Minutes of the 2004 member meeting

The members of the Python Software Foundation (the "Corporation") held its annual meeting on March 25, 2004 at the George Washington University's Cafritz Center in Washington, D.C. Jeremy Hylton, secretary and treasurer, presided over the meeting. The following members attended the meeting:

David Ascher (also representing ActiveState)
Steve Holden
Jim Fulton (also representing Zope Corporation)
Fred Drake
Jeremy Hylton
Thomas Wouters
Barry Warsaw
Paul Prescod
Trent Mick
Brett Cannon
Anthony Baxter
Neil Schemenauer
Reggie Dugard representing Merfin LLC.
Eric Jones
Tim Peters
David Goodger
Laura Creighton representing AB Strakt
Stephan Deibel
Aahz
Michael McLay
Neil Norwitz
Paul Dubois
Guido van Rossum
Andrew Kuchling (also representing Advanced Simulation Technology Inc.)
Martin v. Löwis

The following members were represented by proxy:

Proxy	for
Guido van Rossum	Michael C. Olson Matthew Dixon Cowles Thomas Heller Jack Jansen
Neal Norwitz	Jason Tishler
Barry Warsaw	Skip Montonaro Peter Schneider-Kamp Jason Abate (Hostway) Ka-Ping Yee
Martin von Loewis	Marc-André Lemburg
Steve Holden	Alex Martelli
David Ascher	Neil Hodgson Kevin Altis
Jeremy Hylton	Vinay Sajip Sam Rushing
Tim Peters	Greg C. Ewing
Brett Cannon	Raymond Hettinger

Board Report

Jeremy Hylton presented the annual report of the board, summarizing reports from individual committees. The Python Support Committee (chaired by Marc-André Lemburg) has focus on fund raising. The Paypal system was established and first donations were received. The website features a ranking based on priorities. To date, 258 donations were received. The board has established the notion of a pending sponsor member, which is a donor who is likely to be voted as a sponsor member at the next member meeting. The python.org domain was transferred from CNRI, and work is on progress on selecting contributor agreement. The most recent suggestion from the lawyer to replace suggested three contributor agreements with an individual one, has been well received by the directors.

Treasurer Report

Neal Norwitz gave a brief summary of the PSF's financial status. The current balance are assets of $115k. He then responded to detailed questions from the members on specific numbers regarding the donations.

Sponsor members

Jeremy presented a list of new proposed sponsor members. 43 ballots were collected, and all of the proposed members have been elected, with the following number of aye/nay votes:

Array BioPharma (38 ayes)
BizRate.com (34 ayes)
Enthough (39 ayes)
Google (43 ayes)
IronPort (40 ays)
Open Source Application Foundation (43 ayes)
Industrial Light & Magic (42 ayes, 1 nay)
Opsware (37 ayes)
ZeOmega (40 ayes)

Member voting

After discussion, all proposed nominated members have been elected, with the following votes:

Hye-Shik Chang (39 ayes)
Andrew Dalke (39 ayes)
Jeff Elkner (38 ayes, 2 nays)
Kurt B. Kaiser (40 ayes)
Gustavo Niemeyer (38 ayes)
Armin Rigo (43 ayes)
Trevor Toenjes (34 ayes, 1 nay)
Danny Yoo (43 ayes)

Board election

After discussion, the following members were elected, with the following number of votes:

David Ascher (33)
Stephan Deibel (24)
Steve Holden (24)
Jeremy Hylton (29)
Martin v. Löwis (35)
Tim Peters (35)
Guido van Rossum (26)

Two candidates were not elected: Raymond Hettinger (16) and Marc-André Lemburg (18).

Discussion on Electronic votes

Marc-André Lemburg has proposed that electronic voting among members should become possible. This involves two aspects: the bylaws need to be changed, and a trusted technical procedure must be established. The board has asked members for feedback whether such a change to the bylaws should be made. In general, all members who spoke up were in favour of allowing electronic votes. Thomas Wouters commented that a procedure must provide secrecy, and he is willing to help establishing such a procedure.

Discussion on spending money

The board has asked members how they would like to spend the funds that the PSF has available through grants, after withdrawing necessary funds for organizing PyCon, and paying administrative and legal expenses. Jeremy Hylton proposed that a grant committee should be established, which should then refrain from applying for their own funds. Michael McLay volunteered to work on this committee.

Discussion on helping out

A number of members expessed willingness to help in the day-to-day business of the PSF. Anthony Baxter pointed out that most members, however, were not informed of ways in which they could help. Paul Dubois suggested that roundup nosy lists should be used to disseminate information among members. That lead discussion to the future of round-up. Thomas Wouters reported that XS4ALL will sponsor three machines for Python in the near future: the web server, the mail server, and a third one, which could run services like roundup. Andrew Kuchling asked what happened to the web committee. Jeremy reported that not much has happened. Barry Warsaw commented that the pydotorg list solves only a part of the problem. Andrew asked why Tim Parkin's efforts in improving the website had no results. Guido van Rossum commented that he was in contact with Tim to resolve open issues. There was further discussion on organizing the website.

Adjournment

There being no further business, the meeting was adjourned.