EMSMembership MM092317

EMS
Membership
Meeting Minutes
Meeting date: 09/23/2017

Call to order:

A Regular meeting of the membership of EMS, was held at 687 McKinley street, Suite #1, Eugene OR on Sept 23rd, 2017. The meeting convened at 10:30AM, Tom Upchurch, presiding, and Clif Cox acting secretary.

Members in attendance:

• Ben Hallert
• Mary Bach-Jackson
• Jim Callaway
• Michael Burlingame
• Cord.
• Dale
• Paris
• Dick McRill
• Leslie Allen
• Beata G
• Michael Bacarella
• Clif Cox
• Tom Upchurch
• Jher
• Cord Slatton
• Piotr Esden-Tempski arrived 11:56 am

Quorum present? ??

Also Present Were:

Approve agenda, and previous minutes.

Agenda:

1. Introductions
2. Approve the agenda
3. Reports
4. Clif
5. Jher
6. Quorum procedure
7. Advisory counsels.
   1. membership gets formal accounting of all expenses and assists
8. Documentation problems
9. Equipment pool and maintenance.
10. lumber cleanup
11. discussion of insurance
12. Railing on pick-a-part.
13. scheduling more cleanups.
14. Discussion of board being dissolved.
15. cleanup discussion list
16. statement of intent to clean up.

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

Unanimous approval.

Motion carried.

Ben proposed that we time limit our items to 5 minutes each unless we get enough thumbs up to continue for another five, so that's what we did.

Reports

Clif's

Clif did a quick summary of the previous board meeting. Karen, Tanda and Ben requested a snap election to replace the BoD. Though it was noted that the general EMS BoD election is in 73 days, a short time away. EMS has no precedent (or bylaws) for mid-term elections, so would have to develop a new one in a short time frame. The BoD offered to appoint a third member with the good faith approval of those present to settle the matter. Tom was elected as the third BoD member and appointed president with the good faith approval of all present. The Snap election request was withdrawn.

Clif introduced Michael Bacarella our new sysadmin. He's been taking on sysadmin duties at the EMS both to lighten Clifs workload and also bring some fresh ideas from my 20 years of experience as a Site Reliability Engineer at Google and other firms.

1. Added a few levels of system monitoring, so we have more visibility if things go down and when. Really helps with after-the-fact reports of site outages.
2. Added off-site encrypted backups for the keymaster, so if the device dies or is stolen we can recover quickly. Also monitoring to make sure the backups are happening :)
3. Handling mailing list and mail system tasks
4. Added a dynamic DNS name so you can go to shop.eugenemakerspace.com to view the web cam instead of having to dig up the IP address from the web site (which is often out of date). Monitoring in place of course to check that the DNS name is up to date.

Jher's

Jher did a summary of the previous meeting that there was a general consensus of members in the room to carry on. We also rotated our office positions.

Meeting minutes

The BoD decided (during the last BoD meeting, two days prior) with the feedback and the approval of all present, since there was disagreement over which meeting minutes were completely accurate (Karen's notes, Tanda's notes, and Clif's notes), and that it would designate that all of the reports would be entered into the record as the official minutes.

On flame-wars and treating people respectfully

All people present, despite beginning from quite adversarial and heated positions eventually shook hands or came to an understanding. A sentiment for adopting a no-flamewar rule in communications was carried

Quorum procedure

Clif talked about wavers Cord said we should follow our own procedures. Clif should find who is in good standing and who has paid up and has forms in. Clif needs the paper work to do that. Michale is concerned that not everyone is on the mailing lists and don't know they are not members in good standing.

Cord feels the lists are not being used appropriately. Cord went on to express frustration over how he was informed that waivers were missing, and that it was publicly announced that a third of our waivers are missing due to paperwork mismanagement. Would have preferred if each member was contacted via email. There was general agreement in the room on this point.

Missing waivers should not exclude you from voting

Tom and Cord and others did not feel that a missing waiver should preclude dues-paying members from voting. Perhaps just from not being allowed to use the shop. Michale talked about electronic forms, and how it might solve these problems. Jher offered that if EMS hands you a key fob, it serves as a receipt of sorts; if you're a member in good standing; a missing waiver is EMS's problem, not a fault of the member. No objections were noted.

Advisory councils

Jeffrey arrives at 10:50am

Jher notes that the BoD's overwhelmed by tasks. he says advisors will provide more transparency. If we have advisory councils for various things like shop stewards, sysamins, and a grievances council, it seems like a good way to get buy-in from more members. The members of these councils will reduce the BoD workload, and counsels can then distill things down and present them to the board and have them acted on.

Michael says there is actually a de facto sys admin committee (the sysadmin@ list). Jher noted that this was not very well publicized. Michael agreed and is taking efforts to make it more widely known that IT/systems issues should be reported here.

Do we have a suggestion box?

