Minutes:2014 Nov ConfCall

Posted on November 18, 2014 by admin

Agenda

Venue: to be held by conference call on Nov 18, 2014, 12.30pm EST (17:30 UTC) 
Dial-in Information: +1-857-216-2939 PIN: 62534 http://www.uberconference.com/hlapp

  1. Old business
  2. New business
    1. Review of 2014 financials
    2. BOSC 2015: update from the 2015 chairs (Nomi, Peter)
    3. Update on ISCB “Community of Special Interest” (COSI) (Peter)

Minutes

Etherpad for notes: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/OBF-BoD-Meeting-Nov2014

Attending:

  • Board Members present: Peter Cock, Chris Dagdigian, Chris Fields, Nomi Harris, Hilmar Lapp, Jason Stajich.
  • Board Member regrets: None.
  • Guests: None.

Minutes:

Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Public Board Meeting, held Tuesday 18 November 2014, from 17:30 UTC/GMT, by teleconference using UberConference via https://www.uberconference.com/hlapp or +1-857-216-2939 with PIN 62534.


Meeting called to order at 17:37 UTC/GMT

Approval of previous board meeting minutes (Dec 2013)’

As posted on http://www.open-bio.org/wiki/Minutes:2013_Dec_ConfCall

Unanimously approved.

Financial Report for 2013

Hilmar described this as relatively complex, given move from an OBF bank account, to SPI held funds (who use a cash based accountancy approach).

In comparison, the 2012 financial report listed pending expenses for 2013.

The report is currently on this branch, https://github.com/OBF/obf-docs/tree/financial-report-2013 – the revision discussed was https://github.com/OBF/obf-docs/blob/e05413fdcf9bc1b43e171b67651c81d3d5bdc7da/Financial-Reports/Financial%20report%202013.md

This report deliberately includes the ISCB held BOSC escrow account which forms a sizeable part of the OBF assets. Note that as of 2014 with the launch of the ISCB COSI scheme, we are now more able to spend all year round rather than just directly connected to BOSC each Summer.

Our only concern is the Amazon hosting costs (which might be reduced) versus the OBF income (typically BOSC sponsorship related).

Report unanimously approved

Preview of the Financial Report for 2014

BOSC 2014 preliminary summary is that with sponsorship it came out about even. Server costs are our main cost outside BOSC (at about $190/month), and we talked about that a lot…

Chris D reports that with some restructuring we might lower our costs (e.g. are we using the right machine size for buildbot, or should be pre-buy server space a year at a time) and/or get a grant from Amazon. On the other hand, hosting of physical machines is also viable – or a hybrid approach. The current OBF bandwidth needs are trivial. RackSpace is a potential AWS alternative, who might be willing to support Open Source projects (at least they have links to the Python Software Foundation).

ChrisD confirms the main website/wiki is running on a medium server, plus we have five micro instances covering MailMan, RedMine, Events, BuildBot, etc. RedMine might need a medium instance (although we plan to phase this out).

Note can’t pre-pay the micro instances, but should pre-pay a year at a time if possible, and think about moving the wiki etc to ReadTheDocs or GitHub pages/wiki.

We may need a final BOSC 2013 account from ISCB, since we have a discrepancy likely due to a late keynote speaker reimbursement.

Hilmar would like to complete the FY2014 report much sooner than it took for the FY2013 report.

Meeting Adjourned at 18:34 UTC

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