Minnstf board meeting, on Jitsi, Sept 13, 2022, 6pm. Attending board members: Matt Strait (recording), Aaron Vander Giessen, Scott Raun, Linda Lounsbury, Isaac Schneider (starting about 20 minutes in). == Approve previous meeting's minutes == Approved! == Review TODO list == * (2022-08) Scott will make sure Carol knows we'd like confirmation each month that our bank statement has been reconciled. Scott should remind her of this. He's not sure if he's said it to her or not. * (2021-06) Scott will correspond with ASCAP to tell them we had no events in the last two years. Still has to happen. * (2021-08) Scott will have Irene call US Bank and tell them that Matt and Isaac should be able to use the online banking. This happened. But Matt still doesn't have access. So he should call US Bank. Not sure about Isaac. * (2022-08) Aaron will do the new org form for Vanguard and get the appropriate people to sign it. He has it printed and ready to go, but he has to make the rounds, which will probably happen in October, given Aaron's travel schedule. There's no deadline to file, but we can't take money out or move money between our funds until we've done it. We can deposit without having done it yet. Done: * (2022-05) Scott will update Emily and Kevin about how Irene is going to be an owner of the US Bank account. And tell Irene and Emily that we want to open a third checking account. This item turned out to not make any sense after we talked to the bank. * (2022-05) Scott will make sure that the US Bank "owners" get changed and the new checking account gets opened -- it turns out that the part about "owners" doesn't make sense and was dropped, but we did get a new account opened * (2022-08) Linda, could you get to the PO Box and see if a new box of checks is there? Isaac already has the checks. They came to Scott's house. Also, Scott got a statement for just the new account. Apparently they have it in a different box than the other two checking accounts, which have a statement that goes to the PO Box. This probably means we're getting two charges for paper statements, which is annoying. Let's eventually fix this, but after we get online access working. * (2022-08) Matt will announce the next meeting to officers and chairs. * (2022-08) Aaron will ask Ken to send Matt what Ken's requirements are in a hosting service. Matt did this, so it's probably moot that Aaron do it. See also below. * (2022-08) Matt will see if we can get a virtual server at Dreamhost in a practical way: see below. == Review recurring task list == Nothing this month. == Book donations == Linda contacted Don (Uncle Hugo's) again. He doesn't have the books yet. He's been very busy opening his new store. Do we have a special deal with him, or are we just paying regular prices? Regular prices. Linda might try just walking into the store and buying some books. == Web hosting == Currently we pay nothing under Dreamhost's non-profit plan. For this, we get unlimited storage space, but not all the capabilities of running persistent CPU-using jobs that Ken wants for the Minicon site. Matt's opinion is that the Minicon site only needs to have a dozen pages with text and a few photos and it seems like our current plan is more than enough to handle it. Dreamhost wants you to use WordPress to get the capabilities that we want (i.e. easier for non-geeks to edit, comes with pretty templates) with the plan we have. Ken's opinion is that WordPress is horrible and insecure. Ken wants to move us to a different host. Matt really wants to stick with Dreamhost, because we have really a lot set up there and moving will break it all. To get a Dreamhost VPS (which can do the things Ken wants) with enough space for us would cost $660/year. We've also discussed hosting only the current Minicon site elsewhere with a redirect. Practical options: 1) Keep doing what we're doing and accept that the website is boring looking and can only be edited by a few computer geeks. 2) Host the current Minicon site on whatever Ken wants, but keep the rest on Dreamhost. 3) Have another volunteer set up WordPress on Dreamhost and use that. As Isaac recalls, Ken said he'd pay the cost for option #2. Matt will revive the e-mail discussion and see what Ken is thinking. None of that was obviously board business, so let's review what parts of it really are. Questions for the board: * Would the board consider moving all of everything Minnstf's to another provider? We don't really want to, no. * Is the board ok with having the current Minicon website hosted elsewhere? Yes, as long as it's documented (in the wiki?) what we're doing and we feel like we can keep track of things. And also as long as each place we're hosting stuff has at least two people who can access the data and payments. == Conventions == * Minicon 55 Matt sent his final report to the board. It's attached to these minutes. And now we're done with Minicon 55. * Minicon 56 We're filling in the holes in the department head list. Now we only need one more person for the programming committee (to meet Katie's minimum request). Apparently begging helped. We need a teen room head, and we have a tentative one, and they will probably be able to tell us by January. We have a lead on kids programming that we haven't followed up on very well yet. New idea: we should have an accessibility head. Emily has served this role in the past (without being credited for it). We still have our GoH and our hotel, and everything's fine. We have a concom meeting Oct 18, 7pm, on Discord. (Not specifically Minicon 56 business) We'd like Aaron to ask GPS to properly credit us on their website. We're only being credited in one of three places we should be. * Minicon 57 No news. Still have our one GoH, still have not looked into hotels. * Decongestant 5 We have a Vampire GoH now. Also Fastner and Larson will be there. A few people are registering; the deadline is Sept 21, so we won't know how many people are coming for a week yet. All department heads are full except that it would be nice if someone could make a nice programming booklet. * Minneapolis in 2073 We threw a party two nights, got 58 new members (with upgrades, a net of 52 more paying members), and took in a total of $813.85 and 10 Turkish Lira. We spent $428.30. Now have plenty of material for a Progress Report 11, and have already registered to throw a party at Windycon. Also preliminarily planning on a big party at Pemmi-con, the 2023 NASFiC in Winnipeg (but they don't have any information yet on how to do that). Currently sitting on $689.37 plus various and sundry physical non-fungibles. This is greater than the $500 we agreed would be the maximum without opening a bank account for the bid. But that was in 2011, and inflation-adjusted is like $650 now. Request increasing the limit and inflation-buffering it for another 5 years or so. How about $750? Scott would like, instead, to say that it's triggers if it's been over $500 for 6 continuous months. All approve. Matt is, in fact, probably about to spend around $300 on ribbons. == Rune 92 == Linda asks for a budget. Matt quick looked through old minutes and saw that we budgeted $250 for a Rune in 2012, so he proposes $300. All approve. Of course Linda can come back later and complain that it isn't enough if it isn't. == Next meeting == Linda's, 4125 Dupont Ave S, 1pm on Saturday Oct 29. == New TODO list == * (2022-08) Scott will make sure Carol knows we'd like confirmation each month that our bank statement has been reconciled. * (2021-06) Scott will correspond with ASCAP to tell them we had no events in the last two years. * (2022-09) Matt will call US Bank to get access to the online banking. * (2022-09) Isaac will try to access to the online banking. * (2022-08) Aaron will do the new org form for Vanguard and get the appropriate people to sign it. * (2022-09) Let's see if we can get the same mailing address on all our checking accounts. * (2022-09) Matt will announce the next meeting to officers and chairs. * (2022-09) Matt will attach the final Minicon 55 financial report to these minutes. * (2022-09) Aaron will to ask GPS to properly credit us on their website. Isaac will send him the details.