ORGANIZATION FOR TRANSFORMATIVE WORKS
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
MINUTES OF THE REGULAR MEETING
3 August 2013, 0:00 UTC
PRESENT: Andrea Horbinski, Cat Meier, Franzeska Dickson, Ira Gladkova, Kristen Murphy, sanders
GUESTS: Alison Watson, Lady Oscar
ABSENT: Eylul Dogruel
DECISIONS TAKEN SINCE THE LAST MEETING
1. Approved four new staff members for Internationalization & Outreach.
2. Approved two new staff members for Tag Wrangling.
3. Approved one new staff member for Volunteers & Recruiting.
OPEN SESSION
1. Update from Volunteers & Recruiting:
a) We’re finishing up Communications graphics volunteers and internal Tag Wrangling staff inductions and are about to begin Internationalization & Outreach staff induction.
b) We’ve approved a committee proposal to make recruiting bi-weekly/fortnightly for the remainder of the term, with the regular three slots per opening that’s been in place. We hope this will provide us more time and staff availability to work on our own staff training documents so we can recruit, and also consolidate the roles that will open each time to provide a wider range of available roles for potential volunteers. Information about these changes and the available dates will be announced on allchairs within the next week.
c) We’ve run into a problem with Basecamp where certain tools and features work differently for volunteers (who have access due to their service on a committee with volunteers or a workgroup), or are not available at all. For the moment, we’ve opted to switch these volunteers to the OTW Staffers group so they have full range of Basecamp tools. We’ll revisit this issue when we are fully staffed.
d) Any issue with the Interactive Tutorials for tools can be pointed out to us any time so we can make appropriate changes, with thanks to the the personnel helping to keep our training documentation up to date.
2. Finance update (see chart below).
| — | 20-Jul | 27-Jul | 3-Aug |
| BoA | 135,121.60 | 135,080.70 | 119,753.50 |
| PayPal | 12,034.00 | 12,305.58 | 12,486.46 |
| CD | 10,100.22 | 10,103.54 | 10,103.54 |
| Total | 157,255.82 | 157,489.82 | 142,343.50 |
3. Tag Wrangling has just requested another staffer and has more volunteers incoming.
4. Internationalization & Outreach has finished recruiting and has 4 new staffers coming in.
5. We are in the process of recruiting a new chair for the Translation committee. Eylul has volunteered to coordinate with Franzi to lead the search.
6. Discussion of Board’s recent open house chat for staff and volunteers. A Board member suggested that in the future we should discourage each other from spending excessive amounts of time at such events. (The open house was scheduled for three blocks of time, with the idea that Board members would sign up for specific shifts and could optionally hang out in between shifts; at least one Board member stayed for seven hours straight.) A staff member shared that the Support committee originally scheduled its open house chats with several sessions concentrated in a 24-hour period, but has switched to holding sessions at rotating times on separate days; this seems to work better than trying to do lots of short sessions on the same day with breaks in between, because it’s hard to leave during the breaks.
7. Discussion of the hardware purchase proposal from Systems. The Phase I equipment (approved 20 July 2013) has been purchased and should be delivered by 28 August. We discussed the timing of Phases 2-4 in relationship to the October membership drive and target dates for the equipment to be ordered. Discussion of Phases 2-4 will continue via e-mail with the goal of concluding a vote by Wednesday.
8. Discussion of the Board documentation project. In summary, the docs project is an initiative to create and/or update a large amount of documentation related to the Board, how the Board interacts with the rest of the org, and Board-level guidelines and directives (such as the general steps for major or cross-committee projects that will eventually need Board approval). We’re planning to set aside one month in which we do not take on any new business (aside from emergencies) and focus on getting those docs in order. Before the beginning of that one-month period we will circulate an internal announcement including a list of the documents to be worked on. We discussed whether or not to also do an external announcement, and felt it would be better to do so after the project when we will have concrete results to report. We discussed proposed dates for the project (19 August – 19 September), discussed how work on the documents will be prioritized, assigned, and tracked, and made edits to the announcement draft. Final approval of the announcement will proceed via e-mail with the goal of posting the announcement on Monday.
9. Reminder to please chime in on the e-mail thread about dates for the August org-wide meeting.
CLOSED SESSION
1. Discussion of a confidential staff issue.
2. Discussion of Communications video project.
The meeting was adjourned at 02:17 UTC.
Minutes approved by the Board on 25 October 2013.