O/D Meeting 11/17/2020

Agenda

COVID-19

• Space Report
  • Supply report
  • Current state of the space

Digital Outreach

• Online Events
• Teleconferencing/Streaming Service for LVL1
• Hackathons

New Membership Discussion

• See the thread on the members' list

Minutes

November 17, 2020

tl;dr: Jim covers financials; we're in good shape Covid-19 compliance and supplies discussed prelim discussion about heat and not letting the pipes freeze we paid the lawyer for our legal issue earlier this year discussed The Pointe getting the heat fixed in the classroom discussed digital outreach: hacknight earlier tonight, upcoming Archer Hackathon discussed various meeting software; decided to buy Zoom now discussed 3D design software discussed the StartUp Kentucky email discussed that the process for taking on new members is still valid and useable no round table; meeting adjourned, 10:04 pm.

November 17, 2020 November board meeting, via Zoom

[Secretary's note: Danielle had brain surgery not long before this meeting and has electrodes on her head; how she looks today is from whence "Robo-Dani" is born.]

Attending: Charles Grand Moff, Jim, Madeline, Tiffany, Paul, Danielle (and sometimes Kevin w/ Danielle).

Begin: 9:23 pm

Charles: Jim, finances.

Jim: Let's do the numbers. Sheet 1, expenses. Recurring, $406.57 to LGE, next month is 250-something! I have questions for later during our discussion about our readiness for cold weather, and we can dig into that later. Our rent is $1,500. We have MeetUp, V-Carve and Flickr. And our insurance is $134.48 until next July. The CC processing is down since we have fewer members. We made two purchases on Amazon for 85.59, which were -- non-Amazon, which were supplies. $149 for Pike13. We're down to 7 people on PayPal, so the charge for PayPal was only 9.80. Total ongoing expenses were $2,432.

Sheet 2, Profit and loss. We took in $3,213; our expenses totaled including everything was 2,547.87, so we came out with 666.03, for a net positive; and that's just because we're not doing anything.

Sheet 3 is income. We had $2,850 in the bank, and 350 from PayPal, gave us 3,200. Emergency Fund drew 13.90. I'll have to check with them on that; we've rolled them over, so I don't know if we've got the same interest rate.

Expenses, had 2432 from recurring. 101 on Amazon, most of that was for masks and stuff like that. We had a PayPal charge for $10; and then, miscellaneous was the checking account charge for 2.95. Gave us 2,547 for our total expenses.

And back on Sheet 2 at the bottom, I transferred 1200 from PayPal to checking. We haven't spent anything this month. Reimbursed David for the steadyrest that he bought for the lathe this month, so that will be on the November report.

We still have 2250 in the makership. People are still making donations. After Covid, we'll be able to fund makerships for quite a while. The SBA grant still has $70 left; the hat grant has $458.23. Emergency is up to 9,166.27. The reserve, the money that we sort-of hold back to pay off the entire budget for the rest of the year if we have to, 9,077.07. And that came out to 21,022.42. So I set out to the side there that the unencumbered funds, for if anybody wants to do a FAP or something, is $25,915.48.

Questions? No questions? I like that.

Charles: Moving on, we've got Covid 19 report from the space.

Jim: I was down there twice to get the mail. David was there. There were a couple of people there cutting wood and I had to ask some to put on masks. Everything looked nice and clean; main area was swept. Classroom looked okay; boneyard is still full of stuff. I'm going to get in touch with E-waste and see if they'll come get it. I got some wipes at Kroger; going to leave one at the space. I'm not sure how many wipes there are down there, but there is hand sanitizer and there were masks on the table and all the instructions were there. I'm hoping people are trying to make an effort. If there are any suggestions, let me know.

Charles: I think just telling people when we catch them not following policies, reminding them what policies are and tell them they need to do them. And if they fuss about it, say, "It's not us, it's the government."

Jim: I'm going to try to get down there tomorrow and drop some E-waste; I'll scope it out and see how the daytime people are doing. I discussed it with David and agreed to help in that regard. He's been doing stuff over in the machine shop. We agreed to block off the window with the AC until spring, to keep it insulated so it doesn't leak.

We need to find out about heat, to make sure everything works okay to keep things warm enough so the pipes don't freeze, especially in the wood shop and the metal shop. I don't know what the situation is exactly, if we have to turn something on or find out if it works or it doesn't. We're going to be in the range of cold temps to watch out for soon.

Paul: The woodshop has that heater that's bolted to the ceiling.

Jim: I think we have one over in metal shop, too. I don't know if it's turned on or if it's got a thermostat and how we set it.

Paul: It's pretty self-explanatory once you get a 12' ladder; plug it in; there's a receptacle up there. I'm not going to be around for the next three weeks to drop in and do it; otherwise, I would. I'm flying out of country tomorrow morning.

