Minutes:09 DEC 2020 Members Meeting Agenda

Meeting begins: 1910

Meeting ends: 2049

Participants: Nate Y., James K., Mike Z., David G., Joe D.

Agenda

• Announcements/new business - 10m
• Election update - 5m - James
• Membership update - 5m - Joe
• Financial update - 5m - Joe
• Outreach update
  • Proposed donation drive - 5m - Nate
  • "All Bands Active" - get ball rolling? - 5m - Nate
• December/Beyond! events - 10m - Nate
• Old business updates

Notes

• Announcements/new business:
  • Lonely Space Hardware cleanup/organization effort
    • James still would like to schedule tentatively for January
  • Nation of Makers
    • Joe connected with two people 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/
    • Build-a-3d-printer class offered by another hackerspace. $400ish for the class? Nate suggests cross-promoting classes like these.
    • Post classes in the NoM group if allowed?

• Election update:
  • James was able to optimize the process a bit to do a mail merge to send out voting tokens.
  • Not a great turnout, but had to compete with another "sort of important" election.
  • There are concerns that member emails might not be accurate. Nate suggests a periodic process to see if contact information needs an update.

• Membership update:
  • Joe will get us these numbers ASAP.

• Financial update:
  • https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MTjgdvGJI9-FI7OFxkDdw-hJbirdUaxwBpERWVGVSQs/edit#gid=0
  • Joe will get us these numbers ASAP.

• Outreach:
  • Proposed donation drive
    • Mike proposes to do a little outreach among members, to see if folks are willing to pitch in some money early to earn matching funds from a couple other already-contacted members. Will also make it public so other people can pitch in as well. David proposes we use the existing GoFundMe to run it, most agree.
  • "All Bands Active" - get ball rolling?
    • James recommends a January timeline, will reach out to North Coast to see how to do the technical parts. Twitch/Youtube Live. Mike suggests late January to March; could be too aggressive otherwise. February could be a Valentine's Day event? Mike, Nate, and any other interested folks are going to set up a time to meet and discuss further.

• December/Beyond! events:
  • Seasonal Solder-Kit Build-Along class scheduled
    • Purchase Facebook ads?
    • Cross-promote with other orgs? AADL?
    • Emphasize family-friendly stuff?
  • January - David wants to run a show-and-tell event for AHA.
  • Joe is adding places to promote events to a page on our wiki: Promoting
  • ...And also adding a cross-promotion section
  • David's friend would like to donate some ATMegaZero boards, and David would like run a class with them.
  • Alex G. and David think companion bots would be a fun class to do. February timeline?

• Old Business:
  • Membership:
    • 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.
    • 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 wants us to officially move over to doing a volunteering requirement as a condition of membership, as opposed to using the voucher system.
      • 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.
      • Joe and Nate will set up a date in the next month to look at this, post it in Matrix.
      • Still need to identify some kind of improved solution to store and organize this user data!

• • 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

• • 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?