March 2020 Minutes

• 2020 Community Survey
• 2020 Member Survey

ADJOURNMENT

As usual, work continues on various website projects. Our Events Tool launched for Dublin as scheduled and we were taking live registrations until then event’s postponement. There are several small features yet to complete with this project and we will look to offer it to regional events in the back half of the year.

The last week of February the main site’s proxy server had some issues that prevented the site from serving pages. Technically it would eventually serve the pages, but we mark 30sec page load as an outage. Harold, and Matt Tesaro (member and project leader) triaged the site and there is an active staff project to remediate this issue with a new scalable proxy server configuration. More details can be found https://owasp.org/www-staff/projects/202003-DNS-VM-migration.html

Additionally we have added public monitoring of our web site status and performance at http://stats.pingdom.com/q0cazn7mmdfs. As of this morning, the past seven days avg response time is <460ms for our main site which is very respectable.

We have a new Global Events template design which has been launched with Global AppSec San Francisco https://sf.globalappec.org. It is a design which more closely aligns with our corporate site which gives us greater brand continuity and it’s data structure more closely aligns with our other repos. Of note, Harold designed this template to make it trivial for us to stand up future event sites without the need of using Wordpress or Eventbrite in the future.

Harold has also been working on a variety of automations that are possible with our normalized data structure. As you have already seen by going to owasp.org/chapters and owasp.org/projects you can see which have yet to migrate. Harold just added https://owasp.org/chapters/status/ that allows you to see which chapters have recently migrated. Also you can visit https://owasp.org/chapters/leaders/ and https://owasp.org/projects/leaders/ to find current leadership of our chapters and projects respectively.

Logistically the Projects Summit was a complete success. Unfortunately only seven project members attended the event. Given the low attendance, the COVID-19 crisis, and the backloading of events into Fall/Winter, staff is considering CANCELLING the planned Summer Summit until further notice. We had already slowed down the venue selection process due to low interest, and are under no financial obligations at this time.

The Dublin event has been postponed until February 15-19, 2021. The website has been updated, sponsors for 2020 notified, and refunds issued for registants. Sponsorship revenue for Dublin is €119,899 of which €54,924 has already been paid. https://owasp.org/www-staff/projects/202102-GlobalAppSec-Dublin.html

San Francisco Program Team has opened the CfT and CfP. Kelly has already been actively selling the event and has $398,245 contracted revenue against a budget of $725,000. We are tracking to plan on key milestones which can be found, along with contracted sponsors at https://owasp.org/www-staff/projects/202010-Global-AppSec-SF

Lisa submitted our DEFCON application. Last year’s volunteer coordinator has been unresponsive. Plans for BlackHat US are underway for August 1-6 and BlackHat Asia has been rescheduled to September 29 - October 2, 2020. OWASP will be participating in both events.

Staff has been researching tools to accommodate hosting virtual chapter meetings during the coronavirus pandemic. We are nearing a close to this research but the factors include (1) cost - primarily focused on free solutions if possible, (2) flexibility - the crisis will pass so we don't want to lock into a long-term arrangement or setup, (3) Credentials - we want to avoid having ALL chapter leaders share a limited number of paid accounts (like Zoom webinar) due to date/time collisions, and (4) Scalability to as many as 200 attendees per meeting. Harold has recommended we use Google Meet until July 1 https://owasp.org/remote-meetings/

The member survey closed February 22nd. Preliminary reports are attached to this month’s board meeting agenda. Over the next few weeks I will prepare a narrative and compare the findings to 2019. PLEASE NOTE, there are two different survey participant groups: members and non-members. The first is labeled Member Survey with the sample being members of record 13-February-2020, and the second is labeled Community Survey which is comprised of our entire email list (~50K) that excluded the Member list.

Earlier this month we terminated our contract with Fonteva. Since 2013, the OWASP Foundation has used this software embedded into SalesForce to handle membership. With our new system we were able to move away from this software product. At the same time, we are migrating to a more modern, and less complicated CRM for staff. CopperCRM tightly integrates with G-Suite and is simple to customize for our needs. Harold and I are working to complete this project by the end of March 2021. We do not anticipate any major issues with this migration.

• As always, most major staff projects are all listed with milestones at https://owasp.org/www-staff/