10 December 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”).

December 10, 2025

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

**Executive Director: **Rachel Kerestes

**Not attending: **Sanket Verma

Information:

• Topics for a future meeting:
  • Fundraising
  • Meeting minutes
    • Philosophy & Legal requirements
    • What was discussed, decision points reached, resolutions voted on
  • 2026 Audit

Discussion Items:

• Updates
  • Getting budget set up on quickbooks
    • Have issues with chart of accounts. Not matching the budget categories, so part of what we’re doing as we set it up is to update the classes.
      • E.g., events budget - overhead - will take extra time in QBs, but once we do we’ll be able to get better info/reports
  • Strategic Planning update
    • Drafted ~10 survey questions to the annual survey to projects that will feed into the strategic planning process. Other survey to go beyond projects. List of folks to start inviting to be part of white board sessions, strategic planning sessions. Scheduling will be tough
    • Timeline is still on track
    • Governance and how board members will get seated is part of it
• Elections
  • Communication schedule
    • The candidates have been notified
    • Notification to community is this week
  • All candidates accepted their roles
  • Rachel to meet with them all 1:1
    • Talking to Jim Bednar 1:1
  • Rachel and Rosie to meet with everyone and do initial onboarding
    • Might slip to january
  • Set a January meeting date for the board to convene to set the calendar
  • TSC seat has been vacated
  • Elections process will likely need to change in response to governance changes
  • This year seemed to go better than last
• Internal audit findings
  • Mostly focused on finance policy and procedures and a little bit on legal processes
    • Inconsistencies on what we do and why we do it
    • When we say yes to things we don’t normally do, it creates a new process
      • We default yes to projects for their asks (e.g., reimbursement grant).
  • Software spend
    • Have a lot of different licenses to provide customized solutions
    • Introduces opportunities for errors if we’re not consistent in what we do or across multiple systems
    • Needs to be a clean up job
      • https://www.techsoup.org/
  • We need to move to solutions that are more enterprise-wide
  • short-term structure to guide decisions
  • Migration off of open collective
    • Expectations was maslow bc it allowed projects to run negative balance
    • OC was going to start charging new fees we hadn’t been charged before
    • Doesn’t integrate with other systems, so we had to buy more software to create workarounds
    • Maslow doesn’t solve those issues
      • It’s a banking platform, not an accounting/budgeting system
      • Can’t set up a bank account when there’s a negative balance
    • Investigating other solutions
      • Reporting, easier user interface
      • Have one candidate
        • Would replace:
          • quickbooks (is accounting software)
          • happy fox (ticketing system)
          • open collective
          • hubspot (CRM)
          • Outlaw (track contracts, invoices)
        • It’s cheaper in total
  • Big issue around how much administrative stuff happens by hand
    • Every time we do something that requires an agreement, we have to start from scratch
  • Culture change
    • Embrace tech solutions, behave more like the community we serve
    • long-term communication plan to manage pushback and expectations
• CFOO finalist candidate
  • 2 staff interviews next week: finance + ops, directors
  • Tuesday 23rd - ed onboarding
• Next week is last meeting for board
  • CFOO
    • Budget authorizes person to start at beginning of feb
  • Meeting cadence in 2026
    • Draft calendar - monthly cadence