Board Meeting Minutes: May 4 2013

ORGANIZATION FOR TRANSFORMATIVE WORKS
BOARD OF DIRECTORS

MINUTES OF THE REGULAR MEETING
4 May 2013, 05:00 UTC

PRESENT: Andrea Horbinski, Cat Meier, Eylul Dogruel, Franzeska Dickson, Maia Bobrowicz, sanders

GUESTS: mumble, Tiyire

ABSENT: Ira Gladkova, Kristen Murphy

DECISIONS TAKEN SINCE THE LAST MEETING

1. We approved a new staff member for Communications.

OPEN SESSION

1. sanders gave an update from Volunteers & Recruiting: We’ve started auditing access to organization tools, beginning with the Internal Wiki. We’ll continue to audit tools one at a time over the course of the next few months and then create a plan for routine audits going forward. More information is available about the tool audit at the
   Internal Wiki [link redacted]. We’re drafting a Volunteering FAQ for the website. We plan to send it to I&O and Comms as part of the process before finalizing and posting to ensure we accurately address questions/issues that may exist for international volunteers and that the questions and answers are as clearly explained as possible. Recruitment is open and available to all groups. To be added to the queue for recruiting, committees should prepare a position description and a training plan, and chairs should send those to VolCom, with a request for a role or roles to be opened. We queue roles based on chair/lead request, and plan to continue updating the allchairs@ list with how many roles are waiting in the queue on a biweekly basis. At this time, we can open three roles at one time and each role is open for one week. The templates for position descriptions and training plans, as well as more information about the new recruiting procedures, are available on the wiki [links redacted]. VolCom’s 2012 Annual Report is on its final draft and we’ll be sending it within a week. We’re also finalizing the format and information in our
   first Quarterly Report, and will have it in the next few weeks.
2. Finance update from sanders. She included February because that was the first time she did this type of balance report for a meeting, and it’s helpful to see how much we’ve grown and how quickly.
   1. Finance would like to investigate options for opening an account with a second bank, as well as investment options. There was some discussion about whether we might want to consider opening a bank account outside the United States; however, sanders reported that that is not feasible at this time because of the amount of staff time that would be needed to research applicable regulations, tax laws, etc.
   2. Finance also wants to resume the search for a secondary payment processor. PayPal just reversed a donation from a member in Singapore because their regulations for handling payments originating from that country have changed; we should prepare for the possibility that that will continue happening.
   3. Finance has also been dealing with an identity theft issue (most likely due to a security lapse on the part of one of the online vendors we do
      business with). This has now been resolved and all of the affected funds have been returned to our account.
3. Andrea gave a presentation about fanfiction archive data at the HASTAC conference in Toronto last week, and several people came up to her afterward and voiced their love of the OTW and/or AO3.
4. Franzi reported that Fan Video & Multimedia is having a staffing change.
5. Eylul reported that Systems has a new staffer with at least one more candidate incoming, and that the committee is taking this opportunity to do some work on documentation.
6. sanders reported that Tag Wranglers has a lot of new volunteers, and encouraged Board members to stop by the wrangler chatroom and introduce themselves.
7. The author of a “Fan Manifesto” aimed at professional content creators has requested an official endorsement from the OTW. After reviewing the document, the Board voted not to endorse it. We agreed to provide feedback on the document and to encourage the author to work with Communications to promote it as an independent fannish activity (e.g. in a links roundup).
8. We have been contacted by the organization FixtheDMCA.org about joining their coalition. It is a group that supports our legal interests and in which we’d be in good company (other supporters include EFF, Reddit, the Internet Archive, etc.). The Board voted to join the coalition and announce this decision in a news post.

CLOSED SESSION

1. Discussion of Strategic Planning’s report on Open Doors.
2. Discussed a request from the Webmasters committee to change its name to “Web Strategy, Design and Development”; discussion to continue via e-mail.
3. Discussion of a confidential volunteer issue.

FINANCE UPDATE

The meeting was adjourned at 07:20 UTC.

Minutes approved by the Board on 10 August 2013.