Board meeting agenda for 2015-01-04 at Beth Friedman's, 2pm. Attending: Matt Strait (by phone), Dean Gahlon, Beth Friedman, Lydy Nickerson, Scott Raun. == Approve previous minutes == Approved! Yay! == TODO list == * Beth needs to sign the new bylaws. Dean needs to get them to Beth. DONE. * Lydy will make an informational packet for new board members. Beth will help. Lydy will complain about it! Complaining has been done. The rest has not yet. Do we know the date of the voting meeting? Third Saturday in March is the traditional date and while it isn't officially set, we expect it to be then. That's the hard deadline, obviously. * Lydy and Scott will set up a meeting with Ameriprise. Goal: schedule by the end of December. Bonus goal: actually meet in December. Not done yet. Moving the goal to the end of January. * Beth will tell Peer that in addition to asking for M51 bids, we should ask for 2015 fallcon bids. Scott will add "we need bids for fallcon" to the Einblatt. Both DONE. * Dean will try again to put the new bylaws out at meetings. DONE. * Lydy will talk with DD-B about the password protected internal documents site. Did talk to him, and DD-B said "yeah, no problem", but haven't gone any farther than that. DD-B should send board@mnstf.org a plan. Lydy will ask him to do this. * Matt: What kind of a corporation are we for a W-9? DONE. We are an "other". * Matt will break out the document archival procedure into a separate document and send it to the board. DONE. * Matt will point Beth at the checklist items in the Oct minutes for new board members. DONE. Beth has recently updated the annual todo list on the wiki. * Scott will contact Patricia about METHOD Con 2 profit (or loss). DONE, check got to Carol. We don't know if it is deposited. $1026.05, which includes $500 seed money, for a profit of $526.05. We got full report from Patricia. * Scott will try to find a microphone to plug into someone's cell phone so that Matt can hear better at the next meeting over the phone. Not yet done. Will continue to try. * Beth will write the language that Lydy wants for the harassment policy. DONE. We talked about the new language and massaged it a little. We are all happy. A new draft will go out so that we are sure what we are happy with and then we can officially approve. == Conventions == * Minicon 49 We are just waiting on the Pepsi refund. Hershey reports that Pepsi says that we will have our check within two weeks of a couple of days ago. Matt is frustrated that this is taking so long. Lydy: doesn't it always take this long? Matt: It always takes longer than you'd like, but I think this is longer than usual. * Minicon 50 Matt brought an external harassment policy ready to be approved. Lydy would like it to be more clear that reporting isn't mandatory. We add "you may" in two places. All approve. It's official. Matt will run the changes by Rachel just to be sure and we can always revise later. The approved text is: ======================================================================= Minicon 50 Code of Conduct [Principles section from the Minn-stf policy] Action If someone tells you to stop something they perceive as harassing behavior, stop right away. If you tell someone to stop something you see as harassing behavior and they don't, you may tell us. If you don't feel comfortable telling someone to stop harassing behaviour, you may also tell us. We want to make sure everyone is heard so that together we can make Minicon a healthy, fun, enjoyable experience for everyone. Reporting To report violations of this code, whether or not action is desired, go to the registration desk and ask the staff there to call a designated responder. If the registration desk is closed, call the number posted on the desk. During the hours posted on this sign, we will answer calls immediately. Outside these hours, you may leave a voicemail and we will respond when registration opens the next day. ======================================================================= General status of Minicon 50: Matt says that it is probably fine, but it's hard to tell when only 6 people show up to meetings. (Matt adds to the minutes after the fact: The last two real totals were 11 and 12, counted generously by including people who showed up 2/3 of the way through, etc.) Hopefully this will improve now that it's the new year. Talked about need for more programming department volunteers to do various tasks. There are really only four people who are working on programming in any capacity. Beth: 3 people can do programming if they are dedicated to it. Matt: Ok, but we don't have three dedicated people. We have one, plus 3 who have agreed to do specific minor parts of the job. The 4 members of the board who are local are asked to try to drum up volunteers from Minn-stf meetings. Said volunteers should e-mail programming@minicon50.mnstf.org *and* matt.strait@minicon50.mnstf.org to get