[Ofa_boardplus] OFA XWG Agenda 9/14

[Coulter, Susan K]

From the 2018 draft budget:
Our projected operating expenses without the conference or interop (as they are supposed to break even) and without the $10k optional expenditure for maintainer travel/support is $129,798.

Reserving 2 years operating expenses in the face of zero income is not reasonable in my opinion.
If every member did not renew for 2 years - there is no OFA.
If every member did not renew for 1 year - there is no OFA.
If 1/2 the members did not renew for 1 year - the OFA continues, but our survival would be seriously in doubt.
Slumps are one thing - mass exodus is another.

I contend that 1 full year of operating expenses as our Operating Reserves is plenty.

As for how to spend the operating reserves:

Being conservative in our approach is commendable, but there is a time to be conservative and there is a time to be bold.

Both of these “positions” were are talking about funding are contract positions.
Neither one is enough to be a full time job for anyone with the skills we are looking for.
So, these positions are not that different from what Sean suggests as “specific development” work.
They will more than likely be filled by someone looking for part-time or adjunct work.

If we do not fund these 2 positions in FY18, I fear the OFA will lose even more ground.
If we lose our current ED, progress on various projects will stall.
There is not enough participation from the volunteer board members to keep this boat fully afloat.

If we do not hire a maintainer (or at the least contract for specific development work) the code base may suffer and our standing in the community will stall or regress.  

We cannot wait an entire year to make this move.

For those who do not want to spend reserves on these positions - please immediately start a conversation with whomever is funding the OFA membership for your organization.  As I said on the call - I have done this at LANL and I have tentative approval for a doubling of the membership fee.

As promised, I have attached the talking points I used, and the modified contracts used to ballpark the “doubling” of the fee.

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: OFApoints.docx
Type: application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document
Size: 131599 bytes
Desc: OFApoints.docx
URL: <http://lists.openfabrics.org/pipermail/ofa_boardplus/attachments/20170914/d8ab3f19/attachment.docx>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: MaintainerContract2017.docx
Type: application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document
Size: 34620 bytes
Desc: MaintainerContract2017.docx
URL: <http://lists.openfabrics.org/pipermail/ofa_boardplus/attachments/20170914/d8ab3f19/attachment-0001.docx>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: ExecDirContract2017.docx
Type: application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document
Size: 34428 bytes
Desc: ExecDirContract2017.docx
URL: <http://lists.openfabrics.org/pipermail/ofa_boardplus/attachments/20170914/d8ab3f19/attachment-0002.docx>
-------------- next part --------------
An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: ATT00001.txt
URL: <http://lists.openfabrics.org/pipermail/ofa_boardplus/attachments/20170914/d8ab3f19/attachment.txt>