July 2025 - Board Meeting

07/09/2025 - Area 515 Board Meeting

07/09/2025 - Area 515 Board Meeting

Attending:

• President: Dave

• Vice President: Jake

• Secretary: Brad

• Director: Chris

• Director: John

• Director: Matt

Absent:

• Treasurer: Meg

Approval of Minutes from Previous Meeting

Vote to approve the minutes of the June board meeting

Yes: 6

No: 0

Result: Passed

Current Members: 86

• It was found that a member was storing wood and sand paper on the roof above the textiles room. It was in the way when someone went to perform maintenance on the HVAC system. After extensive discussion, the board decided to contact the member and remind them that the policy is: members can only store things in their cubbys or Steward designated areas.

  • Since the member is out of town for several weeks, Matt and Brad volunteered to get the member's things down from the roof.

• There was discussion about a Steward and member interaction.

• There was general frustration about member communication. Overall there seems to be less traffic to the Google group, and few members respond to Slack posts.

Cleaning and Space Work Nights

• Attendance at Space Work Nights has plummeted. Many of the regular attendees are getting burned out and no longer come.

  • It would help if Tool Stewards would suggest projects people could do on Work Nights.

• Wood Shop Stewards in particular are getting burned out by the amount of cleaning they do.

  • One of the Wood Shop Stewards proposed drastically reducing the number of tools available in the Wood Shop by setting up an off-site storage unit, where a lot of the less-used tools can be kept. In order to use those tools, members would then have to specifically request them ahead of time, and then Stewards would bring them and take them out again.

    • If this plan goes into effect, it was suggested that we could try to strike a deal with the storage unit to get a discount for member's also renting spaces.

  • Another Wood Shop proposal is to steeply increase the Wood Shop tool fee. Right now the Wood Shop fee isn't even close to covering maintenance costs. This fee could also be reduced based on how much individual members help to clean.

• After much discussion, the board decided that we should start tracking which members actually use the space and when. Until now, the door lock checks for valid keys, but has not recorded what keys are used and when. This was for privacy concerns. Now the board feels it would be good to record what keys are being used to open the door and when. In this way we can see who is actually using the space and in the future can compare the list to people doing the cleaning. The record of key uses would only be available to members of the Board of Directors. Matt agreed to work on altering the door lock's programming to accomplish this.

• Jake suggested we hang an expanded volunteer time checklist. Something that lists individual tasks, and includes a place for names and the date the person performed them. In this way, we can compare the list of members who are using the space and the people helping to clean, then contact members who aren't pulling their weight.

• It was also noted that we should emphasize cleaning in the tour script and more in the Orientation email.

• Amidst the discussion on cleaning, the idea of badge access was floated. That is, to make some tools require the member's key in order to work.

  • The difficulty with this is how to make sure a tool stays on and doesn't stop prematurely.

  • There are reportedly lots of documents and some source code to make this work in the Nation of Makers (a national makerspace association) online library. The problem has always been that membership to that is expensive, and no board members have been willing to take the time to research it.

  • A simpler alternative has also been proposed: use a lock out tag out system on the bigger tools. Tags (or keys) could be stored in a lock box, and members use their keys to access the tags and gain access to the tool. Matt expressed interest in this, but decided to focus first on making the door record key uses.

SHR Renewal

Vote to renew a member's SHR at 50% of the normal member fee.

Yes: 6

No: 0

Result: Passed

Space Updates

• Wes dropped off the brake for the Metal Shop he was offering

• Someone requested to use our space for a gathering of coworkers. He will bring all the supplies, only the physical space is needed. Matt volunteered to contact him and, if he approves, to be the member attending the event.

• We still need to pay Janell $1000 to reimburse her for the rocket club expenses.

• Brad agreed to set up an account on BlackBaud - a charitable donation site thingy.

• We need to find who has the password to our Benevity account so we can renew our eligibility on the site.

• Dave lost the key to our PO box, but he'll figure out how to get a replacement key.

Meeting Adjourned

• Did you know: Only about 30% of recipients read a mass email.