, a comprehensive plan for building the knowledge base and toolset will be developed.

    d. By April 01, Emails regarding pending invoice submissions will be sent weekly

    e. Beginning Q2, pose a weekly question in the NF Slack [#projects]

21. Where are we with the Board transformation? Proposal: items should stay on our board agenda until they are complete or the task has been deemed no longer critical. We drop the ball on too many things.