Minutes:08 Feb 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: Zandi, Alex, Nate, Tyler, Greg, Larry
• Meeting starts at: 7:05
• Meeting ends at:

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.

Larry - Brought donations from Stadium Hardware and matching donation from himself. Stadium Hardware would like to take a tour of the space. Greg offered for during the week, Tyler can cover on Sundays. Larry asked that we setup a tax free account there. Greg will take action and setup the account!

(15m) Open For All

• All Are Worthy. All Are Welcome.

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

• December 2016 Board Minutes.
• January 2016 Board Minutes.

Minutes approved by 4 of us.

Education - Nate Y.

Room Rental

• $60 for non-members for 4 hours.
• Members it's free as long as don't have another class.
• Flexible for non-profits and causes that better the community.
• Cancellation policy - no later than 48 hours in advance if you want to cancel.
• Week notice for reservation so we can get a volunteer setup.
• Incentivize people to become members.
• Members have no limit on people attending classes.
• Need to use volunteer hour requirement to fill up people opening for these classes. This should be expected. Hopefully people are open to it because we've been lenient about it.

Core Classes

• Laser, 3D, Vinyl, CNC etc.
• Proposal to raise cost to $20 for members $30 for non-members. Give teacher half for per person attending. Talk about how to reimburse later on and tax considerations.

Scheduling classes

• Nate will try to get schedule on Google Calendar from meetup.

Nate will get back to Katie with all details.

Need to figure out how to track volunteer hours.

Call for Pengiucon - Nick and Nate are going to run soldering again. Need to put them together still. Not do the surface mount soldering there. Sell completed badges and run software classes, embedded systems programming. Nate will respond to Dan tomorrow.

Call for Makerfaire Detroit - Little response, need more completed projects to show off. Can for now, work on cool projects. Nate had another idea for education and little classes and that worked well days before. We could try for that again.

Previous:

• Laser - 5 people
• 3D Printer - 5
• Amateur Radio
• PCB Making - 7-8

Upcoming:

• Laser Cutter
• Vinyl Cutter
• CNC class
• PCB Surface mount
• Root Kits
• Amateur Radio

Finances/Membership - Alex W.

ATT transfered to AHA card.

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.

Did we figure out what is up with HumbleBundle and picking AHA as donation spot?

Alex and Tyler met on 1/28 to discuss how we intake money and decide what to do about stripe. We presently take cash, check, re-run (credit cards online) and PayPal. We lack a good way to charge for classes both online and at the space. That is what we want to resolve.

• Investigated meetup and how it handles fees for classes. Comes to about $1.70 per person for a $15 class.
• Look at Paypal Business extras, allowing us to take a card without a Paypal account from the web or a Kiosk. It's $30 a month.
• Stripe can be added easily with Stripe.JS but then we need to manage the code and stay up to date. Hesitant since we want less to maintain.
• Square is similar price to Stripe for web store. We can easily get a Kiosk tablet for the space to add in person usage. Android 4.4 tablet fastened to wall with Square Chip reader lets us handle the rest of this use case.

We went and built out a Square web store for now to see if that meets most of the need. It will let people pay using credit cards when they show up for class by using our website. We have to add items to the store for each class. If we need to take cash in person then we can investigate the Kiosk. We still wanted better Xero integration but Tyler isn't sold on the trade off of maintaining our own solution.

x dollars in the bank. Will it go up in Jan with the new space? Slightly profitable at the moment. Not burning!

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

Members - Alex needs to count members yet. *** 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, mostly finished. Tyler got it up on the website and we've been tweaking it.

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 - Unstaffed

• Maker Faire - Needs come up with ideas for next year and float them to members. Tyler sent email to the list on 1/27 to check if people have ideas. If not, we will not be having a booth this year.
• Dan asked for what we are doing for Penguicon this year. Need to organize and get more of the badges working and maybe a workshop on how to use them figured out.

Google Adwords

• Alex met with Greg and Google Marketing in December.
• Need to add more keywords/New campaigns we can run.
• Nate suggests google docs! Did this happen?

Marketing Email Updates

• Feb 2017
  • Currently ? Total Audience on email
  • Planned to send on Feb 1st.
  • Nate Y. working with Florencia E. on a monthly newsletter.
  • Greg suggested Maker profiles *Example Mike Grube) for our teachers in the news letter.

Operations/Volunteers - Tyler W.

In progress

• Soldering Irons
  • 1 Hakko returned from Erik, now have 3.
  • Located all irons in the same cabinet.

• Mitre Saw - Erik's parents formally donated it

• Sewing machine returned, 1 still in need of repair

• Nick and Nate continued to work on the door.

• NAS - Investigated problem with LDAP users not able to change passwords. It's a Synology issue. Have contacted support and am working to resolve it with them. Found other reports of users with the same issue.