Jim: Wow. Where did you find a country that will take people from the United States?

Paul: Yeah, we'll see if they let me in; I'm not there yet. I'm going to India for a job. Ten days of quarantine for five days of work.

Jim: Okay. We went ahead and paid the lawyer bill regarding the member issue from earlier this year. I don't believe that action has been completed due to Covid situation.

Danielle: Okay. I mean, you didn't have any other guidance.

Charles: Yeah.

Tiffany: I'm kind of glad that it went this way; because in the end, that attorney ended up doing quite a bit of consultation and spending quite a bit of time with Raj. I don't know that anything has been done, like the actions at the end of the discussion have yet to be taken, I believe. So I believe that that work is still due to us for the amount paid; but I just believe that there ended up being more work involved, and so I am glad that we did not underpay them. I'm glad to hear that. I mean, I know people complain about how much lawyers charge, but there is work in what they do, and there is a lot of school and time behind them.

Danielle: It's pretty fair. That's a fair assessment. I just want to make sure that there has been resolution in all of this, and it's a completely haywire, horrible scenario.

We do have other scenarios in the works; like, we need to know our A/C and heat management. Was Raj looking into that, or who was looking into that specifically?

Charles: From what I have been able to gather, The Pointe wants to have their person do it and then we pay the bill. That's what I've been able to get thus far. It's not been done yet, so it's still out there.

Jim: Just the classroom, right? Our other heaters are working, aren't they? The heater for the main space is working, isn't it?

Charles: I'm not sure.

Danielle: We haven't had any complaints yet, have we? We've just got to make sure that we're addressing that. Charles, that's what's happening?

Charles: That's the last thing I heard. I need to talk to somebody from the Pointe, get them to answer me and get it set up. If they don't respond, we'll have to call someone ourselves and get it done. I'll get in touch with them before Thanksgiving and see what we can work out.

Danielle: All right. That sounds good.

Jim: Money is not the problem; let's get it fixed. We'd rather fix that than clean up a spill of the pipes bursting.

Charles: Digital outreach. We had a digital Hacknight tonight, had approx 12 attendees, so that went well. Steph & I are co-hosting the Archer Hackathon on Dec 11 & 12. So, that's going to be the virtual thing where we keep a meeting open and maybe show people how to make a few things from the show. We will present virtually at 8:00 Saturday night. I've reduced it to 3 categories this year, down from 4.

Charles: Any other online events or Hackathons people want to do? It's really easy; all you have to do is get the Zoom meeting going. We'd like to bring more people into the community. Have we made any progress on getting our own teleconferencing service?

Jim: I tried out Microsoft Teams, and it's almost the same operation as Zoom, except the meeting I had on it is better. It's a lot smoother, well-defined. If somebody wants to look at it, we can pull a meeting together and see how you like it. It's got the same features; it's about the same type. I don't know about price; haven't looked into that yet.

Charles: Are we going to lose our non-Windows people if we do a Microsoft solution?

Jim: Yeah, I don't know.

Danielle: I thought we agreed last time that we were just going to get a Zoom.

Charles: We had talked about Google and we talked about Zoom, but I think there was a non-profit pricing for Zoom that we're going to look into.

Danielle: I'm not impressed with Google, just what they've been doing generally. Zoom, we've already been working with, and I think we talked about establishing a relationship a salesperson asking about an innovative non-profit that would love a membership.

Jim discusses the possibility of purchasing different systems.

Danielle: At what point do we say let's buy it and be done with it? We do this, we already use it, we're not short on money now; let's just buy it.

Jim: Until the winter utility bills; let's hope they don't get us.

Madeline: Zoom is arguably the most important part of LVL1 at this moment; this is where it's happening.

Danielle: So we've been talking about buying this membership for a couple of months now; at what point are we just going to buy this?

Jim: Okay. Let's see.

Madeline: Do we need to put it to a vote or a FAP for it?

Jim: There may be options; I don't know.

Tiffany: Not if it's less than $100.

Jim: It depends on whether we want the Cadillac model so we can have up to 50 people.

Charles: It's like a PayPal or FrontDesk or whatever; it's one of those services, but there are also a few very vocal members that don't like us spending money without telling someone, so we might want to put something out on the members' list.

Danielle: We haven't had minutes from the meetings in a while; I know that circumstances have come up. But it's a great way to communicate, through these meeting minutes, that this is a service that we're paying for.

Charles: Yes.

Danielle: And we've decided that because this is arguably the most important service right now at LVL1 for the continuation of our organization. 100%.

