I believe we just had elections. Sorry I can’t be around during the week due to work.
I just want to confirm the Board Meeting Discussion coming up on 8/12 at Coffee Emporium 110 East Central Parkway Cincinnati, OH 45202 Noon-3pm
I believe the agenda items are:
5 year long term plan/goals for Hive13
Short term plan and money allocation
Overall direction discussion (Move towards outreach, get sponsors, keep on keeping on, etc)
Modification to Bylaws to require Cornerstone membership for Board members
If you are a board member and for some reason can’t make it let me know. Also, any non-board members are welcome and encourage to also come to share insights, concerns and their opinions as well.
For those who could not attend, my notes on this meeting are pasted below. (I apologize ahead of time for views I misrepresented by bad paraphrasing or by omission because I can only type so fast.)
General consensus: Officers and board are to be kept separate.
We need better descriptions of the officer positions and the board members,
particularly, their roles. The goal is partially to clarify for the person in
that position, and partially to give a way to hold them accountable.
“manpages”, says Menningers, are a suitable analogy to this - for how the
system works from the user’s perspective
Ed was of the opinion that we don’t need a board that exists separately
from the officers (they should be one and the same with the elected officers).
Jim - Board is responsible for direction, officers are responsible for day
to day operations.
The board is perceived as doing very little, and as a result, few want to
interact with them, as they perceive the board as not having influence or they
do not even know much about the board… and this goes on a circle.
Jim’s suggestion for member introductions: Instead of doing it at the end
of the meeting, consider making a physical artifact - a frisbee-like thing
with “I Am”, “I Want”, “I Did” or something like that - which is passed around
for each member.
Meeting structure is something we’re still trying to work out
Idea proposed: Having the general meeting split off afterward into general
project talk, and an officer’s meeting (perhaps in the lounge)
Menninger: This has the drawback possibly of feeding the idea that a divide
exists between who runs things and who does projects, so we’ll have to put
some effort into making people aware that these officer’s meetings are for
anyone who is interested.
Bailey & Craig: Both officers and board need to do more and communicate
more. Perhaps reports - even just a paragraph or so - of what happened this
week.
The topic has come up every board meeting that we have a lack of group
projects (vs. individual projects which are most of our projects).
Bailey: Perhaps we should be putting in some money of our surplus each
month into a fund that goes to helping/promoting group projects (perhaps
requiring board/officer approval for what projects should receive it)
Classes that we have usually bring in a good crowd of people, however,
Tiffany’s class did not bring in very many people (perhaps because it did
not pertain to electronics as much as other classes)
But still we have a lack of many classes or presentations…
Jim is in favor of having committees be spun off as-needed for particular
purposes - programs, classes, fundraising - to permit people some influence
or focus when they don’t hold an officer position or don’t have interest in
pursuing one for a specific purpose.
If a committee is actively looking for a speaker (for instance) and people
are aware of this, it helps suggestions along and makes a target for a person
to suggest a person who can speak.
Menninger/Jim: Should they produce reports? Have meetings?
They need to be poked every meeting for progress information - perhaps.
Jason already working on money for speaker series
(cjdavis took over note-taking here for me…)
important not to lose steam on the committee -
more on wiki for new members - how to get involved with committees, etc
Strategic Plan - 5 year etc
dm did last one, SWOT analysis
next one should be more detailed - actions to take, and some timelines
great deliverable for the board - actual actions to take, multiple parts,
(now I’m back)
Bailey: Should the board look at something like: What should the Hive look
like in 5 years?
Davis: The new shelving and the AC were very important things - but how did
they get done? What can we do to ‘reverse-engineer’ how these were done to
keep important things like this coming? People are very interested in getting
involved and doing things, but they do need resources.
Jim’s recent posts were basically ‘I will do this, but I need $N.’ and that
was very successful. (wheelchair controller circa $150)
Bailey: Let’s re-launch the space balloon in this vein.
Davis: Baby steps and feedback are a viable approach here.
Menninger: The case here is not handing out $100 to someone with a good
idea, it’s the projects where they were already doing parts of the project
and needed the money to get over some barrier (e.g. buying a particular part).
Bailey: We should consider a structure where if you provide some publicity
and attention for the project, we’ll provide help working on the project and
possibly funding.
We need to tell members: There are resources available. You need to pitch your
project as a group project.
