1   Attendance

The following members of the Board of Directors were present at the meeting: Stephan Deibel, Martin von Löwis, Andrew Kuchling, Tim Peters, and David Ascher (arrived at 18:45). Also in attendance were Kurt B. Kaiser (Treasurer), Neal Norwitz (Assistant Treasurer), and David Goodger (Assistant Secretary). D. Goodger prepared these minutes.

2   Minutes of Past Meetings

The December 2005 minutes were approved by a 4-0-1 vote.

3   Status of Past Action Items

4   Conference Committee

A. Kuchling posted a status report to the PSF-board mailing list just prior to the meeting:

Current status of PyCon: 205 registrants. The spreadsheet indicates that this means a loss of around $23K. Break-even is calculated to be around 250 registrants.

Jeff Rush did get the hotel to lower the food price from $42/person to $30; this is taken into account in the above figure. Another sponsor or two have appeared; they haven't been taken into account yet, but they won't change the picture very much.

We aren't currently filling our room block, and therefore will be paying penalty fees on rooms and on food.

(The penalty fee is just the cost of the rooms for that night. We should therefore consider booking rooms for keynote speakers, PSF board members, etc.; if the PSF is paying the cost of X rooms, we might as well get something for the money.)

Tutorial registrations are healthy: 136 seats have been filled (I don't know how many people that is, because people can register for 1 or 2 spots). I estimate about $3000 profit from the tutorials at this time.

Lengthening the early-bird brought in about 15 more registrations so far, so it didn't make a huge difference. We'll raise prices on the 15th as planned.

Current actions: more last-minute publicity. I wrote an Advogato post, and submitted a slashdot story; will send out more announcements in hope of attracting more people; will send note to 2005 attendees asking why they aren't attending (location, date, cost, program?); preparing some banner ads. Jeff Rush will try to publicize more among local groups.

Issue for discussion: should we tell the community about the shortfall? Maybe people will rethink registering, or help publicize more. Maybe it's too whiny.

Issue for discussion: given that we've signed a 2-year contract, what do we do for 2007? Options I can think of:

1. Try to be released from the contract. This is only worth doing if it's free. If we have to pay the $70000 penalty, it's better to give the conference and take the smaller 20K loss.
2. Reduce the contract numbers to ~200-250, so that the total costs are cheaper and we actually meet our numbers.
3. Keep the numbers the same, and try to do better on publicity to reduce the loss. I made various mistakes -- most notably a delay in getting the schedule posted -- but it's not clear if that delay is responsible for the poor registration.

Other suggestions?

S. Deibel asked A. Kuchling about the status of the funding we approved for helping people to attend PyCon: "Have you had any responses to your posting?" A. Kuchling replied that five or six requests for funding had been received.

N. Norwitz suggested that we need to publicize the Feb. 1 hotel reservation deadline. S. Deibel agreed, noting that in addition to the lower room rate, "We should make clear that reservations after Feb 1st don't count for us so making them before saves the PSF $89/nite or whatever it is."

5   PSF Members' Meeting

S. Deibel reported that he sent email asking for member and director nominations and will follow up and keep the list of those nominated. All directors present confirmed their candidacy for director; the other two directors (Steve Holden and Jeremy Hylton) were to be confirmed. David Goodger and Brett Cannon had also been nominated for director.

M. von Löwis asked about converting members into emeritus status, noting that we don't have to do this (since it was done last year, it isn't critical this year). S. Deibel replied that Jeremy Hylton took care of looking at records for emeritus conversion last year. It was agreed to forget about this.

S. Deibel expressed concern that the minutes from the 2005 members' meeting were not in the repository. D. Goodger noted that J. Hylton has promised to produce the minutes, and there is a draft dated March 27 2005 in the PSF-Members mailing list archives. M. von Löwis noted that the attendance of previous years' meetings were also missing. S. Deibel noted his general feeling that "Jeremy continues to be too busy to really carry out his job [secretary] in a timely fashion... And secretary is pretty darn important as we find out at moments like this. ... We do need to fix the records issue, at least going forward."

S. Deibel brought up deadlines. M. von Löwis suggested January 30th for sending out snail mail invitations to PSF members; S. Deibel agreed. A. Kuchling volunteered to help with mailing to U.S. addresses.

S. Deibel also suggested January 30th as the deadline for the agenda and nominations. T. Peters noted that the bylaws state that for a regular meeting, the notice is only required to state "the place, date and hour of the meeting". M. von Löwis noted that all forms are sent to the same address, and then distributed. Absentees are requested to also email the recipient, first confirming their presence. Proxy forms must be received one week in advance of the meeting.

6   Grants Committee

M. von Löwis noted that Brian Zimmer did not complete the Jython project, and we still need to determine what fraction was done and what the payment should be. Brian had suggested that Frank Wierzbicki get the remaining money, since he is doing the remaining work. M. von Löwis asked if the board would agree to a procedure where Frank gets a separate contract. There was agreement in general, but discussion ensued regarding the amount of the split, and how it was to be worded.

RESOLVED, that the total amount previously authorized by the Board to be paid to Brian Zimmer as part of his Jython grant be split between Brian Zimmer and Frank Wierzbicki, in proportion to be decided by the Grants Committee.

Approved 5-0-0.

7   Adjournment

S. Deibel adjourned the meeting at 19:04 UTC.