Minutes for May 1, 2014
Possible marketing intern; PLOG reports; Plone Conferences 2014 & 2015; Release manager travel stipend
Paul called us to order at 20:05 UTC
Housekeeping
Attendance
Present: Alexander Loechel, Andy Leeb, Paul Roeland, Steve McMahon, Érico Andrei, Cris Ewing
Absent: Tom (Spanky) Kapanka
Approval of the minutes of April 17, 2014
Érico moved approval, Alex seconded
Unanimously approved
+ check if action items were followed up
All covered in agenda topics
Incoming correspondence
Query: is it OK to use Google Analytics on docs.plone.org?
Discussion: we’re already using it on plone.org, so no problem.
E-mail discussion on Gilbane. No PF presence planned, but there may be talks by some US vendors.
Intern inquiry. Liz asked if we’re interested in spending on a marketing intern. A $3-5,000 budget.
Paul mentioned that the kind of internships he’s experienced with don’t pay beyond expenses.
Cris, Steve mentioned that US internships often pay stipends. Cris suggested “minion."
Steve said that we’d need to work out the employment question — we don’t want to be an employer. And Christina would need to be willing to oversee.
General agreement we do not wish to become an employer in the payroll sense.
Paul said he would want to know we have an enthusiastic candidate.
Steve agreed: we’d need a reason to believe it would work out. Like Google Code, we’d want someone with a known connection to the community.
Cris wondered if a marketing or communications dept. at Penn State might be interested.
Steve suggested that if the board is — in theory — willing to fund, we could pursue the practical arrangements and see if there’s a good candidate.
Cris noted that RIT has an open-source program that might be a possible partner.
Steve will be the liaison for Liz, Eric and Christina to see if we can find a practical way of doing this.
Connection to Érico lost.
New Business
Funding requests
Kiwi PyCon. Are we interested in a sponsorship?
Question: do we have any Plonistas who would be interested in being the person on the ground to make this useful? We sponsored when this was young, but it needed bootstrap help then. Well-established now.
Steve will drop a note to Dylan, Virginia, Tim to ask if this is something where we could have a representative.
Érico rejoined call.
Partnership
A company who is not a sponsor is listing us as a partner. Anything we want to do about this.
Agreed: No interest in pursuing this in any way beyond asking them if they are interested in becoming a sponsor.
Andy will contact, and will keep Liz in the loop.
Volunteer estimate
What’s a reasonable # for our not-for-profit reporting? Agreed that 300 is a defensible number; reality probably much higher.
Sprint reportout
PLOG actually sold out all its spaces. Neighboring hotels had to be enlisted.
Lots of interesting talk on both code and non-code.
Eric’s “crazy mind map” was a big hit.
Eric will be speaking on a related subject at OSBridge.
Plone Intranet Consortium is gaining some momentum. Abstract, Netsight, now some others. Applying for and have some funds for some research on Intranet issues.
Plone 2020, convened by Philip, also produced good discussions. These conversations are mainly regarding back-end database (db and security). General consensus that development of an API specification for the back end is a good way to advance. More immediate involvement in CMF layer also a good early step. We are expecting one or more blog posts on this.
Cris noted that some similar issues were discussed at the “rural” Massachusetts sprint.
Tiles/portlets also a big topic for discussion. An early June sprint in Barcelona is a possibility. Might be strategic for Framework or UI teams.
Training: discussions about the need for training for developers. European Plone companies are hiring developers and need to get them up speed. General agreement that more dev training is very important. An open-source syllabus would be welcome.
Cris noted that US employment scene is very different. Python job market is very different in US.
General agreement we have no problem in listing trainings on plone.org.
Plone Conference
Bristol conf site went live.
Talk about framing conference more as a learning opportunity. We have no problem getting developers, but it’s harder to get admins. Idea of billing conference as a good place for them. Call for talks would emphasize this, and each talk would need pointers to “where to go from here.”
Netsight is also working on plans to encourage more female speakers. One important idea is to reserve some spots for late proposals, as early deadlines cause it to be filled with the usual suspects.
We’ll start work on the call for proposals for 2015 soon. In particular, get the schedule out.
Possible community standards violation (executive session)
No action taken.
Old Business
Europython
An alternative, more modest proposal is in the works.
plone.com/org progress
Status updates on stories for plone.com and organization of plone.org
Badge schemes under development for plone.org!
advisory/ambassador board
Paul expects to be publishing the first announcement this week
In-kind sponsorships
Tabled until Oshkosh
Review ongoing
World Plone Day
Alex asked: Is the release manager travel stipend adequate?
Alex proposed raising it to $5,000. Now $3,000.
Discussion: Eric is a superb ambassador and is doing a lot of community management work and thinking.
Alex moved to raise the release manager travel stipend for for 2014 to $5,000.
Andy seconded
Unanimously approved
Adjourned at 21:46 UTC