Davis: We have a pile of good group ideas, but we don’t have any
meta-project to pick a project and move forward with turning them into an
actual group project. “Yo dawg, we put a project in your project so you…”
mandatory digression…
Bailey: We seem to go on good-intentions and hope that things will kind of
emerge; we don’t really have any process to produce this.
Bailey: We should note repeated agenda items for Tuesday meetings:
Jim’s idea of Round2It (“I’m going to do this project when I get Around To
It”)
Solicitation of any active committees!
Discussing each active group project (Jim: All projects need to say what
they need or what their current roadblock is - and need to publish this.
The point is to make it visual and make it so everyone can see it
independently and know what the project needs.)
Bailey: How do by-laws need to be updated, in light of some of the recent
dispute with election? Do we need to break them down to make them more
comprehensible (e.g. split them into sections)?
Davis volunteered to write a project page on this; we need to get this
finished (particularly the election sections) before the next election, and
get the new election bylaws ratified.
Jim/Bailey: Why not update it to just be electronic? Say, polls open on
Tuesday and you have one week to submit a vote electronically.
Everyone: It was, but we failed to announce it or the candidates. We had
no mailing list post and no blog post on it, just a brief item on the meeting
agenda. We also had no in-person quorum; people were added 30 seconds before
votes were taken. All of this violated the spirit and rules of how we govern.
General consensus is that we should do this electronically - announce who
is running one week, give people a week to vote, count votes up, announce
results in another week.
Bailey: We should take out the quorum requirement and simply say that you
have a week to vote.
Jim: We can have the implicit ‘do-nothing’ vote.
This does, however, put a burden on better notification of everyone.
Jim: Our goal is to have everyone participate in these elections one way or
another. Should it be the goal of every officer to be looking for one or two
other persons to teach their role to, that the officer may have a successor?
Bailey: In job descriptions of each officer’s position, we must explicitly
call out the requirement for a ‘second’ who is a backup or a one to be chosen
next who is being taught that role.
But how do we avoid the situation where this locks in a sort of legacy in
which the only effective replacement is that second?
Bailey: The role has to be transferable to another person easily. We don’t
want any officer to have job security through obscurity.
Jim: Our current situation (with Dave who does not really want to be
president) is a failure of the board to support the president.
Before Tuesday, we need to make a quick post to the mailist list that
before the next meeting we’re going to meet and discuss reorganization of
the meeting. (Chris Davis just volunteered to this one…)
We should look into a better way of telepresence when it comes to meetings.
Even a Google+ hangout out something. (Drop the projector screen and have the
Google+ hangout there on the screen?)
Bailey: Meeting minutes need to go out on the mailing list. Wiki pages are
not sufficient for anything but posterity.
Davis: Maybe this should be the secretary’s job.
We should speak to the idea that officer positions are officially held for
a year, but that they are two-year commitments because the duties extend to
being the backup/alternative officer for the following year alongside the
successor.
Bailey: If you are elected, you are the acting officer in that role for a
year. But the year after, you are the advisor to the officer in that role.
This should remove some of the trepidation new people have to running for this
role - few people want to step in cold to a role with no idea how to do it and
no advisor.
Consider having officers also be actively looking around for others they
might encourage to replace them (keep it informal).
In regards to one item from the minutes:
I really wanted to bring my son to Tiffany’s class, but it was a school night and his mom vetoed. I’m certainly hoping it is offered again.
We discussed it a bit, though a lot of this didn’t make it into the minutes. The note that her class did not pertain to electronics was about our conjecture that most of the people who see announcements for the classes are interested in the more technically-oriented ones, particularly electronics and programming, just due to the Hive’s origins - and so it’s possible that announcements for her class hit a less receptive crowd. It’s not a reason to avoid classes that are more craft-oriented or art-oriented (and indeed we’d really like to have more of those), but rather a reason to look into how we do classes and bring up the discussion yet again of having a better-defined process people can follow when they wish to offer a class.
Yeah I think that not came across wrong. The full discussion was that we need more awareness into not electronic circles. People outside of our membership didn’t attend because we didn’t advertise to the right crowd.
I was at Tiffany’s class and it was awesome. The class was definitely not the issue.
I was at the class with Craig and Craig's his daughter and agree it
was super. Tiffany knows her stuff and did a super job. It was the
first resin castings I'd ever made. The chemistry was neat. This is
the stuff I'd like to see more of at the HIVE. Maybe we could do
castings with "embedded" electronics?
I missed it