2008-10-15
This is the proposed agenda for the Board meeting of Wednesday, October 15th, 2008, to be held at 19:00 UTC in #spi on irc.spi-inc.org.
- Opening
- Roll call
- Tentative regrets received from Neil McGovern and Joerg Jaspert
- President's report (Bdale Garbee)
- Treasurer's report (Michael Schultheiss)
- Secretary's report (Jimmy Kaplowitz)
- Outstanding minutes
- Items up for discussion:
- (none besides the above reports)
- Any other business
- Next board meeting - Wednesday, November 19th, 2008, 19:00 UTC (Note DST/Summer time ends! 19:00 UTC in local time shifts one hour earlier.)
President's Report
SPI was approached in late September by Alan Dechert of the Open Voting Foundation for assistance in preparing a proposal for a new voting system for Los Angeles County. If OVF should be awarded a contract to pursue this work, SPI would have a role to play in handling the funds. After a flurry of emails between OVF and the SPI board, a conference call was held on the 30th of September, attended by Bdale Garbee, Jimmy Kaplowitz, Josh Berkus, Greg Pomerantz, and Michael Schultheiss representing SPI and Alan Dechert, Brian Fox, and Ed Gambel representing OVF. The OVF folks now have the information they need to complete their proposal. While not all of the details are worked out, the participation needed from SPI would be different from anything we've done before, and would clearly require that we hire at least a part-time contractor to handle the anticipated additional administrative work load. No further action should be required from SPI until and unless a contract is actually awarded.
Treasurer's Report
This report uses a cash-based method of accounting, recording donations
when deposited (not when the check was written or received by us) and
recording expenses when sent or scheduled for payment (not when
incurred).
Balance Sheet as of October 14, 2008
ASSETS
Current Assets
Key Business Reward Checking 17,117.74
Key Business Signature Money Market Savings 97,617.96
Ameriprise Cash Mgmt Acct 13,098.74
Total Current Assets 127,834.44
TOTAL ASSETS 127,834.44
LIABILITIES & EQUITY
General and current liabilities 0.00
Equity
Reserves held in trust
Debian Earmark 67,762.98
Drupal Earmark 2,650.00
Freedesktop.org Earmark 2,027.68
Gallery Earmark 4,803.34
GNOME Earmark 20.00
GNU TeXmacs Earmark 9.70
Madwifi.org Earmark 922.03
OpenOffice.org Earmark 1,180.52
Open Voting Foundation Earmark 392.67
Plan 9 Earmark 6,500.00
PostgreSQL Earmark 13,778.44
Total held in trust 100,047.36
General reserves 27,787.08
Total Equity 127,834.44
TOTAL LIABILITIES & EQUITY 127,834.44
Secretary's report
I would like volunteers to help move the website away from Plone and generally keep it more accurate and up-to-date, given that it's too cumbersome and buggy to use effectively. I would like to retain the ability to do web-based editing as well as restore the ability to do VCS-based editing. Therefore, something like ikiwiki might make sense. If you want to volunteer, email secretary@spi-inc.org and admin@spi-inc.org, express your interest, and say what time, effort, and skills you can offer. Also, as requested by the SPI admin team, please explicitly acknowledge that while your opinion as the person doing the work will be seriously considered and will definitely count, the SPI admin team, officers, and board (each as appropriate) have the final say on all aspects of the website. Also, I have now updated the list of officers on the board and by-laws pages on the website.