Tag Archive for 'Board meetings'

August 23, 2009: We’re now a for-profit enterprise

Published
by
Suzanne Yada
on August 23, 2009
in High Priority
. 5 Comments

This afternoon, the CoPress board unanimously voted to switch from a nonprofit to a for-profit organization. It’s a big deal and a new direction for CoPress.

So why did we do it? It opens up a lot of expansion opportunities we wouldn’t have had with a nonprofit status. The move allows us to share equity with the people who have worked so hard to build CoPress up, and it opens the doors for investment opportunities. Though we lose the tax benefits and the warm fuzziness of being a nonprofit, we think CoPress has the potential of being a self-sustaining business in its own right.

Members in attendance:

  • Daniel Bachhuber
  • Joey Baker
  • Ryan Sholin
  • Suzanne Yada
  • Jackie Hai
  • Andrew Dunn
  • Bryan Murley
 
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May 31, 2009: The first board meeting

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by
Suzanne Yada
on June 1, 2009
in Medium Priority
. 0 Comments

The CoPress board met over Skype on Sunday for our first official board meeting, and we continued to mark off a list of firsts. Andrew Dunn is the inaugural chairman of the board, Suzanne Yada (hey, that’s me!) the vice-chairwoman and Jackie Hai is the secretary. We also have a shiny new set of bylaws, but more of that in a second.

First, the people on the call:

Bylaws

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Internal reflection results, May 2009

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by
Daniel
on May 31, 2009
in High Priority
. 2 Comments

A few weeks ago, I put together a Google Docs survey as a sort of internal reflection for the end of the school year. Five people responded out of a total of 11 people that are on our internal list. For each question I presented in the survey, I’ll add several of what I think are the most telling and useful responses.

What are a few of our strengths?

  • Core team is dedicated, puts a lot of energy into content, new ideas.
  • Amazing group of people with a diverse range of talents and abilities
  • Our services are clearly needed and in high demand
  • We’re high profile; there are a lot of people aware of and interested in what we’re doing
  • We’ve started to recruit new blood; we need to keep that up

What are a few of our weaknesses?

  • Too much talk sometimes, but usually better to have more than less
  • A little too much bickering at times, but that goes with the territory. Too much content to sustain.
  • WAY too many unnecessary tools and arbitrary deadlines
  • Delegation and responsibility of tasks. There’s a certain percentage of tasks that either don’t get done or are passed from person to person
  • Stackoverflow is dangerously close to what we want to build, the good news is that they’re proprietary, and run on a MS stack – we can be the open source alternative
  • We don’t have a clearly defined future

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A bit of definition: What’s a student? What’s student media?

Published
by
Ryan
on March 27, 2009
in Medium Priority
. 5 Comments

Hi all, Ryan Sholin here.  I’ve been catching up with some of the TWiC podcasts and recently took a listen to the first board meeting conference call this week.

A few questions came out of that playlist, and I’ve passed some ideas back and forth with at least two of you already, but I’d like to throw this issue open for more discussion.

Regarding “student” status as a prerequisite for being a board member, officer (or really, for anything):  I think there’s a nice big Venn diagram that you can draw to outline some of these overlapping circles:

  • Undergraduate Journalism Students
  • Graduate Journalism Students
  • Journalism Students enrolled in a class that involves producing content for a student media outlet
  • Journalism Students who produce content for independent student media outlets
  • Independent Individuals employed by student media outlets connected to journalism schools
  • Independent Individuals employed by independent student media outlets
  • etc…

So, it’s not such a clean cut between “student” and “not a student.”  And limiting “student” status to undergraduates counts out students from a few big grad-only j-schools like Columbia University.

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March 8 2009: A Bundle of Board

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by
Daniel
on March 11, 2009
in Medium Priority
. 0 Comments

Ok, I know I’m three days late on this but here it goes anyway. On the Sunday conference call were Adam, Joey (via phone on vacation), Greg, Miles, and Bryan.

Organization

We started off talking about Sunday night’s first (unofficial) board meeting. There were two big questions on the table. First, whether to run through the official logistics in the very first meeting, or just have an informal discussion about the bylaws. We ended up doing the second, ultimately to our benefit in my opinion. The second focused on the responsibilities of the board. We decided that they should be responsible for: hiring and firing the Executive Director, approving an annual budget, and ratifying changes to the overall vision of CoPress.

We also covered the teams plans for over the summer. Greg will be taking an internship in Dallas, Joey isn’t quite sure what he’s going to do, Adam isn’t sure either, and Miles’ job probably won’t start until January.

Operations

Operations was light this week. I had a small little rant about using more descriptive subject lines in email. I’m finding myself having to search through past email, and it doesn’t really help to have email titled “smiley face.” I propose that we use primary keywords like “Operations”, “Hosting”, or “Scheduling” and then the topic for the email.

Adam discussed getting more consistent contributions from team (there are some areas in which various people have been dropping the ball), and the general consensus is that we should use Project Pier more often for this. We also need to be better about getting on people when tasks have been dropped.

Financial

I was finally able to sign the signature card at Bank of America last week, and it’s on its way to Florida for Greg’s. We’re going to run into a problem trying to get Joey on the account which will require submitting an amendment to the articles that we filed with the State of Florida. Greg will have a draft of those by Friday.

We’re also going to put together some spreadsheet wizardry for a cost/revenue timeline so we can better forecast our income and spending. Joey is going to work on this next week because he’s on semi-vacation this week.

Continue reading ‘March 8 2009: A Bundle of Board’

 
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