EMS
Board of Directors
Meeting Minutes
Meeting date: 05/04/2017

Call to order:

A Regular meeting of the Board of directors of EMS, was held at 687 McKinley street, Suite #1, Eugene OR on May 4th, 2017. The meeting convened at 6:15PM, Clif Cox presiding and Ben Hallert secretary.

Board Members in attendance: Clif, Ben, Dean, Jher
Board Members not in attendance: Tanda

Quorum present? Yes / Provisional

Also Present Were: Jim, Jeffrey

Approve agenda, and previous minutes.

Agenda:

Approve the agenda
Review previous meeting minutes
Officer’s Reports
1. President
2. Treasurer
3. Secretary
4. PR Director (Vacant)
5. Facilities Manager (Vacant)
Old Business:
1. Action Items from previous meetings:
  1. 1. Clif: He expressed openly that he would be on his best behavior from this meeting going forward.
    2. Dean: To bring a financial accounting to the board (via email)
    3. Tanda: To contact NAO and sign EMS up.
    4. Mini Maker Faire - June 10th
New Business:
1. Jim to discuss Volunteer Coordinator effort
2. Review of the Fix it cafe process
3. Jher's idea for a soft-open
4. Eugene Celebration Parade
5. Offering a subsidized 6-month interest-group discount
6. Mini-Maker-Faire Blog Post about EMS's recent move
Adjourn

Approval of Agenda: Motion was made by Clif and seconded by Dean to approve this meeting's proposed agenda

The Motion carried with unanimous approval.

Approval of minutes: Motion was made by Jher and seconded by Clif to approve the minutes of the April 20th, 2017 meeting.

The Motion carried with unanimous approval.

Officer's reports:

President's report: We have insurance. He reported on the Maker Faire organization and booth placement. Bitcoin work continues, Clif has chosen Coin Base and has been exploring the technical challenges about receiving cryptocurrency and converting it to liquid currencies. He has continued to face some challenges with fixing the Forum related to changes in the My SQL API.

Treasurer's report: Dean has signature authority now on our bank accounts. We currently have $902.80 in our known accounts. Dean has been paying some of our bills based on past payments and is aligning future payments based on available statements. Clif reported that he has been moving more of our electronic billing to the treasurer email account so we can check BMC's balance figures appropriately to get the actual rent amounts paid going forward.

Secretary's report:

PR and Facilities Manager are vacant

Old business:

Action Item Review from 04/20/2017 BoD Meeting

1. Clif: He expressed openly that he would be on his best behavior from this meeting going forward.
2. Dean: To bring a financial accounting to the board (via email)
3. Tanda: To contact NAO and sign EMS up.
4. Mini Maker Faire - June 10th

New business:

Jim to discuss Volunteer Coordinator effort

Jim will be coming up to spped with the organization and people as he workes to define the width and breadth of the position. Is it a position, is it a person? He feels we are skinny on our safety procedures (specifically equipment checkout procedures and PPE). He's reviewed the available materials on the Wiki and noticed those two in particular. He is not ready to make a formal proposal yet, but he's leaning towards identifying specific people for each piece of equipment to be responsible for checkout. He is also of the belief we should have immediate 'here's what comes next' handouts for new members that outline the procedures. He plans to identify holes, work out solutions, then coordinate with members to have the changes implemented. He needs to understand the nature of the needs (cleanup was one example of a task that doesn' t have owners) and suggests reaching out to the members. If we can possibly create task-based organization then assigning bodies would be easier to wrangle, additionally. He will spend the next month researching and developing this further.

Review of the Fix it cafe process

Clif expressed confusion about what happened and thought we should have taken the opportunity because no money was required to be spent. Dean asked if we might have our own fix-it events. Jim counseled caution at putting together events without having volunteers/effort attached. Clif proposed a modified process going forward that less board interaction be required for tasks like this or, barring that, that high-level board approval be sufficient in these cases so that an individual board member could take an idea and run with it without super granular board involvement.

Jher's idea for a soft-open

Jher feels that with the end of the school year approaching, we have an opportunity/deadline combo to get people in. He suggested we ask the membership to actively reach out to their circles to bring more folks to the new space so that we will be well placed to support a full, formal open house/outreach in Fall. He suggests we target some time within a week of the Mini Maker Faire too so we can use that event as a funnel.

Eugene Celebration Parade

There's growing interest in our community for people to participate. He has volunteered to pay the application fee and proceed with planning and organization. Clif made a grand point of letting Jeffrey know that he need not seek super granular guidance,

Offering a subsidized 6-month interest-group discount

He suggests we offer a group discount to new members wanting to start and organize an Member Interest Group along the line of a 10%-25% discount for a six month period. This would help spur member volunteer project work. Jher noted that we may be able to advertise this in conjunction with our future rate increases.

Mini-Maker-Faire Blog Post about EMS's recent move

He's writing a blog post for the Mini Maker Faire blog that he suggests we cross-post to our site. He wrote an article about the Save The Bees event and suggests we post it to the EMS site too. Jher will cross post it and Ben will post it to the Facebook page.

Action Items:

Clif:

Dean:

Tanda:

To contact NAO and sign EMS up.

Ben:

Cross-post Save the Bees article to the Facebook group

Jher:

Cross-post Jeffrie's Save The Bees blogpost to the Wordpress.

Adjournment:

Ben moved for adjournment and was seconded by Clif.

The vote was unanimous and the meeting was adjourned at 7:16 PM.

____________________________ ___________________
Secretary Date of approval
Eugene Maker Space

EMSBo DMeeting Minutes050417

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