A regular meeting of the Django Software Foundation Board of Directors was held on August 11th, 2016. Frank Wiles led the meeting.

Attendance

Old Business

Financial Briefing

Adrienne and others did a big push from the stage at Djangocon for individual contributions, which put us a few thousand dollars ahead of expectations. JetBrains is donating around $46K, improving our financial situation a lot. This is an annual donation, and it has not yet been received for this year. We are expecting additional funds from DEFNA this year when they close out. Given the JetBrains contribution, we may not want to another fellowship push at this time, to prevent donor fatigue. Frank is looking for a large donation similar to PyCharm's from a Google-esque company. Regarding Mozilla, we disbursed some funds to Andrew for previous work. Per contract, money we don’t use goes back to Mozilla. There is a process for funding work on channels, including tutorials, a proposal to Jacob Kaplan-Moss’ subcommittee. We have done this already, have been advertising, and could increase advertising making sure to include that funding can go toward tutorials. We will do a status report blog post shortly.

DjangoGirls Funding

DjangoGirls has stated they cannot support the administrative overhead associated with funding individual meetups. The two proposed solutions if we continue this funding model are: 1) Take on someone part-time like Adrienne or send money to DjangoGirls to fund help for them. Christophe will construct a proposal to DjangoGirls and run it by Frank and Daniele. 2) Automate the request and funding process. One button funding could exclude large parts of the world that we want to fund whose technology does not support that. A related question was posed: Do we want to fund individual meetups? We fund sprints and other events, but not meetups. Part of DEFNA’s mission is to fund events. We should be funding events, as that is core to our mission of promoting Django. But the administrative overhead is high, and that needs to be solved.

Diversity/Inclusion/Accessibility initiative

James & Daniele have a document going to outline what this program will look like. A policy on alcohol was discussed. The appropriateness of alcohol differs by culture. Alcohol can be culturally appropriate but can also be divisive. The DEFNA model is to allow sponsor parties not at the venue, and they have to provide non-alcoholic beverages and snacks. Stacey has experience with such a policy and can be consulted on developing a policy.

New Business

Metal Tiers Revision

The jump between silver and gold is too big, which discourages people from selecting gold. Christophe has explained this issue in an email, which we will revisit at the next meeting.

New DSF Member Nominations

All were approved unanimously.

JetBrains Videos

The videos will use PyCharm but will not be PyCharm tutorials. They will be very short videos about discrete topics. Changes in Django will affect only a few videos at a time. There is a caveat that if they become technically stale, they take them down. Frank suggests a small test set to start. Where to place them on the site will become clearer when we see them.

Free Booth Offered to DSF at PyCon UK, 15th-19th Sept.

Christophe will contact member list and see if anyone is attending and can staff a booth.

Next meeting

8th September

To add agenda items to the board's next meeting, please contact the board.

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