2012/05/24 BOTLab Committee Meeting
Present
- Tarim
- David Wyatt
- Barney Livingston
- Anton Bowers
Late arrivals
- Matt Venn
Drop in contributors
- Alaric Snell-Pym
- Nathan Dumont
Topics discussed
- Do we take the Architects' space? The consensus both among committee members and the membership was that the only major reason for not taking the space would be if we were locked into a long (>=1yr) contract, but since we are confident we can pass on the space to another tenant this is not an issue. Thus, we unanimously decided to take the extra space.
- Do we buy the digital storage oscilloscope? Again the consensus was that this would be an appropriate use of excess Hackspace funds, and Nathan is happy to purchase on the group's behalf and reclaim the money.
- The wider issue of our physical assets: This was felt not to be a problem. John and Nathan [subsequently assisted by Anton] will document what we have on the wiki; we're happy with physical security of the space, and contents insurance is being looked at.
- Switch to different web/email hosting? There have been issues with the current hosting (run for free by Marcus and Mike) not being well supported, particularly in the face of recent email issues. Alternatives include hosting the Hackspace on Barney's machine (for free) or a commercial VPS from e.g. Bytemark (£10/month) or Mythic Beasts. We unanimously accepted Barney's offer, and nominated him sysadmin.
- Support for Barney in Maker Faires: Barney has offered to represent Bristol at the Mini Maker Faires in Derby (Sun 3 June) and Brighton (8 Sept) - we unanimously accepted his offer. He will email the mailing list to request hacks to show and other participants (Nathan, Katie and John are planning to go), and will put together a flyer about the group.
- Proportion of Hackspace income to be spent on fixed costs: Apropos of the earlier discussion, there was suggestion that some money each money could be set aside for consumables. David will start a discussion about a budget of some form on the mailing list.
- Making better use of the space: Again, allied to the earlier discussion about the architects' space, it was noted that although at present Thursday evenings are the crunch point, moves are afoot (via the project evenings on Tuesdays and HackKids workshops on Sundays) to make better use of it. David also raised the issue of rearranging the furniture to increase the space's usability - he will measure, construct a floor plan and make some proposals.
- Annotating bank account transactions: Tarim and David will liaise to review and annotate some of the transactions from the Hackspace bank account.
- Accessing Hackspace money: Matt asked about the best way of accessing the money in the bank account for purchases of kit etc. David will look into getting a payment card associated with the account.
- EDIT: The option is an Alto mastercard prepaid payment card, but that costs £6 to get and £0.5 every time you load it up, so I recommend staying with an expense-based system.
- Met Office hackday: There was some interest from the Met Office in us running a private hackday for them. This led to discussion on whether we as a group are happy to run non-public workshops, or whether a semipublic one (e.g. 50% private places and 50% open to the public) would be appropriate.
- Announcement mailing list: There seem to be quite a few people who are interested in “outreach” workshops we run but not interested enough to read the main mailing list. We suggested a separate mailing list, Google/self-hosted calendar, and/or publicising events through the Twitter feed. As a first step David will set up a Google calendar.