EMSBoDMeetingMinutes080521

Eugene Maker Space Board of Directors meeting August 5th, 2021

Note: These minutes have not been approved by the BoD yet, this is a draft

Call to order

7:32PM Attending: Karen, Beata, Ben Also present: Moto

Approve this agenda

Motion: Karen moved that the Eugene Makerspace Board of Directors approve the agenda as presented.

The motion was seconded by Beata.

Motion passes, the vote was Unanimous.

Approve previous minutes

Motion: Ben moved that the Eugene Makerspace Board of Directors approve the minutes from the July BoD meeting as submitted.

The motion was seconded by Karen.

Motion passes, the vote was Unanimous.

Reports

President's report

Added items to operations calendar relating to election.

Secretary's report

Nothing to report.

Treasurer's report

$1,297.22 in bank account $96.60 Paypal $32.39 Patreon -- $1,426.21 This is +$245 over last month and everything is paid for this month.

Karen did the Broadcom things.

Ben will Create a calendar for the board to track this somehow.

Karen did it.

Karen will update burn rate number on whiteboard at shop

In-progress

Ben will see if he can improve the new user flow

In-progress.

COVID-19 status review - Open Hack closure status

The CDC has renewed a recommendation to wear masks indoors but we will not mandate it for pragmatic reasons. We will post a note to the door and website.

ACTION: Karen will update website and door notes.

Board will Find any references to Friday and 6-9 on website/calendars and update to be Tuesday 6-8.

Karen deleted Meetups for friday and changed the Tuesday open hacks. Done.

Ben and Facebook Calendar

Done.

Karen will schedule bank trip with Piotr, Ben, and Beata

DONE.

Karen will install a new hard drive in the 3d Printer workstation

This has grown into something larger. When investigating this issue, Karen discovered that a much newer version of Linux that has been supplanted by something newer. Our machines have not been updating automatically so Karen began migrating the machines to new systems only to discover that there was no clean upgrade path; a nuke & pave is the only option. Also, our network is not in good shape (some systems are WiFi only, etc) which adds difficulty.

The task has grown beyond the parameters of what was originally volunteered and will require extra help and is something much bigger than replacing a drive in a single machine.

The board will revisit Meetup.com situation

ACTION: Piotr will Find out when we get billed for Meetup again.

Piotr will look into Patreon integration into Slack options as part of assessing whether we want to stay on this tool

Ongoing.

Piotr will will ask the community if they want to switch communication tools.

Karen contacted all of our Patrons to ask them about their thoughts on communication mediums. She contacted roughly 50 people. The poll received 4 responses. Karen summarized some of the responses received.

Slack has announced that the Slack app is dropping support for older versions of iOS and Android.

New Business

Server infrastructure move

The migration has mostly moved from Scaleways to AWS because Scaleways has ended the ARM servers program we were using. Michael Bacarella put in some extraordinary effort to move things over and bring us over. Gatekeeper, Wiki, and Wordpress seem to be up and functioning. We updated name servers and retired some legacy servers.

Review election procedure dates and establish new schedule if need be

Karen has reviewed the organizing documents and there are some dates specified for when we hold elections (first Saturday of December) and notice must go out 30 days before the election. There's no clearly defined window for when voting begins; historically it's been a week before the election.

Karen suggested we set scheduled items in the calendar on Halloween with a November 1st target for sending out the mail announcing the election. She also suggests an October 31st deadline for nominations with an October 1st call for nominations.

ACTION: Karen will Put in the calendar items specified above for election tracking.

"Hackerspace / networks, servers, and sofa"

Moto presented their interests in creating a new space or updating our existing space to make an environment that's friendly to equipment that would not do well with our current high-debris/dusty environment.

Karen spoke to some of the challenges we've faced in trying to identify a good path forward for isolating dust. Her concerns included structural concerns, material costs, and our current lack of a cohesive plan for making this 'dirt box' for debris-producing equipment.

Email -> google workspace

Google is tightening the screws on spam detection and our self-hosted email was not meeting their standards. We have been relegated to spam folders more and more and it's at a point where it's becoming almost impossible to reach anyone through mail.

Moving to Google workspace will fix our authentication issues/make us visibly not spam and will also save a modest amount of money because we qualify for non-profit benefits.

Motion: Piotr moved that the Eugene Makerspace Board of Directors Move our email server to a Google Workspace.

The motion was seconded by Ben.

Motion passes, the vote was Unanimous.

The motion passes.

Update on scrapping the toner machine

Dick arranged for transport and found that it's too heavy to get into the truck. He will try to get it moved again with some more help.

Karen asked Dick if we should scrap the old table saw as well. Everyone seemed cool with it so Dick will scrap it as well.

Adjournment

Motion: Ben moved that the Eugene Makerspace Board of Directors adjourn.

The motion was seconded by Karen.

Motion passes, the vote was {{{4}}}.

The meeting was adjourned at 9:23PM.