This is the second report that I write to the board since I started the role as Secretary General. These reports will normally be conducted on a monthly basis, and they are submitted to the board ahead of their meetings, in line with the requirement. The format of the reports are likely to develop over time. Feel free to post questions and suggestions for improvements in this thread.
/Mab
Secretary General Report - August 2025
Covers the period of 2025-07-27 to 2025-08-24
Management
A call for volunteers to the Team Lead positions was posted on the Website and on Linkedin. We got close to 30 applicants in total, almost all on Linkedin. After removing the obvious mismatches (mostly done automatically by Linkedin), we had 13 qualified candidates, and I am in the process of booking interviews with them all for the period of 4-8th of September. With the aim to have them starting mid September.
Operations
Entire team vacant
Nothing of interest has been done here this month
IT
Still no solution to the Discourse admin problem
Mattermost has had expired certificates, with noone responsible for solving it. This will become a priority for the team once in place.
Communication
Entire team vacant!
Waiting for a reply from the designer of the new logo. Will follow up as soon as I am back in Brussels.
Commmunity & Outreach
Entire team vacant
Got a prospective volunteer through an email. Will pass it over to the Team Lead, once they is appointed.
Been invited by Volt to their General Assembly. Will get back to them to ensure there’s also an invitation for our Chair.
MaB, you know that the PPEU Tec team has been responsible for tech since 2012. We have a reliability rate of 99.98%. Of course, we can also take care of Discourse and Mattermost. But that’s not what’s wanted. Instead, more servers are being rented that no one can maintain. It’s all a bit strange.
@Bastian, as you can see the IT team is the only team in my report where I don’t write “Entire team vacant”. This is to reflect that there are already people managing our IT systems.
However, the way I understood it from our talk in Oslo there is not any formal tech team with internal structure, meetings and such, but rather most of the PPEU IT is been managed by you, and your organisation(company?). Please let me know if I misunderstood our conversation?
My plan, as I hope I shared with you in Oslo, was to incorporate what we currently had into a bigger inhouse IT team, with a new team leader, responsible for recruiting and managing the team, and ideally you as Deputy Team Leader. To ensure that nothing of what we currently have breaks in the process.
Happy to discuss this with you further over text or phone to make sure
MaB, we have a contract with the PPEU. And I have a team and several companies. One of them is a system house with a server farm, and we know exactly what we are doing. What we don’t do is bill the PPEU for our services; instead, we donate them. It’s difficult enough to get a donation receipt for that.
Dear @Bastian as PPEU Treasurer in charge, as soon as we got all the invoices (last Jan 2024) we paid them all and we issued receipt for all donations made.
My Office asked several times to resend them all due to the fact that we haven’t received by email (at least I cannot find them in the mail server), but. as far as I remember I got it in Mattermost and all the Mattermost files have been wiped out last Nov. 2024.
We need them for clarifications about last invoice we got from you in order to pay it (and also to issue a proper receipt of the donation that is inside).
We appreciate a lot your work and your donations: we don’t appreciate the fact that you don’t answer to direct messages and emails.
NOTE: there is an IT budget approved for 2025. All IT expenses, including the one referred to the contract with your company, come from there.
I think that @Emerodh would be happy to add your SSH key to the server, if you would like to solve the certificate issue.
Otherwise me, or any other that can do it, will do it as soon as possible.
