ORGANIZATION FOR TRANSFORMATIVE WORKS
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
MINUTES OF THE REGULAR MEETING
17 August 2013, 19:00 UTC
PRESENT: Andrea Horbinski, Cat Meier, Eylul Dogruel, Ira Gladkova, Kristen Murphy, sanders
GUESTS: Lady Oscar, mumble
ABSENT: Franzeska Dickson
DECISIONS TAKEN SINCE THE LAST MEETING
1. The Board approved Hele as the new chair of Translation.
2. The Board approved a proposal from the lead of the Quality Assurance & Testing subcommittee to use a commissioned drawing as an internal QA&T mascot for team-building and morale purposes. The proposal has been okayed by Legal and does not involve any expense to the OTW.
3. The Board reviewed and approved a document outlining the role of the Open Doors Committee.
OPEN SESSION
1. Journal has posted a wiki document describing Journal and TWC positions; this came about as a result of a discussion with some Volunteers & Recruiting staffers which showed that they were unclear about who did what on the Journal committee versus TWC and who was and was not an OTW staffer. Hopefully this should clear up that confusion. The document is a description of how things currently work, not a proposal for changes.
2. Finance update (see chart below).
| 10-Aug | 17-Aug | Difference | |
| BoA | 117925.65 | 117760.09 | (165.56) |
| PayPal | 13311.47 | 13622.34 | 310.87 |
| CD | 10103.54 | 10103.54 | 0.00 |
| Total | 141340.66 | 141485.97 | 145.31 |
The largest expenses for the week were relatively small ones, including Campfire, Vanilla Forums (which will be cancelled soon; it can be easily renewed if we decide to do so in the future), and shipping. Also, Finance completed a significant project this week: the annual 990 federal tax forms have been filed and accepted by the IRS.
3. Ira shared that zie has started keeping track of hir work using to-do lists in the staff-viewable Board area of Basecamp, and is also using this to issue Board-wide reminders as necessary. If you’re curious about what Ira is working on or are wondering about follow-up on something, feel free to check out the to-do lists.
4. A Board member shared a suggestion that might tie into eventual liaising reform and could be helpful in the meantime while the liaising reform project is going on. Up to now, how information exchange between the Board and individual committees/chairs functions has been at the discretion of the particular liaison and chair(s). We could standardize that information exchange by asking the chairs to write short reports. This would make sure the committee’s doings are not filtered through or bottlenecked by the liaison — and as a bonus, these reports could be collated at the end of the month and turned into newsletter updates with relatively little fuss. The Board discussed this idea, focusing on the question of how frequent the reports should be; different reporting timeframes might be reasonable for different committees. sanders volunteered to draft an e-mail to allchairs to present the suggestion and ask what reporting interval would work best for each committee.
5. Hele has been selected as the new chair of the Translation committee.
6. Discussion of Board documentation project. Board members were reminded to sign up for unclaimed documents and encouraged to work collaboratively regardless of who has claimed a particular document. We set August 28 as the goal for completion of rough drafts of Phase 1 documents. Ira encouraged everyone to use Basecamp to-do lists to track progress.
7. AD&T contractor proposal: Although the prospective contractor has taken on a different project, the Board would like to move forward with review and approval of the proposal so that we’ll be poised to act as soon as the contractor’s schedule opens up again. We will start a 3-day discussion/vote thread on the mailing list.
CLOSED SESSION
1. Discussion of whether and how to fill the Board seat recently vacated by Maia Bobrowicz. The seat has one year remaining if we keep it on the normal term cycle. The following options were considered:
a) Leave the seat empty next year and put it up for election in November 2014. This would get it back onto the normal cycle, but would result in the Board having no more than eight directors in the meantime.
b) Put the seat up for election in November 2013 for a one-year term, and put it up for election again in November 2014. This would get the seat back onto the normal cycle, but would require figuring out a fair way to let 2013 candidates choose to run for that particular seat as opposed to the standard 3-year seats that would also be up for election. The concern was also expressed that one year might not be enough time for a new director to get up to speed and accomplish much.
c) Leave the seat out of the November 2013 election, appoint someone to fill the seat for one year, and put the seat up for election in November 2014. This would fill the seat, get it back onto the normal cycle, and avoid the complications involved in holding an election for a one-year seat, but it would deprive OTW members of the opportunity to fill the seat by election. The concern that one year might not be enough time for a director to accomplish much also applies to this option.
d) Adjust the seat’s term length and put it up for election in November 2013 for a normal three-year term. This option would not restore the seat to the normal term cycle and could cause complications in future elections. After discussing these options, the Board voted for option A: we will leave the seat empty next year and put it up for election in November 2014.
2. Update on Communications video project.
3. Discussion of a confidential staffing issue.
4. Secretary update: Kristen has been working to clear the backlog of Board meeting minutes that existed when she became Secretary in June. Currently there are four sets of minutes in various stages of drafting or approval. After that, the backlog will be finished and Kristen will start tackling the backlog she accumulated while working on the backlog (i.e., minutes from late June to present).
The meeting was adjourned at 21:10 UTC.
Minutes approved by the Board on 19 October 2013.