• Website new - Collecting photos for stream of projects happening at AHA. Haven't touched the code much as we found more stuff on old site to update before migration. Worked on stripe integration with Alex on 1/29 Source: https://github.com/tsworman/AHA-Website2

• Internet - ATT is being pushed to their limit. They will not do bonding of lines in Ann Arbor. Comcast is another option, but we just finally got away from them. Contacted ACD out of lansing for quote on FME and bonded (2-3) service. That would double to triple our bandwidth for only a little bit more in cost vs ATT. ACD rep said they are going to do a site survey, figure out our distance from their CO and get us an estimate in 2-3 days. Will follow up on 10/11 with them.

• Tyler started work on tool aids per Greg's suggestion and brought in frames to mount them in.

• Picked out tables, but need funding to buy them for main space. Home Depot doesn't presently stock them in our area. :/

• CNC CPU restore in progress.

• Wall in Annex - After electric is moved, will contact Jason to approve wall removal, remove wall, move desks, and communicate with all teachers.

Done this month

General

• Alex and Tyler recycled our surplus of florescent tubes and old dead batteries from Jacob's cars. Total cost was $33.

• Kelly had the new space re-keyed to match current. Need to get Tyler's keys back from her.

• Marketing Material - Updated Cache of Marketing stuff used on the website on the NAS. Will place new signage there too when we have it.

• Recycling - Alex and Tyler requested bin from city and paid $26 fee. It should be delivered on 2/3 or 2/7. Call them on 2/8 if it doesn't show up. We should label it as ours!

• Nate setup hub.allhandsactive.org to be accessible from outside AHA again. We can now manage our accounts and access our files remotely.

Website Old

• Updating information and simplified member signup.
• Removing out-dated content
• Improved tool listing and cleaned up tools on wiki.
• Posted Anti-harassment policy
• Swapped for new membership form and simplified membership page
• Worked with Alex to create and add web store to pay for classes. Communicated to Nate to link the web store. Cost per class is similar to using Stripe

Annex

• Brian mounted a whiteboard in the Annex. People love it!
• Moved desk to Annex for Zack
• Capped pipes
• Mounted white board
• Brian fixed track lights and removed bad
• Installed projector
• Nate replaced light bulbs.

Main Space

• Alex and Tyler built a new electronics bench with the fancy butcher block top. Reorganized electronics room.
• Larry fixed door stop for loud room.
• Computer - CNC machine was wiped
• Computer -Vinyl cutter computer was swapped and restored! Nick will test.
• Mounted bin for completed forms on back of pillar and labeled
• Mounted coat rack in new classroom
• Brian rocked out on some electric tasks!
• Kim created volunteer jobs cards and laminated them. We labeled the bin and plan to reset it weekly.

Classroom

• Relocated all kits to a rack in the classroom and started moving desks.

• Relocated pick and place and some tables to the classroom.

Signage

• Front of building - We could not create our own as it needs to be the same material they used per DDA.
  • Design done - Thanks Kim!
  • quotes received - Signarama (recommened by Oxford) and Fast Signs
  • vendor selected - Signarama
  • Oxford approved design on 2/7
  • Ordered on 2/8.
  • Set to be installed in the next 5-7 days
• Stairwell magnetic sign
  • Design done by Signarama to match paint place.
  • Ordered on 2/8.

To Do

Everything still on the operations word doc (non-pressing issues) and these pressing issues:

All

• Purchase and mount 2 PoE Ubiquiti Access points. One in between new classroom and Annex and one in back room. Eliminate wireless from the current box.
• Add second patch panel to rack, we have more than 24 lines with the new classroom and additional access points.
• Swap switch for 48 port managed vs 24 port un-managed. Bonding ports for faster Wi-fi would be nice even if it is just internal
• Internet solution, Pending responses from other providers.
• 1 Streaming camera for the main space when people are there snapping a photo on a 5 minute basis to display on website.

Annex

• Want to find sink, microwave, fridge, and cabinets still.
• Move desks to New classroom, remove crap.

Classroom

• Run ethernet drops
• Add electric on wall.
• Need to move desks there.
• Mount projector.
• Remove wall.

Signage

• Greg is trying to get time with the Chilean designer to clean up the front door logo so we could re-cut it and fix the small issues. If we can't make this happen we can ask Kim to take care of it. Final design files need to end up on the NAS either way.
• After Hours rear stairway sign. Reprint on aluminum to match existing signage per Kelly.
• Sandwich board - Heard back from Adam, he still needs more time, but is planning to get it done soon.
• Downstairs pole signage - Nate wanted to mount a display there, how can we make this happen? If not short term, we should put something there to indicate the entire side is ours. Right now our signage is hidden when you come down the stairs.

(30m) Unfinished Business

Board protocols

• Greg asked for discussion in Jan.
• Tyler sent out email responding to Greg's questions board protocols to board.
• Greg sent survey about board protocols.
• Any Update?

Storage policy

Alex W. - Drafting a Storage / Clean Tabletop Policy -

• As of Jan - Still working on it.
• Alex has a draft
• Alex has printed out parking permits for existing projects
• Working on Locker policy and amount to charge for long term storage.
• 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 was August 20th, 2017 -- Should we consider this dead?