Regular Member Meeting 2017 04 11

Time and Location

Date

Called to order at 7:45pm pm by Tom

Members present: Tom, Matt Z, Andrew R, Xavier B, Kevin C, Enrqiue C., Ken K., Michael C.

Members remote: mirage, juri

Others present: Sanjay, Chrystal, Kevin, Nancy

Quorum

Quorum met? Yes

Approval of Previous Meeting's Minutes

February and March meeting minutes approved.

Recognition

• Andrew: brought & installed an awesome sound system and brought 40 cores worth of servers.
• Tom: Set up a print server (2D) with a Raspberry Pi, you can now print to raspberry.local I think.
• Kevin: fixed (unjammed) Nicks' Ultimaker and the Mini again.

New Members

Sanjay voted in as new member.

Old Business

• Ken's proposal that members confide in and authorize the Board to seek legal counsel and other administrative support to explore financial opportunities in grant sponsorship: HacDC would provide oversight of entities who don't qualify for non-profit grants effecting work using non-profit grants; HacDC would apply/get the grant and sub-contract work to the business who can do the work. Classes, for example. Proposal PASSED by 6 in favor, 1 opposed, 1 abstain.

• Bylaws amendment proposal: Change the threshold for future bylaws amendments from "more than three quarters (3/4ths) of voting members," to "more than three quarters (3/4ths) of member votes cast 90 days from the proposal approval date," and from "Notice of such petition must be submitted electronically to all members," to "Notice of such a petition must be submitted to all members electronically and, where electronic means produce no response, all other available means." (from October) Proposal PASSED by 8 in favor.

New Business

• We have a lot of non-free (paid) events on our MeetUp schedule now - 2 or 3 a week. They are software education events, which are in-line with our educational mission and which we've had people express interest in before to no avail. They are nominally run by High School Tech Services, a non-profit organization, not a business. But are they open to people who can't afford to pay? Are they open to HacDC members who pay rent and insurance for the classroom, the MeetUp fees, etc? Does HSTS have a current 501c3 non-profit status and insurance? Is HSTS deriving any net revenue from these events, and will it be shared with HacDC to offset costs, lower membership fees, etc? Our previous (expired) MOU with HSTS covered 9am-5pm on weekdays, which generally doesn't overlap with other members' events, but the new events are on weeknights and our weeknight schedule is now regularly full Monday thru Thursday with two free and two non-free events. Do current rules prevent members from charging for events, or from asking people who haven't paid to leave an event at HacDC? Should HacDC create some rules for paid events, or limit the number of events so some weeknights are open?

• I am writing to propose the following:

As you may know, Google offers up to $10k monthly Ad Grant to eligible non-profit organizations. We can use that grant to get more donations, more community recognition, more traffic to our site, etc. The below link provides more info: https://www.google.com/grants/ There is no fee for application or enrollment. We just need to apply and see if we can get approved. I suggest using Google Ad credit to market our programming classes at HacDC. Specifically, we can use that credit to get more students in our classes and eventually generate more revenue for HacDC. My non-profit or High School Technology Services (myhsts.org) was partnered with HacDC on organizing coding classes few months ago, so I propose extending the initial MOU between HacDC and HSTS by including Google Ad Grant clause to it under the same revenue sharing and use of space as we agreed before. I like to present my proposal at the next week member meeting and get our members to vote on it. In the meantime, I would love to discuss your questions.

Project Awesome Reports

Project SUPPLIES

Nothing to report.

Project EXPANSION

Nothing to report.

Project Electron Microscope (SEM)

• Nothing to report. We should schedule one night if only to check the vacuum pressure. It would be nice if someone else who's done this before was around (Dan, Hunter). But few people seem eager to get involved and I don't have much time to invest in this myself, so expect little progress on the SEM. -Enrique

• I'll start taking this on during Microcontroller Mondays, but again, expect little progress, and lots of training other people -Julia

Project Optical Table Robot (OTR)

No progress this month. I (julia) have been out sick a lot, and working on increasing our 3D printer count from 3 to 4.

Project CRISPR

• Nothing to report; trying to schedule the next meeting. Maybe next week (it takes 2 consecutive nights to do it). The plan is to compare two different bacteria strains (do the CRISPR process twice in parallel) use freshly-made plates and check for ambient contamination (other species). We do have a water bath now that should make things much easier.

Project SpaceBlimp

• Nothing to report. Not sure if the jet stream is in the right position yet but nobody has resumed any discussion of Spaceblimp 7. I have a 'science payload' idea and parts but don't really have time to take the project lead. -Enrique

Member Reports

• Enrique: Went to a Metasploit workshop from the Beltway Hackers MeetUp group and am convincing them to host a similar free hands-on workshop at HacDC. Probably into May. Let me know if you'd like to stay informed and look forward to the announcement. The March for Science organizers are being rather unresponsive to offers for assistance; two "we'll get back to you," replies so far. Nevertheless I'll be here Friday 21st and the HAM club is looking to contact them to assist with communications also to little avail.

Director Reports

Vice President's Report

I've had some moderately busy days at PC Rebuilds/Hardware [Des]pair. Still needs a better name. Sad Sundays?

    to be filled

Treasurer's Report

• Funding is stable; we have over six months of reserves and total balances around $12k. I'd love to upload files to this someday...
• Paid March rent late and April rent early (eh, works out, right?), so we're $1,021 in the red for March and will have a big 'surplus' in April.
• We have 30 members in good standing after just suspending two for three months of non-payment.
• We have 21 members paying the regular $60 rate. ($1260)
• We have 7 members paying the old $50 rate, who I haven't seen around in years, so... thank you. ($350)
• We have 1 dues-waived member and 1 student-rate member. ($20)
• Theoretical income is $1,630/mo but there's usually someone who just stops paying (without resigning).
• Theoretically we could try to recover $180 worth of dues each from a handful of people, or not bother. (?)
• Paid Tom $33 for key copies - no other unusual expenses in March or February (just Rent, Insurance, Transaction Fees).
• Filed taxes with IRS (990N postcard).
• Registered as business with DC to file tax returns there, haven't actually filed yet.
• Totally missed the CFC deadline (Feb??). We got $550 last year but there's a hefty application fee - was it waived last year?
• Help wanted: To re-establish contact with Newark element 14 for sponsorship (got $600 of free parts last year, now emails bounce).
• Help wanted: Need to calculate individual project balances (HAM Radio, SEM, OTR, CRISPR, SUPPLIES etc) from overall PA dividend.
• Help wanted: Our Dwolla button is broken, so we are paying a few bucks a month more PayPal fees.

Director-at-Large Reports

Matt

Still busy preparing some interesting things for the world.

Adjournment

Adjourned by at xxx by xxx