Minutes:11 Jan 2017 Board Meeting Agenda

AHA Mission Statement
We seek to establish, build, and support a collective of individuals organized around the principles of community-driven education in the arts and sciences, and to ensure ready access to the tools needed to pursue the realization of those principles.

• Meeting attendees: Greg Gage, Alex White, Nate Yost, Michael Grube, Tyler Worman
• Meeting starts at: 7:15
• Meeting ends at: 8:38

Board Meeting Protocol

* Standing Committee Reports - Individual Updates by Assigned Director/Officer presented in the time allotted.

* Open Time: For anyone to bring anything up to the Board. IF the Board agrees the item requires action, it will be put into New Business and addressed at the end of the meeting.

(15m) Open For All

• All Are Worthy. All Are Welcome.

• Greg would like to have a meta-discussion about board protocols.

* How much time should we be committing each week?  1 hr?  10hrs?
* How should decisions be made between board meetings?  Who makes them?  Do we have autonomy? Do we have to vote on all decisions?
* What is the expected turnaround time on messages concerning AHA.
* Who answers emails?  And how do we know if it's answered?
* What is the best way to communicate as a board to assign action items?  Can we use Slack?

- Going to cover via E-mail.

Fire Safety - Breaker box behind laser cutter is continually blocked. We need to maintain access to this. We moved the mirrors that were in the way during the meeting, still stuff in breaker closet we need to dispose of. Going to contact landlord on disposal of old bulbs. Need to label breaker closet.

Minutes Approval

• October 2016 Board Minutes.
• November 2016 Board Minutes.

Approved both!

Education - Nate Y.

STEM / OpenSCAD @ Quicken loans - Went well and raised awareness of hackerspaces in SE Michigan.

Nick - OnShape class shelved for now.

3D printer class slides need to be updated. -- Alex W. is going to try to get fixes for 3D printers this week.

Based on October's policy, we owe Josh $15 for hosting the October Arduino class. Alex will ask Lauren how to record it. Alex is checking with Lauren tomorrow.

Did we get back to Brain Monkeys? Yes, Nate is going to reach out to Katie again and see if she's still interested.

Nate Y was going to schedule an education meeting around mid-January, shelved it. Teachers are really board members and so he decided not to host it yet. We need to figure out how to get more teachers and advertise it as a space people can rent. We should decide on cost and how it works if you are a member. Rental fee, and we need to have a volunteer here. How do we handle charges. Tyler will start email with ideas in it by Saturday.

Previous:

• FreeNet - 15 people
• OpenSCAD - 2
• Inkscape - 1
• Amateur Radio

Upcoming:

• Laser class
• 3D printing
• Root Kits
• KiCad PCB class
• Cryptoparty
• Amateur Radio

School in Dexter interested in having us there. Outreach becomes harder to justify running. Maybe we should consider scaling back. Nate says we should start now and put out a call for folks at Detroit.

Finances/Membership - Alex W.

Rerun is setup - Lets us handle recurring payments using credit card and feeds into Xero! All setup and we'll be using it for Spark. This lets us handle when we can't use Paypal for people without accounts.

4500 dollars in the bank. Rent was paid already for this month by check. Will it go up in Jan with the new space? Slightly profitable at the moment. Not burning!

Nate will put a button to pay for class!

DTE meter issue. Alex got a call back. Alex needs to get meter numbers from Kelly to get payment taken care of.

ATT needs to be transferred still.

Members - Added 5 new, Alex needs to count members yet. members still. *** From Greg. Please update when you can. It would be nice to have a monthly report of +/- Change in Members per month, and a break down of what these members are (paid, student, volunteer).

The electronic membership form, finished! Alex will send link to Tyler and he'll get it on the website.

Tax - Alex working with Lauren to resolve fine issue. Waiting on reply from Michigan sales tax. He's talking to Lauren tomorrow.

Fundraising - Greg G.

Google

We need to submit ideas to Google for community grants. We can ask from $500-$15/$20k They are vague about The limits. But said they'd like to help a lot of people. I'd like to ask for around $10-15k. As the work in writing is roughly equal to $500. We neee project ideas. Google is interested in STEM. We can fairly easily write a High School component to the research being done over the summer that is manager by aHa and works to integrate the greater community into this effort. But I'd like to hear others opinions.

Spark

Spark wants to give us a Credit Card. We are working on PMT system that recharges monthly with simple email/web interface. Spark has teams interested in the space, and one (a drove company) came down in Jan 2017 to tour AHA. This is good news as it means that Spark should continue to invest in us for the near future. Goal with recurring payments is to "set it and forget it".

NIH

Partially related to AHA. Backyard Brains received good scores on an NIH grant that calls for an injection molding machine to be purchased. We could even justify getting a nice CNC mill to make molds. Grant will be known in March/April timeframe.

Marketing/Events - ???

Marketing Corey Updates

• Maker Faire - Needs come up with ideas for next year and float them to members. ETA is 11/14.

Marketing Adam Funk Helps!

• Will on sandwich boards - Tyler contacted him.

• Will think about how to improve signage around the space.

Google Adwords

• Alex met with Greg and Google Marketing

• Need to add more keywords

• New campaigns we can run.

• Nate suggests google docs!

Marketing Greg Updates

Jan 2017 Email: Currently 186 Total Audience on email. Will send on Jan 12. Will try to do 1st every month. Nate Y. working with Florencia E. on a monthly newsletter. Will be posting sending a note out to those who would wish to sign up via Meetup by this weekend. Already posted it on Facebook places -- will continue to do so every month.

Operations/Volunteers - Tyler W.

Fishtank moved!

Greg covered a new Nest Subscription.

Bought 2 new Hakko Solder Stations

Mounted new donation box.

Capped pipes in Annex with Nates help!

Going to order new electronics bench this month.

Picked out tables but need funding to buy them for main space.

Website new - Draft is underway, planning to have new design finished by end of Jan with all content. Re-working everything around new color scheme/logo. Hosted on GitHub presently, anyone can clone contribute if they want. https://github.com/tsworman/AHA-Website2

Nick and Nate did work on the door and it's great. Will start working on space across the hall once we know what's up with the Annex and new classroom.

Classroom

• Want to find sink and cabinets still.

Signage

• Greg was going to get in touch with Vanya to fix up door logo, get other signage running. From Greg: it wasn't Vanya, but a chilean designer. Trying to get into her schedule. Will try more this month.
• After Hours rear stairway sign - Sent to printer for production on corrugated plastic. Need to get mounting hardware.
• Front of building - Work planned for this weekend.
• Sandwich board - Bugged Adam on 1/7 to see if he made progress - Haven't heard back.

Recycling - We've been collecting in separate box and leaving cans in bags for people to collect outside the dumpster (other tenants do that). We should still get a bucket, but haven't had time.

(30m) Unfinished Business

Alex W. - Drafting a Storage / Clean Tabletop Policy - Still working on it. Alec suggests also having a cheap "storage box" solution, you could rent a cardboard box to put your projects in for a limited time. ETA is August 20th. -- Alex has a draft storage policy, and printed out "parking permits" for existing projects. Still working on the locker policy, and amount to charge for longer-term storage.