From the Executive Council: Sarah Stevens, Yanina Bellini Saibene, Michael D. Smith, Aleksandra Nenadic, Konrad Förstner, John Chodacki, Masami Yamaguchi
From the Core Team: Erin Becker, Talisha Sutton-Kenedy, Danielle Sieh
Agenda item 22/9: Approved minutes from the February meeting on
- Minutes from the previous EC meeting (Q1 meeting, February 28, 2022) were approved asynchronously via email on 2022-04-29 and the minutes were published in GitHub
- Async voting: I move to approve the minutes from the Feb 2022 meeting of the Executive Council. Maker: EC Member Nenadic, Second: EC Chair Stevens. Motion passes (6 yes, 0 no, 3 abstained)
- Covering the period January-March 2022, presented by Talisha Sutton-Kennedy, The Carpentries Operations Manager
- Income was more than expected; a lot of income came through the Instructor Training and memberships. Expenses were less than budgeted. Overall - a very good outlook for this quarter - brought more money than anticipated and spent less than anticipated.
- Balance at 2.2 million at the end of Q1, including grant funds and general funds. A little above budget:
- $1.4 million in grant funds (can only be used only for things specified in grant)
- $52,748 in general funds (can be used on anything)
- $293,269 in reserve
- Question from the EC: Regarding our actual memberships and training numbers being higher than expected, who tracks forecast and actuals? It would be interesting to see when they went up and why they were higher.
- Membership renewals are at pretty high right now (they have been high in the recent past, but are even higher at the moment). During budgeting, The Carpentries account for renewals at 75% rate, but in reality it’s actually higher. The Core Team usually shoots low for new memberships because it is hard to predict what will actually happen.
- EC recommendation: it would be good to lay out this information when a budget report is presented to show what was planned (budgeted) and what happened (actuals).
- For example, add a slide under financials for membership tracking to present: we anticipated X memberships, we got Y renewals and Z new memberships.
- And the same thing for income from workshops and Instructor Training
- This will also give a nice, easy-to-read overview of what is bringing in the most money
- Review draft of the annual financial report, presented by Talisha Sutton-Kennedy, The Carpentries Operations Manager
- Question from the EC: percentage of grant income is twice that of income from memberships, workshops, Instructor Training and others. Do we need to have a good amount of non-grant support to become an independent non-profit?
- No real formula for now, but from a budgeting perspective in the US, we’d want a larger percentage of the budget to be from programs (the things we do in service). Grant funds are also categorized in different sub-categories. Looking at general, reserve and grants, most of our grants are for programs. This is a good thing because grant money is restricted funding and we want to have a portion of unrestricted funds for operating the business. Membership fees and sponsorships can really support operations. Program funds have to be higher than operating dollars.
- Key self-sufficiency metric: non-grant related expenses should be covered from our programs alone.
- The updated standing committee (Officers Committee, Finance Committee, Communications Committee, Governance Committee, Program Committee) charters for 2022 were reviewed for approval
- Smaller inconsistent formatting issues were identified
- It was suggested that the committees keep the past charters’ text in the same documents and create the new ones each year on top, to preserve the history and for tracking purposes (e.g. past members and changes)
- For several of the charters, it was noted that the new version/formatting is much better to work with than the previous one. For example, for the Finance Committee it is difficult to identify new, unique things that change from year to year - many of the past objectives would simply remain the same. The suggestion was to nail the common format/portions of the charter down and only ask for a certain number of things to be reviewed each year.
- Voting: I move to approve the EC standing committee charters for 2022. Maker: Sarah Stevens, Second: EC John Chodacki. Motion passes (7 yes, 0 no, 0 abstained)
- Quarterly standing committee reports were shared and verbal and non-verbal updates from the standing committees were presented on their activities for the Q1 2022 period
- Officers Committee key activities during Q1 2022:
- The meeting between the Executive Council, the Core Team and the CoCC and Core Team was held in April 2022
- Code of Conduct Committee reorganization - there are a lot of new volunteers joining the CoCC which may address some of the previous concerns
- The Officers Committee will monitor this activity for the next 6-12 months.
- Finance Committee activities during Q1 2022:
- The Finance Committee met with The Carpentries Executive Director to discuss:
- the development of The Carpentries financial model
- the timeline for the upcoming Director of Fundraising hire
- Financial report release
- In order for the Finance Committee to provide feedback to The Carpentries Business Team regarding the development of a long-term financial model, the Business Team will review financial reports from 2018-2021 and The Carpentries Membership tiers and identify opportunities and threats. This information will be shared with the Finance Committee one week prior to the next Finance Committee? meeting which will be 6 June 2022 during which the committee will have a deeper discussion about the long-term financial sustainability and figuring out how the financial plan supports The Carpentries in becoming an independent non-profit organization.
