Interested in running for the PSF board? Read about board responsibilities here!

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PSF Director Duties & Communication

Below are the Board member responsibilities and meeting communication guidelines, please weigh in both as we will be adding to the wiki and using for our next election outreach and onboarding.

Board Member Responsibilities

The following description was adapted from materials from BoardSource.

We expect the time commitment to amount to roughly 5 hours a month on average.

Minimal expectations:
  1. Protects the PSF’s mission and understand the fundamental fiduciary duties
  2. Regularly attends board meetings and important related committee meetings. The board meets once a month for an hour. Committee meetings usually take place on a bi-monthly or quarterly basis. Twice a year the board will host longer and more in depth meetings to plan for the upcoming months (May + November).
  3. Actively participates in Slack and email discussions.
  4. Actively promotes the PSF and its programs within individual networks and at Python events
  5. Makes a serious commitment to participate actively in committee work. Most of the PSF Board of Directors are involved in at least one committee (such as the Code of Conduct, Finance, Diversity & Inclusion, Fundraising, or PyCon US committees). Committees are an essential part of the PSF’s work and help drive forward the work important to the PSF and Python community as a whole.
  6. Stays informed about committee matters, prepares themselves well for meetings, submits their monthly progress report on time, and reviews and comments on minutes and reports.
  7. Is an active participant in the board’s annual evaluation and planning efforts.
  8. Volunteers for and willingly accepts assignments and completes them thoroughly and on time.
  9. Communicates in a clear manner, and with kindness and respect. See the communication guidelines document for understanding the meeting format.
  10. Gets to know other committee members and builds a collegial working relationship that contributes to consensus.
  11. Has appropriate relationships with the Python Software Foundation staff.
  12. Gets involved with fundraising goals. This can include introducing PSF fundraising staff to new contacts for sponsorship/donorship/grant making, helping promote fundraisers and membership drives, participates in discussions with sponsors and donors alongside PSF fundraising staff, helps staff PSF booth or give talks at events to promote the organization and its programs
Nice-to-haves:
  • Is based in Latin-America, Africa, APJ, or other parts of the world currently not well represented on the PSF Board
  • Has expertise in finance, fundraising, or non-profit legal matters

Meeting Communication Guidelines

Purpose: “Meetings are to take action and have deeper discussion on items that help us advance the PSF mission, below are the expectations for meeting conduct:”

How and where we communicate during a meeting

  • Slack for voting
  • Zoom for conversation
  • The Chairperson will screenshare and enforce time limits for items on the agenda.

Communication Norms

  • Be mindful of your patterns of communication, for example if you are more prone to speaking out loud actively try to make space for others to allow others to have mic time.
  • Mute yourself when not speaking.
  • If comfortable, use the video option in the meeting.

Technical support

  • If you need access to any tooling such as a mic, better internet connection, etc we should discuss this at onboarding to help increase accessibility

Additional Readings

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