Minutes:10 FEB 2021 Members Meeting Agenda

Meeting begins: 1910

Meeting ends:

Participants: Nate Y., Joe D., David G., Andrew C., James K.

Agenda

• Announcements/new business - 10m
• Membership update - 5m - Joe
  • Process Improvement meeting results/discussion - 15m - Nate
• Financial update - 5m - Joe
• Events - 10m - Nate
• Old business updates

Notes

• Announcements/new business:
  • Puppy show-and-tell :3
  • Summer camp, via friend-of-James - wants to discuss the idea of running these with AHA around summer 2022. Discuss this first thing at next month's meeting? Joe also has connections in this area.
  • Election coming up! We need to put the call out for nominations before it sneaks up on us in a month.

• Membership update:
• Lost one member, gained one sponsorship-tier member, so a net gain.
  • Initial pass at mapping out the current membership processes, and some ways we can improve it, happened on 1/19. Notes from that meeting were put in Matrix in #Operations. Next step is to try and implement some of these improvements.
  • Discuss!
    • Tentatively decide to check out Tendenci
    • Old business, but related stuff pulled in here:
      • Motion to replace new-member vouching system with n-hours of volunteering/vote on it? - James
    • Create an "exit survey" that can help identify why a person is leaving, but also can try and convince them to stay by pointing out our reduced cost options available. - Joe
    • Make sure we are on-boarding new members consistently -- specifically we should try much harder to ensure that they join the mailing list (using an "opt-out" basis, even?). This needs to be a specific part of the on-boarding process that is always done, possibly during the point at which we add them to the membership roster.
    • James: get feedback from new members on how the process currently works, and see how we can use that information to get the above things done.

• Financial update:
  • https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MTjgdvGJI9-FI7OFxkDdw-hJbirdUaxwBpERWVGVSQs/edit#gid=0
  • Not ready for the meeting, Joe will get those for next week.
  • Thank you notes for the end-of-year fundraiser sent out!

• Outreach:
  • Thank you notes for the end-of-year fundraiser sent out!
  • Corporate donations/solicitations - David
    • Probably won't get started until end of the month or so, check in again (still working on it; will check in again later this month!)
  • James will reach out to his contacts to see if we can get more guidance on how to raise funds. James mentions that we could come up with some initial questions before meeting to get better feedback, e.g. come up with some ideas for fundraising that we can compile together to ask them about.
  • Joe brings up the concept of a 5-year plan.
• Events:
  • James is pushing everyone to get events in sooner so we can get in the A2 Observer, for example.
  • Seasonal Solder-kit build-along -- Cupid Edition: This Saturday @ 6:30PM!
  • Work with AADL on virtual-AACME
  • Pick a kit for St. Patty's? -- Nate will look around this weekend.
  • ATMegaZero class with Eddie - April timeline so we can get this in the Observer? - David
  • Companion bots with Alex G. - David
  • Show-and-Tell - already lining up guests for the next one. Good ways to gauge interest for special interest groups! - David
  • Get a music event on the schedule by March 10th (electronics, chip-tuney stuff) in time for April - James
  • Joe will put our "study hall" events up on Meetup.

• Tool lending thoughts from Joe: feels things have been out for a while, feels that we might be losing track of things, and in addition could possibly make use of software to help us out in the future. On another note, he has come across some construction tools that could be lent to AHA.
• James will try to track down the remaining tools that have been lent out

• • Old business:
    • Joe is adding places to promote events to a page on our wiki: [[Promoting][ ...And also adding a cross-promotion section

• Older Business:
  • Volunteering:
    • A task that could be done is to pull the list of donors/sponsors (via GoFundMe, Duo, etc.). Also DigitalOcean for hosting our website. Also SPARK, maybe?
    • James would like to figure out how to get our name on the list (presumably through the various schools) for future volunteers. This was also a suggestion from our Nation of Makers call: reach out to schools and other volunteer hubs to attract more help.
      • Improve the process to find and recruit volunteers
      • Joe recommends following suite of another space that has "job descriptions" for new volunteers, so that they can start up doing something well-defined instead of some nebulous "volunteering time": https://www.acemakerspace.org/monster-corps/ https://www.acemakerspace.org/member-contribution-portal/
      • Volunteer hour tracking
      • Lonely Space Hardware cleanup/organization effort -- When do we want to do this? Ask James for update.
  • Events:
    • Joe connected with two people from Nation of Makers who are possibly interested in cross-promoting classes with similarly-sized hackerspaces.
    • Another hackerspace would be interested in having us check out their bi-weekly show-and-tell events -- microcontroller/electronic. https://www.meetup.com/Robot-Garden/events/gvcgvrybcqbqb/
    • Are we allowed to post upcoming classes in the NoM group?
  • Bylaws revision:
    • Nothing really to report here since James is busy with a lot of other things; so just keeping it on the radar. We all agree that the bylaws could use a little attention after 5+ years, especially to better fit how the organization has been running (or could be run!). Follow-up again next month.