Jim: Yeah. I'm looking into the design software that Andy wanted, that they were using. So we've got maybe two things to work on. How about we get the definition of what we're looking for. Are we looking for a service that is scalable, or are we doing small meetings? Do we want good video, 1080?

Danielle: Well, let's just pick a service. Let's just Zoom right now.

Charles: We don't need 1080; we're not doing broadcast movies.

Madeline: I'm on the Zoom pricing page right now, Zoom.com/pricing.

Paul: Yes, I just called it up, too. $200 a year for large enterprise.

Madeline: Does so many dollars per year per license mean that we get one person who could set stuff up; we'd have like one? That's the part I don't understand how many can --

Charles: I think that's the person who has access set things up. Or maybe it's a number of simultaneous.

Madeline: Small teams, $149.90 per year per license; host up to 100 participants; unlimited group meetings; social media streaming; one gigabyte of cloud recording per license. I don't see us having anything with more than 100 participants; even in person, that's a lot.

Charles: We didn't even get that at the space.

Madeline: That seems to be the upper limit. And if we have to get more than one license, it's $150 per year. I think we can deal with that.

Jim: Well, I've got it priced out in the books. When you get the books, it's got our subscriptions in there, so we can just add this.

Charles: If we get anywhere close to 100, we can come back and talk about this again.

Jim: Yes.

Danielle: Absolutely.

Charles: But see if we can get any discount for being a non-profit and I say we should get that set up.

Jim: I'll go to Zoom and maybe try to get in touch with a human being, like at a help desk or something that can give me some head's up on what they were talking about.

Charles: If they can bill us in a way that makes it less then $100 a month, that will give us a way to pay it.

Madeline: The link that I just put into the chat, Zoom.us/contact sales seems to be a way to actually talk to them. Looks like you can put in an email address and they'll get back with you, and there is a phone number at the bottom of that page.

Danielle: Thank you so much, Mad. Thank you. This is very important. As you're talking with the person, be reminded that we need to make a purchase.

Madeline: If we need to have another meeting this month to discuss this before making the purchase, I'm fine with that. Maybe we can talk once we have more information.

Jim: Yeah. I can just send it in an email to the directors.

Danielle: That sounds perfect.

Madeline: On the topic of emails, there were 2 emails I did not respond to yet; let's slip that in here. The first one from 12 days ago, a lady asked if we have a 3D printer and what is the smallest object we can print. My gut instinct is to send her the wiki page about 3D printers, but I have no idea if that information is accurate. But she's not a member, so maybe I should send her the --

Danielle: "We're not open."

Madeline: Okay. I will send that, as well. The other one is, we've gotten three emails from this guy, Stephen [something] with StartUp Kentucky. Can I tell him that yes, we'll talk about it on social media?

Danielle: Send it out to the members' list, StartUp Weekend Kentucky. Just forward that email to the members' list.

Charles: Yeah.

Madeline: Does anybody know how to set up Gmail alerts for emails to directors so that it tells me I need to actually look at that, because I get a lot of emails from lvl1?

Danielle: I've done tabs. Have you done that yet? That tabulated my emails, that just created different sections.

Madeline: I'll look at doing that. Thank you.

Danielle: Thank you for doing all of that email responding; it's a job.

Charles: Anything else on digital outreach or new-membership discussion. I don't think there's anything new. We had an event; we had a couple people show up. Brian is willing to meet with people in whatever form and be part of the process of getting more people into the community. He had to travel and leave early, but he did say he very willing to help with that. Maybe some people who were at the hacknight, maybe they will talk to others and get that process under way. Nothing really to update on that.

Elections. We need to open nominations for elections soon. After people come back from Thanksgiving is the time that we've done that in the past.

Danielle: Yes.

Jim: Okay.

Charles: I will post on the members' list right after Thanksgiving saying that we're opening up nominations for elections.

Jim: Did we ever come up with a process for signing off on new members?

Charles: The process is in the bylaws and the process is going to be the same. We need to make sure that they're involved in the community. We still need to get two directors to verify their ID somehow, so we may have a mask-wearing, social-distanced thing where they have to stop by the space. But without a bylaw change, the process is still the same. They complete the form; they get the three sponsors and the two director signatures; and we just need to make sure that we actually bring them in the community and make sure they're a good fit before that happens and make sure that they interact with the community after that happens.

As we said before, we still have the member objection thing, so if they don't play along, it just takes four members - they can be board members; they can be regular members; they can be any kind of member - it just takes four members to say, "This person isn't participating." And the way the bylaws are written, I don't remember the specific language, but it's something about contributing thoughtfully, or there is some clause in there about how they contribute to the community.

Jim: Okay.

Charles: So that's pretty much where that is. That's all the agenda. Any round table? Going once, going twice. All right, we're finished.

Meeting adjourned, 10:04.