The board@ list is a suggestion box of sorts, unfortunately it's moderated so members are turned off by the automated response if they're not on the list (only board members are on the list). Ben asks if we can disable moderation. Clif says that opens us up to Spam, but we can have additional people configured to approve mailing list messages. Michael added himself to the board@ list as a moderator so requests can be approved more quickly. There was some talk about other channels for member input like another suggestion list and possibly a physical suggestion box. :-)

Dale on the shop steward role

Dale wants to volunteer for the shop steward position but nobody has defined what a shop steward is. Moving in a direction to have a three person committee to oversee the shop stewarding role is carried. Dale defines what he thinks shop steward should do

1. makes sure equipment works
2. find people who are qualified to fix broken equipment
3. shop upgrades
4. does not want the shop steward responsible for being a janitor

There's consensus to have Dale be the de facto shop steward. Michael talks about mailing lists and how its similar to advisory committees. He has e-mailed Dale offline to ask if he wants to set up a steward@ list like the sysadmins have.

Lesly arrives at 11:11am

Daile talks about problems with getting training. Jher suggest finding some training videos. Yes, Dale would like to have some training videos on equipment.

Membership receives formal report of financial accounting

Dean has formally resigned as treasurer (two meetings ago) and Clif has adopted the role. Dean will continue to work, unofficially, in this capacity and assist Clif. Ben requests this is sent as a written report to the membership. Cord requests this be complete before the general election. Beata asked if the statement would account for shop inventory assets. Group decided that is too huge a job and that sticking straight to the financials would be better. The new treasurer (Clif) resolved to try to get this done wihtin a week.

Some of the items in the report would be, Iincome, Expenses, Cash flow, and membership. Hard cutoff date. by Wednesday for status and next Wednesday.

Documentation

Cord's suggestion

Cord suggests we should have a members@ list that emails everyone that's a member. Clif says everyone gets added to the discuss@ list, manually, after they join. Cord wants something other than the discuss@ list for reaching every member since it's toxic and people unsubscribe themselves. [ Michael notes privately that there are opportunities to automate both adding people to discuss@ and also adding functions to the keymaster so we can reach all of the members via email. ]

Meeting minutes controversy

Mary expresses that she is alarmed by the meeting minutes controversy; there were conflicting minutes of the meeting, with members observing that important sections were missing in the official post. Ben calls out Clif's editing the meeting minutes to remove controversial items. Clif's response on meeting minute editing controversy is that Clif understands membership is upset by his editing of the minutes. Clif explains that he removed the part about the snap election due to a mistake in editing, and that he will do absolutely everything in his power to make sure it doesn't happen again.

Mary gets most of her info on the discuss list and misses a lot of stuff. she needs more channels of communication. need a better way to sign people up to the mailing lists. Jher talked about meeting minutes and the three documents. covering that particular meeting.

Equipment pool/maintenance

Dale says the new member welcome email should say what to do if we find a piece of broken equipment. (Contact the shop steward!) In a new member list perhaps we should have instructions on how to report equipment problems. Ben's squwk list has worked well in the past. Perhaps have a wiki page of maintenance issues. Paris offers to write a system that would include all avenues of input. some further discussion.

We covered the Laser cutter time line and table saw maintenance like new blade.

Lumber storage/cleanup

Ben says the lumber situation is untenable. Our sheet goods and stick goods are in piles that are difficult to safely navigate. Further, everything is stacked which limits visibility/accessibility, so people are probably going out and buying materials instead of using what we already have. Dale agrees. Ben would like to rally a group to build a structure to manage the lumber. Mary says instructables has half a dozen designs for lumber management, so finding a design should be easy.

Clif says the shop used to have a shelf but we took it down because of safety issues. Jher asks Dale to chime in on what he recommends. He says he'd like to hear more about Ben's thoughts on how to move forward. Clif says Joe also wants to make contributions here but he is not at the meeting. We agreed Joe should reach out to Dale.

On cleanup: we agreed Les would be empowered to be in charge of cleanups for the organization.

Insurance almost being lost?

Clif says we paid a premium late due to a mixup; it got paid and everything was worked out.

Dale asks, w.r.t. insurance, what's required in terms of shop safety. Clif said he would send this information to Dale. Mary asked if untrained people using the machinery is an issue for insurance; Clif says it is not.

Cord offers that Dale should feel empowered to make any necessary changes to meet shop insurance standards. No objections raised.

Railing at pick-a-part area

We talked about the railing around pick-a-part Dale will address that.

Scheduling more recurring cleanups

Looks like Weekend cleanups are best. Group turns to Dale to schedule the first one (aside from the post-member meeting cleanup). Straw poll results: last Saturday of the month is when cleanups should be done.

Clif suggests cleaning up after your project and leaving the shop slightly better than you found it. Les is empowered to help coordinate monthly cleanup he picks last sat of month.

Dissolve the board?

Cord says lets move on.

Cleanup the discussion list

Some more talk about discuss and announce and good communications.

Piotr arrives 11:56 am

Jher's closing comments

... Thank you all for coming...

Action items:

Clif

• Get Dale basic insurance requirements for shop safety. Then dale can make determinations of safety requirements.

Adjournment:

Clif moved for adjournment, Seconded by Cord.

Unanimous, the meeting was adjourned at 11:57PM.

____________________________ ___________________
Secretary Date of approval
Eugene Maker Space