Regular Member Meeting 2015 09 08

Time and Location

September 08, 2015

Called to order at 7:52 pm by Celeste

Members present: Logan, Christine, Mirage, Celeste, Enrique, Ethan, Don, Bill, Julia, Dan B.

Members remote: Sumter

Others present: Dylan J. David, Cookie, Bobby

Quorum

Quorum met? Yes 11 of 32 members present.

Approval of Previous Meeting's Minutes

Regular Member Meeting 2015 08 11

Recognition

Ethan W. for an offer of scanning electron microscope spare parts. Danish for helping Ethan move a second Cambridge Stereoscan SEM.

Director Reports

Vice President's Report

All four Purple Martins fleged. Probably headed to South America by now, if not there already. Photos available. Good luck!

Personally constructing Taz_Mega, combining features from both FlexReplicator and LulzBot Taz designs. Existing Taz machines can be upgraded with compatible custom metal plates. Progress documented at Aleph Objects' forum.

Alternative Office Space

Recommend we do not take the office space down the hall. We would be better off retaining one of the existing spaces, with access to plumbing.

Part-time subletting of the classroom space may also be possible.

Furniture

Workroom furniture is not 100% efficient, and the middle area is not a great classroom space. Yet, the classroom seems just fine with 3' of desks along the long walls. Suggest we build permanent tables, shelves, and tool enclosures along the classroom walls. Done right, this could vastly improve usability of the space for hardware work, while occupying little of the classroom space.

This can be done one workstation at a time, gradually moving equipment and freeing up space. CAD models should be available soon.

IT Admin

HacDC servers suffered some downtime, due to external power failure exceeding UPS capabilities. Shell/VPS servers Starlight/Shimmer are fully operational at present, haxwithaxe's NAS server is temporarily offline. Modern desktops/laptop hardware is currently in short supply, owing to some failures over the years. Please let others know if you can spare some replacement hardware.

A ToDo/Wishlist category has been added to the wiki. The old wishlist page was perpetually obsolete, hopefully a category page linked to user pages, projects, etc, will be easier to maintain.

Treasurer's Report

Income from memberships for August: $1500 Donations: $150

paypal balance: $1341.66 Dwolla balance: $890 bank balance: $6853.39

Secretary's Report

Not much to report; mostly the proposals. We generally need more members. 32 members, a third of which aren't really active, is not enongh. HacDC doesn't really work without active members teaching classes and helping out. We're becoming overreliant on Juri for 3D Thursdays, Web Scraping, Treasurer, etc.

Project Awesome Reports

Project SUPPLIES

Four Raspberry Pi's have been purchased, to be expensed soon. At least two are immediately planned for dedication to HacDC 3D printers.

Planning further repairs and upgrades, likely including the following.

• Repair/buy more desktops/laptops as needed.
• Hard disks may be needed, either for NAS capacity upgrades, or RAID redundancy.

Project EXPANSION

No expenditures this month.

We could upgrade to this outstanding mitre saw someday: http://www.sears.com/craftsman-10inch-compound-miter-saw-21236/p-00921236000P?sid=IDx01192011x000001&pla&kpid=00921236000&kispla=00921236000P&kpid=00921236000&mktRedirect=y .

Lumber may be needed for custom furniture in the classroom. Funding this through EXPANSION is a possibility.

Old Business

• Pending: Proposal for a list of special tool custodians and list of authorized users (eg CNC, Laser Cutter, Lathe, etc).
• Pending: CryptoParty 2015?

New Business

Proposal 1a: HacDC may sublet the classroom to other corporations during the hours of 7am to 5:30pm, Monday thru Friday. HacDC authorizes the board of directors to negotiate the terms of such a sublet for periods not exceeding one year. (Paying rent for the classroom M-F 9-5 and keeping it empty is extremely rent-inefficient. This is Plan A.) Proposal was APPROVED by 7-0 vote.

Proposal 1b: See 1a but restrict to non-profit organizations. (We probably need all options open right now though.) This proposal was not voted on.

Proposal 2a: Negotiate a change to our lease agreement with St. Stephen's to exclude the workshop and lower our rent accordingly as soon as possible. Consolidate the workshop into the current classroom and basement. Authorize the board to negotiate the change to our lease and lower rent amount. (This is clearly Plan B or C.) Proposal was APPROVED by 6-0 vote.

Proposal 3a: HacDC may display sponsorship information on our home page (in addition to the sponsors page) and have a display of current sponsors at all public events. The board shall be authorized to negotiate terms of sponsorship for periods not exceeding 1 year. Proposal was APPROVED by 7-1 vote

Proposal 3b: Same as 3a but restrict 3a to organizations that provide technical, educational or artistic products and services. (Again, 3a would give us more freedom and options right now.) This proposal was not voted on.

Proposal 4a: Approve expenditure of $200 from the general fund towards the purchase of HacDC-branded tee shirts. (Design TBD) (An easy way to advertise HacDC at HacDC public events, we could also give them away to guests for more advertising.) Proposal was APPROVED by 8-to-0.

Proposal 5a: Approve creation of a billboard up to 36x48" for the display of HacDC sponsors' logos up to 12x12" each at HacDC events. Authorize the board to negotiate sponsorship prices for a period of one year. Proposal was APPROVED by 8-to-0.

Proposal 6 (see email 8/31): We have an offer from St. Stephen's to move to HacDC's original room at St. Stephen's, recently vacated by One World Education, for rent of $940/mo. This would nominally put us at a budget surplus immediately. The room is 400sqft, the same as our current classroom. It includes a sink and dedicated restroom (currently not working) and window A/C units rather than central air. We'd keep the basement. This offer is reserved for HacDC until Thursday 9/10/2015. Proposal APPROVED by 5-to-4.

Upon further discussion there was general sense that the 3D Printing and HARC station would stay in the upstairs classroom, the woodworking, metalworking and laser cutter would move to the basement.

New Members

Dylan J. welcomed by unanimous vote of all members present

Adjournment

Adjourned by at 9:30pm by Celeste