Tag Archive for 'Board of Directors'

May 31, 2009: The first board meeting

Published
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

Continue reading ‘May 31, 2009: The first board meeting’

 
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Internal reflection results, May 2009

Published
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

Continue reading ‘Internal reflection results, May 2009′

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.

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

March 8 2008: First Unofficial Board Meeting

Published
by
Daniel
on March 10, 2009
in Medium Priority
. 4 Comments

Sunday marked our first (unofficial) board meeting. We’re calling this one unofficial because, according to the research I did, the first meeting should follow a specific template for electing the board and ratifying bylaws. The bylaws are a work in progress at the moment.

Joining me at the meeting were Bryan Murley, Adam Hemphill, David Cohn, Jackie Hai, and Suzanne Yada. Missing, but also on the board, are Cody Brown, Andrew Dunn and Ryan Sholin. We started off with introductions, and then went on to discuss specifics of what will be in the bylaws (which Adam and I will work on drafting):

  • Meetings will be held once a quarter preferably. Maybe twice-yearly if need be.
  • The board will be comprised of 4 undergraduate students with at least a half-time course load, and 3 non-students
  • 3 weeks notice will be given before every meeting. The chairman will be responsible for scheduling the meeting.
  • Term for a board meeting will be 1 year.
  • For voting, simple majority will be used to resolve most issues. Amendments to bylaws will be 2/3 majority.
  • Quorum to hold a meeting will be 50% plus one.
  • The primary responsibilities of the board will be to approve the annual budget, hire/fire the executive director, and helping to refine the overall vision.

Like I said, Adam and I will be drafting the bylaws beginning at the start of April, and the next (official) board meeting will be by the end of May.

Establishing our Board

Published
by
Daniel
on February 28, 2009
in Medium Priority
. 1 Comment

First off, the Wordpress iPhone app is really legit. I’m tapping this up at the moment because Stanford has their darn wifi locked down. The app does nearly everything I need it to.

Secondly, I’d like to think through categorization vs. tagging a bit more (although this is probably super low priority).

To the real point of this post: our first board meeting will be the 8th of March and there’s still planning to be done in preparation. I’ve personally never put one of these together before, so I’m going to open up the process as much as possible.

I imagine the first one will be about an hour and a half long. The goals will be three-fold (and I hope the app will accept my HTML formatting):

  • Establishing how the board will operate, including responsibilities of the chairman, how often they will meet, how long they will serve, etc.
  • Establishing the responsibilities of the board, including approving the budget, hiring the Exec Director, etc.
  • Giving feedback and guidance of the medium term goals of CoPress, including hosting services, building community, and this supposed advertising network.

Anything I’m missing? My hope is to prepare the agenda in coordination with Bryan, the unofficial chairman, but I’m not entirely sure of the process to do this.

One open question I have is whether we draft bylaws before or after the first meeting. My intiution, however, is that we should: have this first meeting, draft the bylaws based on conclusions from the first meeting, and then ratify the bylaws at the second meeting.