Participating
Leah Silen, Travis Oliphant, Anthony Scopatz, Ralf Gommers, Jarrod Millman, Prabhu Ramachandran.
Not Attending
Fernando Perez, Emmanuelle Gouillart, Andy R. Terrel, Perry Greenfield
Approval of Prior Minutes
Minutes look fine, and are approved.
Old Business
- Sloan Foundation
Travis mentioned that Sloan may be interested in providing seed funding for the technical fellowships. The idea being that once it is started, it will be easier to get additional funding to continue it from industry. Ralf and Jarrod will contact Sloan to make a small initial proposal with maybe funding for around 1 mentor and 1-2 fellowships.
- Purchase of a Mac for Christoph Deil
Decided to host in a co-location facility. Ralf will follow-up with Anthony to make this happen.
- Didrik Pinte
Jarrod will take an off-line inventory about whether we should increase the size of the board, change members, or wait a bit longer before revisiting the issue.
- PyCon
We have an OSS sponsor booth and two passes. Jarrod will try to help man the booth on March 15-17. We will organize a BoF and possibly an in-person board meeting.
Team Reports
Membership
Fundraising
Publicity/Promotion
Grants/Fellowships
Finance
- No reports yet.
New Business
- Boot Camp for Women in Science and Engineering
General interest, so Travis will contact Greg Wilson to get a specific proposal for the board to consider.
- PyGotham – Travis
General concern about this not being focused on scientific programming. We could try to organize a scientific track. Non-Python scientifically-oriented conferences may be more interesting than general Python conferences.
- PyData sponsors
Travis described that PyData proceeds will go to NumFocus. The PyData site would like to advertise this fact.
For informational purposes, Continuum defines proceeds as money earned from ticket sales and sponsorships beyond fixed costs (venue, website, food, etc.) plus the travel of Leah and other community conference organizers and participants (keynotes, speakers, etc.) to the conference. I need to check on this, but I believe the ticket sale costs are set up to basically break even with about 2 sponsors and a full conference. All of this is subject to change as the ability for Continuum to under-write the conference varies.
This is just an example. Other companies who under-write conferences may have different metrics and approaches for determining proceeds. We should be willing to engage with as many people as possible at this point. Conferences can be a useful source of revenue for NumFOCUS as long as they have significant sponsorship.
Ralf, Jarrod, and Anthony expressed concern that conferences can also have significant cost and NumFOCUS should be very careful before agreeing to under-write a conference itself.
Next Meeting
February 4, 2013
