April 15, 2013

Participating

Ralf Gommers, Didrik Pinte, Anthony Scopatz, Leah Silen, Perry Greenfield, Fernando Perez, Andy Terrel, Travis Oliphant

Not attending

Emmanuelle Gouillart, Jarrod Millman

Treasurer’s Report

• Checking: $3,065.04

• Savings: $4,449.09

We have until May 15th to file our 990 forms for the IRS.  Didrik is working on the European bank account, it’s moving along.

Old Business

a.  Proceeds from PyData

Exact figure isn’t available yet, waiting for final checks from Santa Clara Convention Center.

b.  Boot Camp for Women in Science and Engineering

Team Reports

Fundraising: Ralf edited the fellowship document

Finance: Have until May 15th to file 990 form with the IRS.  Didrik will report next call with more concrete details on opening a UK bank account.

New Business

For next week, take some time to think about what the corporate sponsorship levels are and what they mean.  We need a more solid business model here.  Look at the Van Lindberg email from the PSF.

Fiscal Sponsorship

• Establishment of rules for projects to have formal relationship with NumFOCUS

• Sponsorship is in the public good.

Ping Tony about fiscal council.

April 1, 2013

Participating

Andy R. Terrel, Ralf Gommers, Fernando Perez, Didrik Pinte, Anthony Scopatz, Leah Silen, Travis Oliphant

Not attending

Jarrod Millman, Emmanuelle Gouillart,  Perry Greenfield

Treasurer’s Report

SciPy’13 has been officially sponsored, funds for this were disbursed ($2500).  This gives Numfocus a silver sponsor level (2 passes, booth, name on website).  Once the corresponding details for EuroScipy are clear, the same will be done.

• Checking: $2,243.04

• Savings: $4,449.09

Old Business

a.  Mac Mini – Is this ready to be publicized on the site?

Ralf reports that Christoph hasn’t replied much to his queries.  The site is up and a NumPy CI engine is set up, but he’s waiting for responses from Christoph.  Anthony suggests asking the list for help so that someone can support Christoph.

b.  Fundraising for Boot Camp for Women in Science and Engineering

Work is ongoing with a funder to secure the majority of the cost.  More follow-up is needed.

c. Sponsorship of SciPy and passes

Our donations are earmarked for student support, we get two session/tutorial passes at the silver sponsor level (see Treasurer’s report for details).

d.  SciPy domains ready to transfer

Travis checked that all domains have been transferred.  We will wait for the person working on SciPy central before pointing the domains over to a new site.

Team Reports

Membership: we are considering opening up the membership model to one where the basic level is free for anyone to join, and the paying/participating membership levels have some benefits as well.  We will draft some language on this topic in the coming weeks.

Fundraising: Ralf and Andy proposed updating the language on the Technical Fellowship to: “Purpose (new formulation): The purpose of the NumFOCUS Technology Fellowship Program is to enable high-potential graduate students and early career professionals to work full-time on cutting-edge scientific open source software.”

“Target areas: infrastructure for SciPy eco-system, accessible and reproducible computing (& core projects?

Travis likes the intent. Keeping the educational component in mind is important.

Publicity/Promotion: Andy manned the booth at PyCon along with Leah and Anthony.  Lots of contacts were made, there was good interest and a number of people came by with the idea of doing “bounties” on specific topics.  Some people didn’t like the nomination model for membership.  Talked to the Center for Open Science, a new venture at the University of Virginia (http://centerforopenscience.org) whose goals are very well aligned with NumFOCUS.  Anthony also talked to the “Data science for social good” group in Chicago, which has an explicit education and open government/open science mission; they have a 10-week summer fellowship program we can learn from.

Grants/Fellowships

Finance

New Business

a.  UQ Foundation update from PyCon

b.  Euro SciPy sponsorship – Participant Sponsor

c.  Disco domain and trademark transfer to NumFOCUS from Nokia, Ville Tuulos

The Disco authors have left Nokia and would like to have numfocus to hold that domain as well as their trademark and all other IP associated with the project.  They are waiting to see our domain transfer form.  Anthony asked about what legal responsibilities we’d be exposed to in terms of defending the IP.

d.  Industry funding for IPython – contract issues. Conversation with Brad Kuhn from the Software Conservancy.  Fernando will set up a conversation with Brad Kuhn and any board members who are interested in participating, to clarify some of the legal issues involved. The SWC has experience with this and Brad offered to provide some information to us.

e.  PyData Vimeo Channel – $150 to $200. The motion for these funds was approved.

