08 October 2025

Minutes of a Regular Meeting of the Admin 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 8, 2025

**Attending: **Julie Hollek, Rosie Pongracz, Mridul Seth, Andy Terrel, Sanket Verma

**Executive Director: **Rachel Kerestes

**Not attending: **

Information:

• Topics for a future meeting:
  • Fundraising
  • Meeting minutes
    • Philosophy & Legal requirements
    • What was discussed, decision points reached, resolutions voted on
    • Public vs “executive session”

Discussion Items:

• Updates
  • Give feedback on charter by EOW
• Timeline for strategic planning process
  • Initiation
    • Announcement
      • Project summit Oct 22-23 where we announce the process
    • larger strategic planning committee
    • recruitment
  • Exploration
    • Smaller taskforce to do surveys/interviews
  • Board will discuss as part of regularly scheduled board meetings
  • Analysis
    • Findings presentation to community
      • everything we learned and things we know we need to work on.
      • e.g., codifying business model. Wouldn’t present biz model, but that there were areas of disagreement
        • Board and SPC will have an opportunity to ask questions about findings and stress test/verify
      • This is more of a report than add new stuff
  • Production
    • planning and feedback cycles
  • Q&A
    • What’s the end result?
      • A written strategic plan
        • Done in PPT format
      • Narrative
      • Finding presentations
      • More the what than the how
        • Develop a brand platform -> gets delegated to head of marketing
    • Planning for 2027
    • Go in with certain assumptions about what we can achieve, what the world will be like, etc.
    • Can be used for evaluation purposes
      • Board to ED, ED to staff, community to NF as a whole
    • How long will it take?
      It will take a year bc of the community input stages
      • If it was just with the board, we could do it faster
    • How does the budget intersect?
      • Staff is in place for a year but the budget will be set for 2026 already
      • Financial questions are front and center. What’s our business model?
      • Do we need to adjust any of our mission/vision and how do we support OSS?
      • Some things are going to be staff-internal
        • E.g., we don’t do time tracking, so impossible to tell what people are working on and what’s a good use of their time
    • How do we up front some of these things?
      • What is each role doing? Tasks are?
      • If we’re trying to make staffing decisions on a 2027 plan, we might not be able to operate
      • Communication plan will be important
      • Budget, priorities
  • Review and come back to next week and then vote
• Recruitment for strategic planning participants
  • Who are the people who should participate?
  • Board should lead recruitment
• Volunteer leaders policy
• Elections
  • List of nominations for board - very few seem like they have experience
  • Nominate folks for board seats
  • Rubric to evaluate folks for nominations
    • Folks who’ve had experience with management
    • Folks who’ve had experience on boards
    • Folks who’ve had experience with strategic plans
  • https://github.com/numfocus/elections/blob/main/election-process.md
  • Will send out a survey with questions
    • Use these as rubric
  • Admin board will review & confirm nominees