Regular Member Meeting 2022 08 09

Time and Location

Date: Tue 09 Aug 2022

Called to order at 7:42 pm by Michelle

Members present: Michelle, Oby, Kevin, Gabe, Matt, Fernand

Members remote:

Others present: Carter

Quorum

Quorum met? Yes

Recognition

• Gabe, for bringing in the Security Summit donation of $500
• Michelle, for coordinating / communicating with Security Summit folks to smooth over details

Old Business

• Tayeb has dropped off a parking pass with Gabe
• Michelle has not heard back regarding her inquiries into mesh networking efforts in Baltimore, but the HacDC ham radio people are still interested and Michelle hopes to attend the ham radio meeting tomorrow to discuss further
  • Oby was recently visiting Philadelphia and learned of Iffy Books's Mesh Jam, a two-day event spread across two weekends: August 13 and August 20.
• DreamHost payments are now up-to-date.
• At Michelle's prompting about setting up a Capture the Flag session, Gabe has said he'll be able to set one up for the fall (after August)
• Oby is a bit busy at the moment to host the Machine Learning class, based on the Coursera Deep Learning class, but hopes to free up time after August.
• Michelle believes she's fixed the problem with the PayPal logo on the main site

New Business

• New lease: a 2.5% increase of $22.50 / month resulting in a new rent of $922.50 ($990.00 next month as "makeup payments")
  • Two-year lease
  • This is much better than pre-COVID rates, but is slowly creeping up
  • New equipment (laser cutter(s), etc.) will require additional space. So, remove / move older items from the space, or... ??? (Matt)
  • The general consensus is leaning towards staying and rearranging rather than trying to move.
  • 5 in favor, 0 opposed. Motion to sign the new lease is APPROVED
• Basement: Oby is inquiring about the state of the basement and the equipment
  • The "Obstacle Table" continues to be an obstacle.
  • Michelle wants to recover the space occupied by the table
  • Kevin says that getting the optical table up and running again would require a massive amount of talent that he does not believe we have on hand
  • Gabe wants to make a 3D model of the basement, taking into account the unusual angles and outcroppings. Enthusiastic support for this idea ensued.
• Ulisses Santamaria of the Rockville Science Center Makerspace, is doing a field trip of the DMV Petri Dish Aug 13, from 2:00 until 5:00 (..."or longer") to the Baltimore UnderGround Science Space (BUGSS) located at 101 N. Haven St. #105, Baltimore, MD 21224 Carpooling available!

Director Reports (Governance related stuff)

Treasurer's Report

• The summary is a bit different this month due to new expenses (see last month): a variety of filaments (diameters, colors), silica gel drying material, airtight containers for filament storage, etc. Plus rent.
• Old PLA filament in the space is in terrible condition. Brittle. Unusable. 15 rolls. No knowledge of the state of NijaFlex. How do we recycle it? Matt will look into local spaces that might handle re-extruding, turning old filament into new.
• Summaries are archived on the treasurer's Google Drive space.

Secretary's Report

• Getting into the space to work on OctoPrint etc, hasn't happened yet.
  • Matt is suggesting several Raspberry Pis attached to each printer to do OctoPi. But they're currently hard to find / expensive.
  • Kevin suggests the Raspberry Pi Locator as a possible way to mitigate cost.
  • Matt is also suggesting uninterruptable power supplies (UPS)
  • Church will be 100 years old in a few years, and there are concerns about fire. No remote printing. (Ideas about mitigating fire with cameras, haylon-like "exploding" balls to suppress / extinguish fires, etc.)
  • Pi-Hole DNS server? ("pihole -g" and "pihole -up" to keep it up to date.)

Adjournment

Adjourned by at 8:37 by Michelle