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: 8:08

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.

4853 dollars in the bank. Rent was paid already for this month by check. We owe them for re-keying. We're bringing in enough to cover rent each month. Will it go up in Jan with the new space?

Alex is going to look at API for Xero to import paypal data automatically. Not yet. Working on stripe. Tyler and Alex will try to resolve in January.

DTE meter issue. Alex contacted them via email. Waiting to hear back from them about missing meters! The guy will have to call and disconnect, so that we can transfer the service though.

ATT needs to be transferred still.

Comcast needs to be cancelled still. Nate will do it, Tyler sent relevant info. Any update? If not Tyler has off end of Dec and will do it. -- Nate Y. let this fall through the cracks (sorry!). Just closed out the account. Please let me know if they charge us again, and I will pay the last month's balance. They wanted us to return equipment -- I don't recall what became of it, so they might bill us unless we find it. -- Tyler: Josh has the stuff to return or returned it I believe.

Members - 28 members still.

The electronic membership form, finished! Woot! Google Form. Alex will send link to Tyler and he'll get it on the website. He has copies of physical forms for at the shop to get 2 signatures! Half sheets! Awesome.

Nate will look into getting an AHA referral code for Amazon purchases. Smile works! -- Haven't gotten a code yet, but did do a little reading. This is the program I was referring to: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/welcome/getstarted

Tax - Alex working with Lauren to resolve fine issue. Need board members to sign a form at the space on the main table. Tyler and Alex have signed already. Hoping to send out this week if possible.

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 - Corey T.

Marketing Corey Updates

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

• Corey wants to run group focused events once a month to get pictures going and create marketing material. Rebuild the community.

• Get cheap cameras for AHA with Wifi SD cards, use them to automatically upload event images to a repository during.

• Host a monthly VR night? Corey needs a better 3D card to really make it work better.

Marketing Adam Funk Helps!

• Will on sandwich boards

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

Marketing Greg Updates

Dec Email: Our Open rate for December Email was 28.9% (Average of Education and Training emails = 16.4%) Our Click rate for December Email was 3.5% (Average of Education and Training emails = 2.2%)

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

Classroom

• Want to find sink and cabinets still.

Upcoming improvements

• Nate will work on securing new space -- From Nate Y.: New card readers arrived, verified working on test platform (my laptop); haven't tested on the RPi, but I suspect it will suffice at least as well as the current reader. Had an error on the last batch of PCBs for the controller board, so we are waiting on a new revision to come from OSH (should be this week or early next).

Signage

• Greg was going to get in touch with Vanya to fix up door logo, get other signage running. ??
• 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

Stephanie is here to help AHA with marketing, has a Engineering/Business background, working with marketing automation software (Buffer currently, not chained to anything in particular). She believes working with her hands is a valuable experience, enjoys informal/impromptu teaching opportunities; but is also a good planner. She brings a unique perspective given the background. She and Corey will meet afterwards to talk about marketing. -- Corey is waiting to hear back.

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.