October 2025 - Board Meeting

10/01/2025 - Area 515 Board Meeting

10/01/2025 - Area 515 Board Meeting

Attending:

• President: Dave

• Vice President: Jake

• Treasurer: Meg (remote)

• Secretary: Brad

• Director: John

• Director: Matt

Absent:

• Director: Chris

Votes By Email Since Previous Meeting

• On Saturday, September 6th, our $500 bid on sedo.com to regain ownership of the Area515.org domain name expired. No other bids were submitted. Our bid was not accepted; we never heard from the buyer; our bid just simply expired. Board members then discussed how to proceed on the Board Slack channel. Three main options were discussed:

  • bidding $500 a second time

  • bidding $500 a second time & including a message about negotiating (Explanation: On sedo.com, the only way to send a message to a seller is to include the message in a bid)

  • getting a new domain name right away

• A formal vote was not officially called, but agreement coalesced around bidding $500 again and including a comment to the seller that this would be our final offer. The second bid was submitted along with the message "Nobody else wants this site. We will not bid again."

• One week later, September 13th, our second bid expired as well. Once again there was no communication from the seller. So we decided to purchase two new domain names:

  • desmoinesmaker.space

  • area515dsm.org

• John had previously tested Shopify to see if we could use it to create a new website and process member payments. John moved some of the data that had been on our old website to this new Shopify website, and pointed the desmoinesmaker.space url to it. The area515dsm.org domain name was made to point to the desmoinesmaker.space site.

Approval of Minutes from Previous Meeting

Vote to approve the minutes of the September board meeting

Yes: 6

No: 0

Result: Passed

Financials

• The new BOSS laser HP-2440 was purchased this evening. Included in the purchase were the following:

  • Vue kit

  • 155w laser tube

  • 155w power supply

  • water chiller

  • air compressor

  • air filter/water separator

  • oxygen regulator

  • LightBurn PRO software

  • PiBurn V Roller Rotary

  • 1 extra focusing lens

  • 3 spare 1" mirrors

  • 2 year warranty

  • freight insurance

• The space has a CD that matures October 16. It would renew with a very low interest rate.

Vote to cash out the CD instead of renewing it.

Yes: 6

No: 0

Result: Passed (Meg said she would get this done.)

• Derek gave us $50 from the knife making class he had with Matt.

• The Pop Money Box still needs to be re-hung by the refrigerator.

• A 3rd party contacted us about setting up a vending machine in the space. In the end, they felt that we didn't get enough traffic to justify installing a machine.

New Website Through Shopify

• The site has not yet been made live.

• Our new website is created using Shopify. John was able to connect our regular checking account to the website so that we can start accepting payments through it. We were also forced to create a new checking account w Shopify itself, that account gets 2.71% interest. We may need to manually transfer money from our Shopify checking account to our regular checking account.

  • Shopify also charges us a regular monthly fee.

• John has yet to find a good PayPal integration with Shopify. He also has not figured out how to get PayPal Express turned on. Shopify doesn't seem to be playing as nicely with PayPal as when the system was first explored.

• Some benefits of the new Shopify website:

  • Tool Fees wil be simpler as they are listed as products on the website.

  • Gift Cards will be easy to implement

  • We have more control over SHR payments. For instance, we could implement them with coupon codes now.

  • We can do POS (Point Of Sale) through Shopify. This would allow us to accept payments on the spot.

• Once the Shopify website goes live, we can have new members sign up through that. Previous members can continue to pay through PayPal.

• When new members sign up through the website they have to create a user account. We can manually create accounts for previous members if we choose to.

• Setting up "merch" on the site was discussed, but as a "further down the road" project.

• Using Shopify to track active badges was discussed. Whether it could or not was unknown.

• It was asked what was needed before the Shopify website could go live. The answer was essentially: nothing is needed, it's just not very good yet.

• All our old domain's email addresses were handled using Google Workspace. A new workspace will need to be created to handle the new domain's emails. Items in the accompanying Google Drive will need to be moved to the new Google Drive. We will need to make sure the new Google Workspace doesn't break any of our Zapier automations.

• John is hopeful that we could start doing liability waiver and code of conduct signing via the website.

• There is also some integration for coursework that might help us to record tool trainings. The idea presented was that after a member is trained on a machine in person, they would receive a link to a one page training course which they could fill out and which would then record the training.

• It was suggested that once the new Google Workspace is established, we could schedule a day where all of us could get together to work on improving the website.

Current Members: 85

• Matt made a Miro chart of all the cubbys.

• Matt sent an email to the owners of the 4 oldest cubbys, asking them to please come reclaim their stuff. He told them, with the support of the board of directors, that he would throw away any unclaimed items. In the end he got cold feet about throwing anything away, so we'll box the stuff up and store it somewhere out of the way.

• There was some grumbling that one member is using 3 cubbys and may have more stuff in the textiles room.

• There has been no progress on the idea of the Wood Shop storing extra tools in an offsite storage area.

Space Updates

• The Space Work Night last Thursday was very sparsely attended. It has about 4 people.

• The idea of a hiring a cleaning service was briefly discussed. We've never gotten a quote from anyone on how much they would charge, but if we go that route a two-tiered membership would be seriously considered.

• Some of the board members expressed interest in attening the Mainframe Studios first Friday from 5-8pm. Mainframe Studios theme for next year is "STEAM" (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Math - a term often used in education). Several years ago we sent them a proposal that their members could join at a reduced rate, but we never heard back from them.

Motion to order $50 worth of new Area 515 business cards with our new website on them.

Yes: 6

No: 0

Result: Passed

• The possibility of mounting the space's ham radio antenna was brought up.

• There was also discussion of hanging a meshtastic device from a balloon.

Meeting Adjourned

• From a discussion about mailing large amounts of letters at the post office: "When I have to do a big mail thing, I just walk past the line because I'm an a******, put them on the counter, say "They're all stamped" and leave."