involved. * Minicon 51 We haven't gotten a bid. Our top candidate is still unsure about whether they want to do it as of last Friday. We don't know of any other candidates. We really would like a bid approved before Minicon 50 so that we can collect pre-regs for M51 at M50. However, Matt notes, we haven't always taken pre-regs a year in advance, and it would not be a disaster if we didn't this year. It could easily be more of a disaster if we strong-arm someone who doesn't really want to run M51 into running it. So we accept the idea that a bid may come too late for this. What can we do to try to get a bid? We have been advertising at Mnstf meetings and in the Einblatt, but Matt stopped begging for bids at concom meetings when it looked like we were getting one. Matt should go back to begging for bids at concom meetings. Beth expressed some despair at the state of our organization. Is it time to pack it up? Matt says that he doesn't think we're there yet. The volunteer base is strong, but we just seem to have burnt out everyone at the top. * METHOD Con 2 Everything tied up, assuming the check from Patricia has been deposited. * Fallcon in 2015 Michael Lee wrote on Dec 13 to say that he does not need financial support from Minn-stf for JOFCon. He has been thinking about the branding and whether it should be designated as an official Minn-stf con. He has decided he doesn't want the con to have two names (as the Millenium Fallcon/ditto 12 did). He would like to list us as a "supporting organization". We discuss whether we want this to be officially our fallcon. There's a general feeling that it wouldn't really feel like our fallcon and that putting in the effort to get it to conform to our rules would be unrewarding. Beth is unsure about JOFCon because she's not sure what Michael really wants for us. After going around a few times, Lydy suggests that we tell Michael Lee no, and ask for fallcon bids. All approve, i.e. no, we are not calling this the Minn-stf fallcon. Yes, we're happy with being listed as a supporting organization. This designation doesn't come with any money (he explicitly isn't asking for any) or other resources. But how to get the fallcon we want? Matt suggests the anarchistic approach: We tell people they can bid for a fallcon, or any con they invent for that matter, and if someone wants to do one, we'll consider the bid. The rest of the board would instead prefer a top-down approach where the board decides whether we are having a fallcon instead of just letting things happen. In the absence of the anarchistic approach, Matt says that the thing to do seems to be an official statement that we aren't running a fallcon in favor of JOFCon. No, the rest of the board disagrees. We definitely want a fallcon that is ours, even though there is JOFCon. But we don't have any candidates to run it. Beth wonders if we are too burnt out to run fallcon *or* Minicon. Matt extols the virtue of our anarchistic bylaws with respect to conventions. It's never mandatory for us to have any cons. If it comes to it, we can take a break and then start up again without destroying any formal structures or breaking any rules. No one else seems to really buy this line of thinking. We will ask for fallcon bids from our membership. We will ask for a deadline of May 1 for a con sometime in Sept, Oct or Nov, but point out that people really have to start looking at hotels and stuff a few months earlier than that to make a good bid. The meaning of the May 1 deadline is that if we don't get a bid by then, we will declare that there is no fallcon this year. == Pool party == We still don't know when it is. Matt Weiser is being asked. Matt S will ask him harder if no answer comes in the next few days. == Set next meeting == At Clay's, Jan 24, Clay's, 5:30pm, to end by 6:15pm. This is after the Minicon concom meeting and during the Minn-stf meeting. == New TODO list == * Beth and Lydy: Lydy will make an informational packet for new board members. Beth will help. * Lydy and Scott will set up a meeting with Ameriprise to happen by the end of January. * Lydy will ask DD-B to send board@mnstf.org a plan for having an internal password-protected documents site. * Scott will try to find a microphone to plug into someone's phone so that Matt can hear better at the next phone meeting. * We will all read the new harassment policy draft that Matt will send out to be sure that's what we meant to approve. To be formally approved at our next meeting. * Matt will tell Michael Lee what we decided. * Everyone will try to recruit for Minicon 50 programming. * Matt will go back to begging for Minicon 51 chairs at concom meetings. * Someone (Scott?) will verify that the METHOD Con 2 check was deposited. * Scott will advertise our new fallcon desires in the Einblatt. * Someone (Beth?) will ask Peer to advertise our new fallcon desires at business meetings. * Matt S will press Matt W about the pool party.