Interim Board Meeting: Nov 4, 2014

Software Carpentry Foundation Interim Board Meeting: Nov 4, 2014

Attending

• Greg Wilson (Software Carpentry Foundation)
• Neil Chue Hong (Software Sustainability Institute)
• Kaitlin Thaney (Mozilla Science Lab)
• Josh Greenberg (Sloan Foundation) - on etherpad
• Jenny Bryan (UBC)
• Damien Irving (University of Melbourne)
• Tracy Teal (Data Carpentry / BEACON)
• Katy Huff (UC Berkeley)
• Adam Stone (LBL: Sick, No Voice)

Apologies

• Carole Goble (U. Manchester)

Actions

• Board: mext meeting on Tue Nov 18 (same time unless Doodle poll finds a better one).

• Board: vote on bylaws/funding model at Nov 18 meeting.

• Board: add all funding/partnership leads to funding directory of board_pvt repository with details of what is being offered by end of business on Friday Nov 7 2014.

• GW to separate the list of current funding proposals into "immediate action" vs. "those that require confirmation of partnership/revenue model".

• GW/JB: sort out ownership of funding repository.

Unresolved

• Board agreed to discuss roles and responsibilities of Board members at next meeting, but nobody was assigned to draft.

• GW would like to begin talking to several potential partners (list included below), but meeting ended before this could be discussed.

Resolutions

• Job description for Executive Director approved.

• See executive-director.md in public board repository.

• Executive Director position offered to Greg Wilson.

• Greg provisionally accepts conditional on agreement on SCF by-laws

• Description of the role and responsibilities of the chair approved.

• See board-chair.md in public board repository.

• Board Chair position offered to Neil Chue Hong.

• Neil accepted on the provision that it is the chair of the interim board.

• Board to vote by email on final text of mission statement for the Software Carpentry Foundation by Thursday Nov 6.

• See mission-statement.md in public board repository.

• The acronym "SCF" will be used for the Software Carpentry Foundation.

• Guidelines for issue escalation and communication between workshop coordinators, the Executive Director, and the Board of Directors adopted.

• See issue-escalation.md in public board repository.

• "Pursuit of Funding" resolution adopted, and all Board members promptly inform the Board of all ongoing fund-raising activities involving Software Carpentry.

• Note: wording "on an Etherpad" in original text has been replaced by "in the Git repository and by email", since we're moving away from Etherpads (see below).

• Documents for discussion will be managed through the Git repository rather than through Etherpads, and conversations will be managed through GitHub issues.

Discussion

• Should Board members sign non-disclosure agreements?
• No.
• Instead, sharing of information (i.e. a culture of disclosure). should be enshrined in the description of the role of a Board member.
• How to balance funding sought by SCF vs funding for SCF through partners?

• Good faith.

• Do board members share specifics of what they're offering to do w.r.t. Software Carpentry with potential partners to help with capacity planning etc.?

• Yes.

• The Board requested more time to comment on the three-tier model for partnership, and committed to voting at the next meeting on Nov 18.

• The board requested more time to comment on the revenue sharing model for workshops, and committed to voting at the next meeting on Nov 18.

• For next meeting:
• Approval of by-laws.
• Approval of partnership model.
• Approval of revenue sharing / management model for workshops
• including agreement of what to do with future workshop donations

• Define/vote on roles and responsibilities of board members.

• For subsequent meeting:
• Propose operations communication procedure for SCF staff and workshop hosts.
  • Requires linkage to partnership model.