- The Finance Committee recommends that The Carpentries begin filling out paperwork to become a registered non-profit organization sooner rather than later as it will help us learn and develop a stronger roadmap for transitioning out of fiscal sponsorship. 501c3 discussions (on becoming a non-profit organization) will be the big focus for the Finance Committee this year.
- The Finance Committee discussed having an in-person meeting in California with CxORE (given that many of the involved parties are based there) to build out our transition plan more concretely.
- Question: Are we definitely transitioning to the non-profit model?
- Unless something really amazing comes up in the process, we are certain that this will be happening.
- Question: Is there a timeline for transitioning to the non-profit model?
- There is no strictly defined timeline. No set milestones. Initially, a timeline of a couple of years was mentioned for the transition, however the Finance Committee is pushing for a faster move (e.g. within a year) - there are some clear paths for the transition that are available for us and the recommendation is not to spend time investigating every edge case and every possibility but to start on one of those clear paths and amend along the way if need be.
- An investment worth the money would be legal support to help with the process since we are new to this.
- Question: How will this affect the governance? What will the impacts be?
- The legal council can help us with that. We (the EC) function, essentially, as a board of directors already; we don't call ourselves that because we can't legally. Won't necessarily be a large transition to how we currently function. But there may be some small changes.
- There are a lot of templates and instructions and examples when you register as a 501c3 (non-profit) organization in the US to help us with the transition, which is great news.
- The Finance Committee met with The Carpentries Executive Director to discuss:
- Communications Committee activities during Q1 2022:
- Planned a blog posts to introduce the new members of each standing committee - one already went out
- What kind of communication should be done other than in English?
- Blog post for August 2021 - January 2022 Standing Committees activities report to be published end of April
- Governance Committee activities during Q1 2022:
- Started the work on the new parliamentary procedures (built on Martha’s rules), which will also be discussed at the EC retreat in July 2022 with the whole EC.
- Focus of the Governance Committee for this year: parliamentary procedures, election update, Bylaws update.
- Program Committee activities during Q1 2022:
- Last year Trainer’s community came up with a Trainer Leadership proposal where they wanted to establish a trainer leadership governance committee that will provide a voice for the trainers and work on the instructor training policy:
- After a number of small changes requested by the Program Committee to the above 2 document, the recommendation was to approve the proposal (pending addressing the requested updates) and the EC voted in favor.
- Voting: I move to approve the Trainers Leadership Committee and their updated powers and responsibilities document. Maker: Sarah Stevens 2022, Second: Konrad Förstner 2022. Motion passes (6 yes, 0 no, 0 abstained)
- Updates to the Committee & Task Force Policies in The Carpentries Handbook and Bylaws are in progress but some clarifications are still needed. Aiming to have the changes ready by the next EC meeting.
- Review and discussion of strategic plan activities, presented by Erin Becker, Associate Director of The Carpentries
- We have now passed the end of the 2nd year of our strategic plan!
- Accomplishments from the Core Team against the strategic plan’s goals have been summarised in the blog post
- As part of the Strategic Plan review, the main goals for Year 3 (April 2022 - March 2023) were looked at:
- Continue to empower community to develop new lessons and lower the barrier for contributions to the Carpentries (Lesson) Incubator
- Develop workflow for responding to accessibility information and feedback and better accommodate instructors and helpers
- To this end, the Core Team hire a new Accessibility Manager (Brynn Elliott) to supervise this work and implement a roadmap
- Got back an in depth report from the consulting group, understood.org, that we worked with last year. Will be digging through and implementing
- Create a roadmap for improving accessibility to various resources (lessons, infrastructure, other online resources and workflows used to sign-up to teach)
- Create structures and pathways for identifying and utilising training opportunities for the Core Team to improve skills in management and other contributor roles
- Develop a plan to work with local and regional communities to ensure they are supported appropriately
- Question from the EC: what/where are the metrics that are attached to the goals so that we know that we are successful?
- The Core Team’s response was that some goals have very concrete metrics but other goals do not. Kelly Barnes (Deputy Director of Instructor Training, from the Core Team) will be going into a Deputy Director of Assessment position (on one of the grants) to specifically focus on defining and track metrics across programs, and identifying and filling in gaps in metrics definitions and collection
- Retreat update, presented by Danielle Sieh, the Core Team’s Workshop Administrator
- Time and location: 17 - 20 July 2022, Lisbon, Portugal
- In person with possibility to join virtually
- Accommodation - shared house
- Schedule for the retreat was discussed (arrival/departure of people attending in person as well as the agenda and activities) and travel rules/restrictions