Difference between revisions of "Minutes:2008 BOSC Meeting"

Latest revision as of 05:04, 17 November 2008

Agenda

• Old Business
  1. Approval of minutes from 2007
• New Business
  1. Current Board
     • Confirm past term expirations of those who did not run again for the Board.
     • What to do about the Secretary seat?
     • Some of the items on the agenda here need a legitimate vote by the Board (with prior notification and quorum satisfied). Should plan for a (presumably virtual) voting Board meeting soon afterwards.
     • How can we better ensure quorum?
  2. Voting on the board appointments
     • Kam Dalhquist has already served as a major organizer for BOSC and is interested in helping lead the OBF to achieve more outreach and education.
     • Darin London has served as BOSC chair for the past 4 years
     • Strengthen connection with O|B|J
     • Procedure for appointment of additional BOD members
  3. Financial report (Treasurer)
     • Account standing, reserves
     • 501(c)3 accounting and filing status
     • Sponsorship accounting
  4. BOSC
     • Short 2007 report (attendance, talk highlights)
     • BOSC 2008 summary (attendance, talk hightlights)
     • Should BOSC 2009 to be held in conjuction with ISMB2009?
     • Possibilities for including submitted papers for a publication.
  5. OBF Membership accounting and drive to register more members
     • Membership forms physical records
     • Members who are citizens of trade-restricted countries - legal advice, file for exemption?
     • Form doesn't give date, need to amend
  6. OBF future directions
  7. Review of By-Laws (Parliamentarian)
     • 10-days prior notice of Board meeting requirement: need to change or have a standing Board meeting (BoF) on day 1 or 2 of BOSC
     • Not clear who elects officers - members may, but not a requirement, Directors can elect officers too. Leave as is or change?

Minutes

Location: Radisson Harbourfront, 5th floor poolside, July 18, 2008

Present:

• current BoD members: Jason Stajich, Hilmar Lapp
• Director nominee: Kam Dahlquist
• Guests: Aaron Mackey, Mauricio Herrera Cuadro, Michael Heuer, Paul Gordon, Andrew Jenkinson, Saravanabamuttu Gnaneshan

Meeting minutes:

Approval of 2007 meeting notes

• unanimously approved

Introductions of present BoD members and guests

OBF Board

• Term expirations confirmed.
• Board currently consists of Jason Stajich, Hilmar Lapp, and Chris Dagdigian.
• How to ensure Board meetings to meet bylaw requirements?
  • Teleconference over the phone
  • IRC not favored, might pose undue burden, also identification might be problematic
  • multi-jabber would be a possibility but also disfavored as creating a barrier (and technical issues)
  • Teleconference will be our future modus for binding vote-entitled Board meetings, meetings at BOSC will have BoF/membership discussion character
• Soliciting new leadership contribution
  • OBF is a volunteer effort.
  • Ability of people to commit time may depend on their institution's or employer's commitment to support this.
  • Frequent observation of volunteer projects is that there is a small group of people doing everything, getting burned out, and then moving on, requiring a new leadership to be recruited.
  • One can only encourage people to join if there is critical mass, professional conduct.
  • Consider projects and organizations that weren't presenting (Cytoscape and Ensembl as examples).
• Size of Board: bylaws doesn't make a stipulation.
• Election procedure
  • Explained procedure laid out by the bylaws.
  • Nominating committee should network and advertise broadly to obtain a pool of Director candidates.
  • Aaron Mackey volunteers to serve on the Nominating Committee.
  • Set ourselves a deadline of Sep 15 to have the nomination process complete and hold the BoD meeting the elects them.
  • Will approach members and consituents for suggestions of whom to approach.
  • Should aim for electing at least two new Directors, possibly 3.
  • Kam is on slate to be nominated for Director, and is committed to serve.
  • Should invite Darin London whether we would be interested in serving.
  • Should invite Toshiaki Katayama, or someone else he suggests from OBJ, to serve.
  • Would we want to be exclusionary to anyone? Only to people or organizations who would want to commercialize the organization, in whatever aspect.
• Secretary officer will temporarily held by Parliamentarian.

Financial report

• No update from Chris Dagdigian.
• Haven't lost any money, still have about $30,000 in two accounts.
• Kam will get ISMB account straightened out.

BOSC

• Bad catering for the meeting (only coffee, less-than-great lunch)
• No computer support for presentation.
• Need to resign ourselves to the fact that ISCB is factually no longer accountable to the SIGs since they absorb the losses and keep the profits.
• Concern that ISCB will factor the accounting such so that our historical surplus drops to zero, and may cut BOSC then.
• Is there an alternative venue for people to present instead of at BOSC?
  • Possibly OSCON, but who would attend / be able to attend OSCON?
  • ISMB covers many of the areas that motivates our constituency to come.
  • Should we hold the meeting at the same place at ISMB but organize it separately?
  • Conclusion: Hold BOSC 2009 in conjunction with ISMB.
    • But don't want to end up with the same situation as in Brisbane.
    • Supporting organizing committee attendance; OBF needs to be prepared to absorb the travel of the BOSC organizing committee chair (if the person's attempts to secure funding from elsewhere fail).
• Structure of BOSC:
  • Balance between demonstrations and presentations should be improved.
  • Could be very useful to fold OBF project tutorials (or others) into BOSC.
  • Software could be subject of talks on the first and of tutorials on the second day. Should presenters come prepared to give tutorials?
  • Content seems to work though for user-developers in terms of getting the information that they were looking for?
• Marketing the conference can be improved upon a lot.
  • Professional review with for the first time got feedback to the submitters.
  • Open source requirements were pretty rigorously enforced.
  • Emphasis on quality should help with marketing in the future.
• BOSC 2007 attendance was 97 (registered)
  • Have 77 primary sign-ups this year.

BOSC proceedings:

• Page charges from BMC are very high (BP850 normally, BP500 in bulk (BP10,000 for 20 papers) but then we have to do all the work ourselves).
• Authors may not have the incentive to use this venue because they may want to publish a full paper in a higher-impact venue.
• Should BOSC have Proceedings?
  • People should have the possibility to present at BOSC.
  • We are not at the level of quality as ISMB is.
  • The main thing that comes out of BOSC is code, presentations don't really add the main value.
  • We're not ready for having
• Looks like this is a non-issue?

OBF fund drive

• Using training to gain funds?
• Having more people on the Board should give us more possibilities to explore opportunities to raise funds.
• Sponsorship
  • BioTeam donates bandwidth, colocation space, domain purchases. Should acknowledge that appropriately on the OBF website.
  • Have sponsorship for BOSC from Helicos ($1000) and an anonymous donor ($250). The latter will fund the student travel fellowship and the former will subsidize the keynote speaker.
    • Possibly remaining funds will be used towards travel fellowships in 2009.
  • May in the future need to secure sponsorship to fund organizer travel.

Membership

• Trade restrictions:
  • Can we re-incorporate in Canada?
  • Should we seek legal advice? Yes, pro-bono if possible.
• Should chang the form to include date, having that is useful.