Board Meeting 2014-01-23 Minutes
Directors Present
- Shawn Porter, President
- Roxy Dehart, Vice President
- Richard Gowen, Secretary
Directors Absent
None
Location and Time
Meeting held on Jan 23, 2014 at Mama’s Pizza during lunch.
Business
1st Order of business:
Expansion of board. Discussion regarding future potential board members either from the officers or from the membership (floating board members). We will raise this as a topic in the upcoming leadership meeting.
2nd Order of business:
Membership credit expiration. Enough interest from the membership in changing the one year rule exists to consider changing this. Although, this will require a bylaws change and will need to be voted on by the membership at the first annual meeting.
Proposed rewrite of that bylaw will indicate that the points will not expire unless the member leaves or is expelled. In the case of a member in a non-payment status the points will be automatically used to extend that membership until the points are exhausted or the member returns to paid status again.
This proposed bylaw amendment will be put to a vote at the first annual meeting.
There is not an urgency to do so before this time since no member points will reach the current one year expiration point prior to this meeting.
3rd Order of business:
Can we spend the $850 needed to file for federal tax exempt status? Agreement that if we postpone repayment of founding board member expenditures then we can afford to file now.
Vote on spending $850 to file for federal tax exempt status.
- Vote: 3 in favor, 0 opposed, 0 abstained
- Resolution: Vote passed
4th Order of business:
Logo Contest. We want to have our new logo prior to our media blitz and fundraising activities in March. So the logo contest must be completed by the end of Feb. Richard will put together the contest details. We will have Abby do some PR for it.
5th Order of business:
Founding members and incentives for them. Defined founding members as those members who started paid memberships prior to us signing the lease on a physical space. We should have some incentives to encourage more members to start paid memberships now. The first incentive will be that founding members will have thier membership fee of $20/mo $200/yr locked in at that rate regardless of future fee increases for as long as they remain a paid member in good standing. Future incentives could include items like free t-shirts, etc.
Vote on the definition of a founding member and the rate lock incentive.
- Vote: 3 in favor, 0 opposed, 0 abstained
- Resolution: Vote passed
6th Order of business:
Transparent bookkeeping. Discussed various software packages that we might want to try out for bookkeeping. We are all in agreement that we want to make our books transparent and available to the public at large (no just members). We will raise this topic with our treasurer and at the upcoming leadership meeting.
7th Order of business:
Intellectual Property. Since questions have been raised about our stance on IP we need to come up with a clarification. This should explain our position on members retaining their IP but that anything produced using lab equipment or labor should be covered by creative commons or open source licenses. Shawn to write up the clarification. We will raise this topic in our upcoming leadership meeting.
8th Order of business:
Leadership meetings. Our first leadership meeting is scheduled for Jan 27th from 7-9 PM. Discussed topics to review with the leadership at this meeting. In addition to the topics raised by previous orders of business we need to have our CTO take on the compute lab and we need to discuss the priority of the wireless lab program given the lack of interest at the member meeting.
A legal meeting has been scheduled bi-weekly on Mondays at 10 PM starting on Jan 27th following the leadership meeting.
9th Order of business:
Founding Board Member Point Reward. In recognition of all the time and effort spent by the founding board members to bring the Lab to its current point the founding board members will be awarded 3 membership points each.
Vote on awarding the founding board members 3 membership points each.
- Vote: 3 in favor, 0 opposed, 0 abstained
- Resolution: Vote passed
10th Order of business:
Rules Page. Many of the bylaws were left lacking specifics so that those could be clarified by the board via board defined rules. While this allows the board to clarify and modify many rules without requiring an amendment to the bylaws, the creation of these clarifying rules has not yet been completed. We need to put together a list of supplemental clarifying rules and post them on the web site. Richard will start this rules list and will work with the board via email to finalize the rules to be posted.