Regular Member Meeting 2016 09 13

Time and Location

Date

Called to order at 2005 pm by Julia

Members present: Nancy, Tom, Enrique, Luke, Ethan M, Ken

Members remote: ITechGeek

Others present: none

Quorum

Quorum met.

Recognition

• Tom brought in and refurbished a significant number of laptops which can be used by guests and students at Intro Linux and similar events. Thanks!
• Nancy has offered to serve as liaison to HSTS, met with Matt and wrote up a report for us on what HSTS is doing.
• Julia, Mirage and Nancy attended the Office of Science and Technology national makerspace meeting in DC.
• Ethan M. donated a nice sheet metal bending and cutting tool, now in the basement.

New Business

• HARC would like a separate bank account; it would be a HacDC account that the HARC treasurer would be an authorized user of. It would automatically consolidate HARC-earmarked donations and give HARC ability to purchase stuff directly, easing some of the workload from the HacDC treasurer. DiscussS

• We need volunteers to staff informational tables at upcoming CFC events. Last year we got $250 without doing any outreach but we could probably do much better if we attended some of these events at federal agencies. Last year we were invited to NRL but could not attend. There are likely similar informational events at NASA, NIST, NIH, FDA, FCC, etc, etc, where we could inform people that HacDC is a charity they can donate to.

• There is one bylaws amendment pending, awaiting sufficient signatures. There is a second bylaws amendment that will be presented next month to lower the threshold required for bylaws amendments from 3/4ths of all voting members to 3/4ths of votes cast.

Director Reports

Treasurer's Report

• We got another $32 from last year's CFC recently; the total is now $260 or so for 2016.
• We received a check from our sponsor, Accelebrate, for $450. It's technically in September, not August.
• Finally done collecting all the membership dues we (I) didn't collect in June.
• We had a $265 surplus in August, which will be distributed to projects.
• That's $265 after several significant project purchases, which reduced the surplus, which reduces the allocation to projects now. The rules state the PA allocation must be based on cash accounting. Is that a good idea? Expenses affect the project dividend even when income is far above regular expenses.
• I expect another similar surplus in September thanks to the Accelebrate money.

Project balances at the end of JULY... need to update this... Supplies $379.71, Expansion $264.91, Ham Radio $156.54, SEM $534.40, OTR $2,868.32, CRISPR $0, SpaceBlimp $0.

Secretary's Report

I've been holding our PC repair instruction (destruction) meetup on Sundays now for a few Sundays running and plan on continuing it every Sunday afternoon at 4pm in general. We had 3 visitors two weeks ago but nobody this last Sunday.

We worked on a Dell Poweredge T410 tower server. I would like to put it into service as an implicitCAD rendering server, which will take about $300 under project Expansion or as a new project (Rendering).

We're also very close to getting the classroom laser cutter running. I'm putting the finishing touches on the vent adapter and we have the control unit on hand.

Currently member information is kept in a google sheet, which I find massively inconvenient and difficult to use. I would like to set up a more customized CRM setup so that we can more easily keep track of up to date member information.

Project Awesome Reports

Project CRISPR Initiative

Our first attempt at adding antibiotic resistance failed. We tried this again with several troubleshooting control samples and although the efficiency was very low, a few bacteria colonies are now growing on the antibiotic-laced dishes. We're close to putting together a workshop and also expanding the equipment. We've contacted both the vendor and a local Maryland lab about obtaining more of the particular consumable ingredients.

Member Reports

• Enrique: I'm starting to put together a monthly HacDC newsletter. It's hard for HacDC members (paying membeers) to keep up to date with HacDC's activities if they can't stop by the space regularly. We have at least four, sometimes five or six events per week now but no written summary of them. The Project Reports are a good start, I could use help in general, with formatting/layout and getting content (I am also not omniscient, don't know all that's going on). Ask me!

Adjournment

Adjourned by at xxx by xxx