Regular Member Meeting 2016 05 10

Time and Location

Date

Called to order at 7:47 pm by Ethan W. (VP)

Members present: Ethan W., Tom I., Mike C., Julia, Jamie, Bobby

Members remote: Mirage, Hunter

Others present: Ethan, Nancy, Ken

Quorum

Quorum met.

Recognition

April was an an extraordinary month for HacDC and lots of people deserve recognition. It was a massive effort in terms of public events for HacDC last month. We had a HacDC table at 3D/DC in the Rayburn Office Building, followed immediately by the USA Science and Engineering Festival in the DC Convention Center where we had four tables full of HacDC projects, tools, activities and information for three solid, long days full of annoying little kids. If that wasn't enough, we had a HacDC table at RobotFest two weeks later (thanks to Julia and Nancy). All three events went remarkably well for HacDC thanks to a big effort by our members and volunteers. Special thanks to Julia, Nancy, Mirage, Rob, Tom, Ethan W, Ethan M, Danish, Bobby and Enrique for making it all happen. Also a shout-out to Unallocated Space for coming by HacDC after USASEF and then hosting us at their hackerspace after RobotFest a week or two later. We also have several members who've stepped up to fill in our schedule right after these publicity events, meaning HacDC has something going on almost every day of the week for the next three weeks:

• Julia for restarting Microcontroller Mondays (in addition to 3D Thursdays).
• Xaiver for starting Introduction to Linux.
• Tom for starting Intro to PC Hardware.

Also,

• Nancy and Enrique for filming, editing and scoring the HacDC USASEF video, now on YouTube.
• Nancy for making several fliers for HacDC events.
• Julia, Ethan and Enrique for making time to meet with NRL's STEM Outreach Coordinator.
• Paul Jaffe for a great talk on Space Solar.
• Don for always being there to help in a pinch.
• and myself (Enrique) for filling out tedious IRS forms on short notice and handing them in in-person and other stuff.

New Members

Ethan and Nacy were approved as members.

Ken and Jamie were previously members and are considering resuming membership by paying of dues.

New Business

Tom I (Secretary) requests approval for reimbursment of PEI heatbed.

Director Reports

Treasurer's Report

I'll be headed back into town Tuesday evening and may not make it to this meeting.

Regular and one-time income was $1,110 and $311 respectively, so $1,436 total. Regular expenses were $1066 and the other $369 went to Reserves, which are now $5,200. Project expenditures were $324. We got a Yaesu Wires-X kit for HARC and donated some cash to NERA. Supplies purchased some USB Flash Drives and spare LEDs for the television.

Project Balances: Supplies $522, Expansion $489, Ham Radio $852, SEM $436, OTR $3,104

I've realized a mistake in how we handle some membership dues on PayPal. The old $50/mo dues are deposited automatically each month into our account once the subscription is set up, just as dues paid through Dwolla. The new PayPal dues since February 2015 must be billed manually. This caused headaches last year already with Phil and Matt and other members. Last month I billed several of these for the first time. It seems they have to be billed manually every month, and I didn't know that. Several members were not billed in April, so our revenue is lower. There are even subscriptions set up that haven't been billed for months, or ever, and I'm reaching out to those members about this issue.

We received $242 from the CFC. Thanks to Don, Phil and even Travis for setting that up in 2015. I filed a "pro-forma" IRS 990 with the CFC so we can stay on the list and do better this year. I haven't heard from the Audit Committee lately. Getting Brian a parting gift wasn't clearly delegated and didn't happen, unfortunately. It was a busy month.

Secretary's Report

I've been a little scattered the past month -- will try to do better this month and all others coming.

For instance, once again I've forgotten to close the outgoing pile. Nobody has gone to the basement to throw anything out so it's still there ready to be picked over. I'm going to haul everything off sometime this week and then we can start the process again. On this topic, I've picked up a small haul of stuff from a local nonprofit including a couple of Dell tower servers, one of them a T410 of reasonable quality, some old but well-kept laptops, a very old HP laserjet, lots of cisco full-height PCI wireless cards, and some switches. I'd like dibs on some of the hardware if it gets thrown out but don't want to abuse my position by any means so it'll all come to the space once I'm done wiping hard drives.

Also -- I lost my log of the IRC from last month's meeting which was to be used to update last month's minutes. I had to write them from memory more than a week later. Anyone have a copy of the #hacdc chat from last month? This and future meetings will be saved to non-volatile memory...

I'm going to start a recurring workshop for DIY PC repair / hardware tech support. I put it up on the Meetup (although I thought it wasn't announced publicly yet) and will announce it on Blabber too. I here a lot of "Well I have this old broken laptop/pc I would like to fix up and put linux on/get help and see if it's salvageable" and similar sorts of statements from visitors; it seems like a well run class that addresses this kind of want from people could be a good draw to the space.

Director-at-Large Reports

Matt "mirage335"

• Fabric chairs present a special combination of food and habitat. None that we have are significantly better than trash.
• Our Microwave imparts spicy flavors. Sometimes, it just doesn't seem to fit the entree. Maybe spend $50 on a clean new unit.
• TazMega was a big hit at USASEF.
• Upgrades to Starlight are still in-progress, with one motherboard having spontaneously exploded, and another bricked after some reliability issues. On the upside, we can probably expect an 8-core, 48GB RAM, 20TB RAID6 array, 4TB RAID0 fast array, with around 900MB/s and 1000 IOPS peak disk performance.

Project Awesome Reports

Project SUPPLIES

• Emergency purchase of supplies related to recent incidents.
• Preemptive delegation to Ethan Waldo to select a computer workstation (after two missed purchases).

Project EXPANSION

Nothing to report.

Adjournment

Adjourned by at 2108 by Ethan