Interim Board Meeting: Oct 14, 2014

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Software Carpentry Foundation Interim Board Meeting: Oct 14, 2014

Attending

• Jenny Bryan (Univ of British Columbia)
• Josh Greenberg (Sloan Foundation)
• Katy Huff (UC Berkeley)
• Damien Irving (University of Melbourne)
• Neil Chue Hong (Software Sustainability Institute)
• Adam Stone (Berkeley Lab)
• Tracy Teal (Michigan State / Data Carpentry)
• Kaitlin Thaney (Mozilla Science Lab, audio only)
• Greg Wilson (Software Carpentry)
• David Ascher (Mozilla) - on Etherpad, but not on call

Actions

• Board: next meeting on Tue Nov 4 (same time)
• Board: submit corrections/extensions to governance doc via pull requests by Oct 24
• DI + GW + NCH + KT: define process for communication and issue escalation among workshop coordinators
• KT + JG + JB + NCH: talk about GW's salary from Nov 1
• AS + KH: arrange AS access to GitHub repositories
• JB + KH: transfer ownership of draft grants material to Software Carpentry board group
• GW: find out how much notice we need to give NumFOCUS to have a rep attend a board meeting
• GW: re-add note to governance doc about SCF board deciding scope of SWC project
• GW: circulate minutes from last two meetings for approval before putting in public repository

Resolutions

• KH + TT + GW will be signatores on the NumFOCUS FSA
• Documents stored in two GitHub repositories
• Public (things go here by default): /board
• Private: /board_pvt
• Send minutes to board mailing list for correction/redaction of personal information
• Put into public repository one week after meeting
• Escalation
• Workshop coordinators promote issues to project lead as needed
• Project lead promotes to board as needed
• Coordinators may go directly to the board if they feel it appropriate

Summary

• Date of next meeting
• GW: propose Tue Nov 4 3:30 EDT
  • NCH: may not be able to do it
• passes: if NCH is unable to make it, choose a chair closer to the day
• Final approval for signing up with NumFOCUS
• KH, TT, GW as signatories
• passes
• Mechanics of storing SCF documents (KH)
• Public Repo : /board
  • minutes will hold summaries of the chat window
• Private Repo : /board_pvt
• Board Team : https://github.com/orgs/swcarpentry/teams/board
• Procedure for when we make things public?
  • e.g. minutes
  • Once there is a milestone version, we can introduce a period of review on the listhost
  • After a week of discussion on the listhost, things will become public.
  • passes
• Should grants stuff go in board_pvt?
  • Probably not but once we have time to discuss this (probably not today) we can tackle that.
• Discussion of governance and core vs non-core activities
• Re-add note about board deciding scope of Software Carpentry (what's in/what's out)
• Do we think that it is useful to have a NumFOCUS rep observe at the Board meetings?
  • NumFocus have offered to attend Board meetings
• Do we need the governance document to be in particular format (for legal reasons)?
  • Yes, soon but not immediately
• Who fights copyright / trademark ?
  • NumFOCUS (because they will own the trademarks)
• Q: what can/should be handled by admin staff like Arliss, what needs to be pushed up to the board?
• proposal: admins promote to the project lead as needed, project lead promotes to the board as needed, admins encouraged to go direct to the board if they feel appropriate
• passes
• Discussion of budget
• Josh: "SCF = steward of the public goods for SWC". Institutional partners contribute to SCF to support that.
• Who organises the "special" workshops, like WiSE workshops? (or little efforts by, say, grad students, who don't have easy access to funding streams or event coordination abilities)
  • Does a central "workshop coordinator of last resort" need to paid by taxing institutional contributors?
  • Are there any funders who would support this? Possibly not?
  • why would institutions be happier paying for program management than for coordination?

• Can we make it so that institutional partner contributions aren't calculated such that early contributors don't end up paying more because they are subsidising the lack of other contributors?

• From the chat:
• DI: Whatever happened to each individual workshop giving money for core?
  • GW: we've been asking for donations - hasn't been particularly successful
• JB: Re: a donation to support a specific workshop, how do we feel about a donation to support development of curriculum for specific topic?
  • DI: At UniMelb we are getting money from the Australian National Data Service to develop capstone examples using Australian data
• DI: Does [organization's] contribution to the 'core' have to be money?
  • GW: alternatives?
  • DI: Not sure. I just know that [some orgs] will probably not want to contribute money to core.
  • JG: the only "in kind" support to core budget lines according to my strict definition would be salary for the project leads (not workshop coordination)
• TT: I'm a little concerned that all workshop coordination is being 'outsourced' to institutional partners, and it makes it hard to coordinate as a whole
• JB: It would be hard to get grant money to SWCF to support workshop coordination. That should be for curriculum development and advocacy.
• DI: At what point do you become an institution that is doing so much SWC stuff that they should start giving money? 3 workshops a year? More? Less?

• GW: overhead to ramp up on workshop coordination machinery is (unfortunately) considerable at the moment, so volunteers stepping in to coordinate a workshop now and again is impractical