ORGANIZATION FOR TRANSFORMATIVE WORKS
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
MINUTES OF THE REGULAR MEETING
13 April 2013, 05:00 UTC
PRESENT: Andrea Horbinski, Cat Meier, Eylul Dogruel, Maia Bobrowicz, Franzeska Dickson
GUESTS: james_
ABSENT: Kristen Murphy, sanders, Ira Gladkova
DECISIONS TAKEN SINCE THE LAST MEETING
None.
OPEN SESSION
1. The April membership drive has concluded. It brought in at least 2,054 individual donations totaling US$53,243.99, and 1,266 people became new OTW members. Donations are still coming in at a brisk pace; the fundraising total for the month of April is currently US$58,000 and climbing.
2. Volunteers & Recruiting has officially reopened recruitment; they e-mailed Board with details of what they anticipate happening in the next few weeks.
3. Tag Wranglers have gotten some interesting and useful suggestions for improving the wrangler and user experience; details to emerge as things are set. They are planning for a blog-about-wrangling week at some point in the next couple of months.
4. Directors and Officers insurance is officially renewed; packet of documentation is being sent to sanders; it’s about a quarter-inch-thick stack of papers.
5. Cat elaborated on the membership drive report from a Finance committee perspective. The majority of donations are at the US$25 and under range. While donations have slowed down significantly, they’re still coming in faster than they were before the drive started.
CLOSED SESSION
1. Discussion of the opening letter for the Annual Report. A staff member has suggested shortening the letter. A majority of Board members present are in favor of keeping the longer draft. Their reasoning is that the draft is in line with annual report letters from other nonprofit organizations, and is one of the Board’s few official and regularly scheduled opportunities to address our membership.
2. The Board intends to send thank-you notes to Volunteers & Recruiting for their work to revise the recruitment process; and to Development & Membership and other committees involved in the April membership drive. Maia volunteered to draft the notes.
3. Discussion about possibly forming a workgroup similar to Category Change for planning the AO3’s multimedia posting interface. We decided to table this for now and discuss the idea with relevant chairs when the Category Change project is closer to completion.
4. Support is looking at moving away from 16bugs to the RT system that Systems uses, which will mean a slight change in how they work, and in finances (freeing up the fees paid to 16bugs starting next year).
5. The staff of the Fanhackers project, which currently operates under the umbrella of the Journal committee, are interested in forming their own committee. They plan to send a proposal to Board in the near future.
6. Systems is in the process of recruiting some new staff members.
7. Maia shared that she has been researching cloud hosting platforms as part of a non-OTW project, and suggested that the OTW might want to consider making use of cloud hosting services at some point in the future. We would need to gather more information about price, effect on staff workload, and legal ramifications before considering such a step.
The meeting was adjourned at 06:45 UTC.
Minutes approved by the Board on 15 August 2013.