Board meeting, August 16th, 2021
Board members present
- Michael Schultheiss (schultmc) (President)
- Stephen Frost (Snow-Man) (Vice-President)
- Tim Potter (tpot) (Secretary)
- Joe Conway (jconway)
- Forrest Fleming (fsf)
- Milan Kupcevic (milan)
- Chris Lamb (lamby)
Board members partially present
- None
Board members absent with regrets
- None
Board members absent
- Martin Zobel-Helas (zobel) (Treasurer)
- Héctor Orón Martínez (zumbi)
Registered guests present
- Jonatas L. Nogueira (jesusalva), The Mana World
- Célestin Matte (Perdu), contractor
These are the minutes for the August 16th, 2021 SPI Board Meeting, held at 20:00 UTC in #spi on irc.spi-inc.org. LOG.
President's Report
SPI’s insurance broker has presented SPI a renewal quote for its Directors and Officers insurance. The insurance provider is offering the renewal for the same price as 2020 - earlier indications were there may be significant cost increase due to industry conditions but the price increase did not materialize this year. Martin Michlmayr has been working with our auditor to get our 2020 financial statements audited. He is also working with the auditing firm on filing our New York State and Federal annual filings. SPI has received a draft from the auditing firm that is currently under review. We have received a 6 month extension for the time to file and are confident the filings will be completed by the November 15, 2021 deadline. Continued thanks to SPI Vice President, Stephen Frost, for handling contracting with SPI's contractors. Stephen continues to do a fantastic job working with our contractors and legal counsel.
Stephen Frost presented a Vice-President's Report:
SPI continues to work on modernizing our Information Technology (IT) infrastructure with the help of our contractors. To that end, we are working to migrate all @spi-inc.org addresses to another email platform, decommissioning those addresses which are no longer needed or in use along the way. If you are aware of any special arrangements regarding @spi-inc.org addresses and have not already heard from SPI regarding those addresses, please reach out to myself or the board to discuss. We are looking to finalize the migration soon. SPI is working to consolidate maintenance of DNS registrations and to get out of the DNS server running business. To that end, SPI, with its contractors, is migrating all domains to Gandi for both registration and DNS server services. This approach allows projects to have access to maintain their DNS records directly with reliable DNS server services while allowing SPI to further reduce the amount of IT infrastructure it is responsible for. If you have domains registered by SPI or are using SPI's DNS servers and have not discussed plans for your domain with SPI, please reach out to myself or the board to discuss.
Treasurer's report
Report presented by Michael Schultheiss on behalf of Martin Zobel-Helas.
The SPI treasury team is continuing to process requests and is striving for more timely ticket handling. The backlog is being processed but if there are any board members who would like to assist with treasury tasks, additional help is always welcome.
Secretary's report
Nothing major to report. Website is up to date and I've just sent out renewals for our conflict of interest policies to the directors. Thanks to those who have responded already. Martin Michlmayr reports that we have a first draft of the 2020 audit.
Vote On Minutes For Previous Meetings
Vote on minutes for meeting Monday July 12th 2021
| Joe Conway | Abstain |
| Forrest Fleming | Yes |
| Stephen Frost | Yes |
| Milan Kupcevic | Yes |
| Chris Lamb | Yes |
| Tim Potter | Yes |
| Michael Schultheiss | Yes |
Vote passes with 6 yes, 0 no and 1 abstain.
Items up for discussion
Officer elections
Officers are elected via informal vote usually during the AGM. For the 2021-2022 year, the directors voted the following directors into the officer positions as shown below:
- Michael Schultheiss to remain as President
- Stephen Frost to remain as Vice-President
- Tim Potter to remain as Secretary.
The position of Treasurer remains open.
Resolution 2021-08-16.mcs.1: GeekBeacon as an SPI associated project
GeekBeacon was offered SPI Associated Project status per a vote at the 2021-06-22 meeting. Michael Schultheiss reached out on 2021-07-31 to inquire whether they accept and learned both of the listed project liaisons are mostly unreachable due to extended leaves of absence for personal reasons. They're still interested in possibly joining SPI and would like to discuss what that entails once they're available. This resolution extends the expiration of the invitation to 2021-11-30.
| Joe Conway | Yes |
| Forrest Fleming | Yes |
| Stephen Frost | Yes |
| Milan Kupcevic | Yes |
| Chris Lamb | Yes |
| Tim Potter | Yes |
| Michael Schultheiss | Yes |
Vote passes with 7 yes, 0 no, and 0 abstain.
Any other business
During the Vice-President's report it was decided to re-register and retain the domain names for inactive projects instead of letting them expire and possibly be picked up by spammers. Any individual decision regarding retaining may be revisited if the situation requires, but our default stance should be to renew and then take action if that is problematic for some reason.
Officer communications (email, calendar etc) is being migrated to Google GSuite to separate SPI-specific email from personal email.
Adjournment
The meeting was adjourned until Monday September 13th 2021 at 20:00 UTC in #spi on irc.spi-inc.org.
Appendix A: Current Board Membership
| Last elected | Name | Role |
|---|---|---|
| July 2021 | Michael Schultheiss | President |
| July 2021 | Stephen Frost | Vice President |
| July 2020 | Timothy Potter | Secretary |
| July 2020 | Joe Conway | |
| July 2019 | Forrest Fleming | |
| July 2021 | Milan Kupcevic | |
| July 2019 | Chris Lamb | |
| July 2019 | Héctor Orón Martínez | |
| July 2019 | Martin Zobel-Helas |