February 4, 2013

Participating

Leah Silen, Travis Oliphant, Anthony Scopatz, Ralf Gommers, Fernando Perez, Andy R. Terrel, Perry Greenfield, Jarrod Millman

Not attending
Prabhu Ramachandran, Emmanuelle Gouillart

Approval of prior minutes

Prior minutes have been approved.

Old Business

a.  Boot Camp for Women in Science and EngineeringThis is a Software Carpentry workshop, requesting $6,000.  This is a worthy endeavor but beyond our ability to fund at that level.  We’d be happy to contribute partially towards this goal (up to $1500) and help them with the rest of the fundraising.  We will advertise this on the website

b.  Update on Christoph Deil’s Mac
Mac will be hosted in the US, will be bought by Anthony from Apple and Leah will ship it to the hosting company.  Once it’s up and running it will be announced on the list.

c.  Update on increasing board size
Nothing to report, Jarrod will follow-up this week?  No new activity on this, Jarrod will report back on that.

d.  PyGotham. Community site run by Gloria W., essentially a NYC PyCon.  Upon further communication with her, it became clear that she had in mind a fair amount of engagement which might go beyond the resources that Numfocus currently has.

Anthony and Fernando express that it’s important to have a memo of understanding, stating that the conference is nonprofit and that NumFOCUS supports it with the idea of promoting STEM in Python. Should be checked that there are no tax-related issues with handling this money.

e.  Result of numpy.com / numpy.org appraisal
John Turner donated these two domains, he’s getting this appraisal notice so he can claim a tax deduction.
numpy.com: reported as worth $5850, the .org is still pending.

f. Follow up by Andy with Sloan Foundation program directors… Andy wanted to know exactly what he should discuss with Sloan F. to avoid bombarding them with too many things in parallel.
Andy asked about clarifying how the budget would work for the technical fellowships.  After a fair amount of back and forth on clarifying the intent of the TF idea, Jarrod, Andy and Ralf planned to work further on making this more precise.  Andy mentioned the NSF Computing Innovation Fellows program (http://cifellow.org/) (no longer active) as well as Google Summer of Code (https://developers.google.com/open-source/soc/) as two ideas that we can use to frame the discussion.

g. The Sloan is also interested in citation/impact reporting, at SciPy’12 there was discussion about citation infrastructure for software.  The alt-metrics community has done a lot of work on this, it might be useful to interface with them.  Andy mentions that the NSF just put out a Dear Colleague letter asking about how to measure the impact of software, perhaps Numfocus could provide a reply to that.

Team Reports

Membership: Nothing to report, but Perry plans to start meetings to discuss soon.
Fundraising: Conversations with industry starting.   Financial Industry interested in Technical Fellowships.
Publicity/Promotion
Grants/Fellowships: Nothing to report
Finance

New Business

a.  Approved minutes are now on the website under “Board”
b.  NumFOCUS and SciPy 2013 conference
Andy  and Anthony are heavily involved with the organization of this year’s SciPy conference, they will try to involve others from the board on this effort.

c.  NumPy release management (Ondrej Certik, …)
Ondrej is moving on to a postdoc position at Los Alamos.  He may be able to do a bit more release management in the future, but it would be ideal if the money came via NumFocus, since up until now it has been done directly as Continuum.  Once that transition is done, Ondrej would report directly to Numfocus.  Ralf points out that a discussion about the future of release management for numpy, and whether the numpy community would be happy with Ondrej continuing to work in this capacity via Numfocus.

d. PyData SV: Leah mentioned that Fernando will be a keynote speaker there and that Anthony will run a tutorial on PyTables.
There’s also going to be a PyCon Booth, Jarrod can’t make it but Andy will let us know soon if he can.  Fernando will go to the NumFocus booth a little.

e. The check for Miriam Sierig cleared and now all donations go directly to her on the website.  The final amount collected by NumFocus, between the creation of the Fund on August 29 2012 and Dec 31 2012 was $91,500.

 

January 21, 2013

 

Participating

Leah Silen, Travis Oliphant, Anthony Scopatz, Ralf Gommers, Jarrod Millman, Prabhu Ramachandran.

Not Attending

Fernando Perez, Emmanuelle Gouillart, Andy R. Terrel, Perry Greenfield

Approval of Prior Minutes

Minutes look fine, and are approved.

Old Business

a.  Sloan Foundation

Travis mentioned that Sloan may be interested in providing seed funding for the technical fellowships.  The idea being that once it is started, it will be easier to get additional funding to continue it from industry.  Ralf and Jarrod will contact Sloan to make a small initial proposal with maybe funding for around 1 mentor and 1-2 fellowships.

b.  Purchase of a Mac for Christoph Deil

Decided to host in a co-location facility. Ralf will follow-up with Anthony to make this happen.

c.  Didrik Pinte

Jarrod will take an off-line inventory about whether we should increase the size of the board, change members, or wait a bit longer before revisiting the issue.

d.  PyCon

We have an OSS sponsor booth and two passes.  Jarrod will try to help man the booth on March 15-17.  We will organize a BoF and possibly an in-person board meeting.

Team Reports

Membership

Fundraising

Publicity/Promotion

Grants/Fellowships

Finance

- No reports yet.

New Business

a.  Boot Camp for Women in Science and Engineering

General interest, so Travis will contact Greg Wilson to get a specific proposal for the board to consider.

b.  PyGotham – Travis

General concern about this not being focused on scientific programming. We could try to organize a scientific track.
Non-Python scientifically-oriented conferences may be more interesting than general Python conferences.

c.  PyData sponsors

Travis described that PyData proceeds will go to NumFocus.   The PyData site would like to advertise this fact.

For informational purposes, Continuum defines proceeds as money earned from ticket sales and sponsorships beyond fixed costs (venue, website, food, etc.) plus the travel of Leah and other community conference organizers and participants (keynotes, speakers, etc.) to the conference.  I need to check on this, but I believe the ticket sale costs are set up to basically break even with about 2 sponsors and a full conference. All of this is subject to change as the ability for Continuum to under-write the conference varies.

This is just an example.  Other companies who under-write conferences may have different metrics and approaches for determining proceeds.  We should be willing to engage with as many people as possible at this point.  Conferences can be a useful source of revenue for NumFOCUS as long as they have significant sponsorship.

Ralf, Jarrod, and Anthony expressed concern that conferences can also have significant cost and NumFOCUS should be very careful before agreeing to under-write a conference itself.

Next Meeting

- February 4, 2013

January 7, 2013

Participating

Leah Silen, Fernando Perez, Emmanuelle Gouillart, Andy R. Terrel, Anthony Scopatz, Jarrod Millman, Ralf Gommers, Prabhu Ramachandran.

Not attending
Travis Oliphant,

Treasurer’s Report

Tax filing situation: for 2012 we’ll need to do some paperwork related to taxes.  Anthony proposes contacting someone who can help with this; he will inquire about the cost.  Leah mentions that NumFOCUS has joined a non-profit support organization that could also provide information on this matter.  Both Anthony and Leah will follow up with their contacts to find out how to best proceed.

Approval of Prior Minutes

The minutes from the previous meeting have been accepted.

Old Business

Approval of the appraisal of the domain was recorded, Leah will now take care of having the appraisal done.

Teams:

Fernando will finish up the team organization document, some teams were merged from the previous organization.

Brochure: Emmanuelle asks for the sources for the brochure document so she can translate it to French.  Leah will put the source file on the shared folder so others can edit it as well and for Emanuelle to translate.

Emanuelle just created a Twitter account for NumFOCUS; Andy asks about password management, to which Jarrod proposes setting up a KeePassX shared password file, which Jarrod will set up for everyone.

New Business

a.  Discussion of adding Didrik Pinte to the Board as an official representative from Enthought.
Fernando proposed to table the discussion until next meeting to give Travis a chance to express his opinion, as he had mentioned by email some thoughts on this but is not present today.  Ralf noted that the bylaws may need amending for even/odd and more than 9 board members.  Leah indicated this can be done by simple vote during a board meeting.
b.  Christoph Deil’s suggestion on a Mac for continuous integration. The team led by Jarrod and Ralf will work with Christoph to get the details of his proposal and will work with him further.
c.  Sloan Foundation: how it could help NumFOCUS.  Leah has had some brief email exchanges already with Josh Greenberg, and will follow up further the discussion with Jarrod and Andy who will take point on this item.

Action Items:

KeePassX/dropbox – jarrod
Leah: set up emails going to info@numfocus so they go to everyone.
Christoph Deil >> pointed to Jarrod and Ralf
Sloan follow-up – Jarrod/Andy >> Fernando can help
Leah will follow-up w/ Sloan and introduce Jarrod and Andy