Minnstf board meeting, Linda's backyard, May 21, 2022, 6pm. Attending board members: Isaac Schneider, Matt Strait (recording), Scott Raun, Linda Lounsbury. Non-attending board member: Aaron Vander Giessen Meeting happened in a Minnstf meeting within earshot of several other people. Of those, one person paid enough attention to chime in: Dean Gahlon. == Ratify approval of previous meeting's minutes == Already unanimously approved by e-mail. Ratified. == Review TODO list == * (2022-04) Linda will ask Thorin if he wants to be the quartermaster. Thorin says no. Let's ask Isaac. Isaac says yes. Isaac asks if he can ask other people where stuff is instead of finding it all himself. Absolutely. What is he supposed to do other than that? Well, this position happens to be one of the best defined ones we have. The duties are listed at http://mnstf.org/info/quartermaster.php Dean just happens to mention, at this point, that the storage locker called him to say that they think we haven't paid. Dean has passed that onto Carol. Scott will follow up with Carol. They say we owe $161. * (2021-06) Scott will correspond with ASCAP to tell them we had no events in the last two years. No action yet. * (2022-04) Scott will do the taxes. Not done yet. Aren't they due six days ago? Possibly. Scott will get on it. Since we don't owe anything, there's no penalty for being late. * (2022-04) Scott will do the MN Secretary of State check-in. Ditto. * (2022-04) Scott will renew the "Minicon" assumed name and report on the current process for doing that. Ditto. Done: * (2022-04) Matt will send bills for past due accounts. * (2022-04) Matt will update the list of officers on the website. * (2022-04) Matt will announce the next meeting to officers and chairs. * (2022-04) Matt will tell Clay that we unenthusiastically approve a third air purifier unit. Done. And he's ordered them. And they are in the storage locker. Isaac saw at least two of them go in. We asked for them to be in the front so they were easy to get out for events. == Review recurring task list == Up this month: * Preliminary Minicon finances (see below). * Minicon incident info (see below). * Domain renewal. TODO to Scott. * Send notices to concoms reminding them how voting member status works. TODO to Matt and Isaac. == Renew covid policy? == Should we clarify/modify position on boosters/2nd boosters? Currently the way we have it worded, since 2nd boosters are "recommended" by the CDC, we require them. (But 2nd boosters didn't exist when we wrote the policy.) Should we set a shorter self-destruct-if-not-renewed window, because covid things change a lot faster than annually. Scott and Linda would like to keep it as is. Matt would like to switch to just "fully vaccinated" since it's unclear that boosters have a public health benefit (as opposed to a personal benefit), i.e. it's pretty clear that the primary series reduces the chance that someones spreads covid, but it's not clear that getting a booster lowers it further. It is clear that it's beneficial personally, but that's not our business. Matt would also like like to have a 3-month self-destruct clause instead of an annual one because that's how fast things change. Perhaps in 3 months, there will be an Omicron-specific booster that *will* have a clear public health benefit, for instance. Scott proposes that we make it "fully vaccinated", we keep the 1-year sunset, and we add a clause that requires the board to discuss the policy every three months. Matt amends that we should both discuss and have to come to an affirmative decision to keep, modify or end the policy. All approve. Matt will write the text of the new policy. == Buy hard drive(s) for archiving video? == There's a variety of old fannish videos being digitized these days. Should we keep Minn-stf videos on our own physical media for archival purposes? Best price per unit for reliable drives is around $23/TB for "16TB" drives (real capacity probably really 14 TiB). That's without comparison shopping, and it is for Western Digital "Gold" drives, plus USB enclosure. They claim mean time between failures of 2.5 million hours, so are nominally sensible for archival. Cost would be $323 per drive. Two would be preferred for redundancy. We discuss data storage technology. Scott is in favor of buying two if we buy any. We are tentatively in favor of it, but we want to look at our finances first. So we'll look at that and come back to this. == Banking == US Bank calls the people who are in charge of all of our accounts "owners". This is separate from people who are signers on individual accounts. Currently the owners are Emily Stewart and Kevin Austin. We unanimously agree to change the owners to Emily Stewart and Irene Raun. Scott will tell Irene, Emily and Kevin. Matt would like a separate checking account for Decongestant so that Isaac can be the treasurer. Currently he manages Minicon and Decongestant money within one checking account, which only just barely works. Can we have a checking account for Decongestant is officially named "Decongestant"? Probably not because it isn't a registered assumed name. But that's ok as long as we make sure people don't write checks to "Decongestant", but instead to "Minnesota Science Fiction Society". We authorize making a new checking account for Decongestant, under whatever name works. Matt would like us to make the US Bank "owners" and the various checking account signers into club officers, simply as a way of remembering who they are and making sure they are willing to continue in those roles. Approved. They don't need a fancy title, just "signer on account X" and "US Bank 'owner'". Matt will get those lists together and post them. We accidentally let our CD mature and roll over to a new 3-year CD, but we didn't want to do that. We want to put some of the money in Vanguard where it will, most likely, earn a much higher rate over the long term, and some in checking so it can pay current expenses. Shall we cash out our CD to checking, paying whatever the penalty is? Approved. The penalty is 3%, so we lose $325 of the $842 the CD earned. (The old CD had 2.6% interest. They rolled it over to one earning 0.1% interest.) We'll put all but $5k into Vanguard. == Officer selection status == * Quartermaster. Done, it's Isaac. * We should make Carol's "cheer" position an officer to help remember it, says Matt. Same idea as with the banking roles above. This makes exactly zero change to the position; it just helps us remember that it exists and to ask Carol if she wants to continue. Approved. == Book donations == How much should we budget for this year's donations? We did about $1300 the last two years. Isaac wonders if we can put a QR code on the bookplates along with the human-readable web address. Linda would be happy to do that if we provide her with one. We approve $1300. == Conventions == * Minicon 55 Matt projects a profit of $2800 compared to the target of $3200. And it is a good estimate because almost everything has happened. He's just waiting on getting the check from the art show for credit card purchases, and he has to pay the printing invoices he just got from Linda. We had extra expenses because of covid: a couple of extra mailings. On the other hand, we got an anonymous $2000 donation before covid was even a thing, which about cancels that out, leaving us with a normal balance. We discussed whether to ban a certain person based on how that person harassed reg staff over covid rules. A couple of people were problems to some extent about the covid rules, but this one person was much worse than the others. The board would not like to do a lifetime ban. Scott suggests that the Minicon 56 chairs consider ban him from just M56 and see what happens. Matt and Isaac will discuss it in that context. * Minicon 56 We don't know how many people have registered so far because most registrations are at the ducky box in Clay's house. We don't have any GoH yet, but we are collecting nominations and planning to convene a subcommittee to choose among them. * Decongestant 5 Proceeding apace. Looking for a consuite head. Hoping for a fresh young face to be paired with someone experienced. Clay would like to put the membership list up the website, because no one remember if they registered or not. * Minneapolis in 2073 In 2021, we did a big party at Chicon 7. Shall we approve $1000 for a party at Chicon 8? Yes. We'll have to find some other groups to partner with to get a good party room, like we did before. == Next meeting == 2pm at Hidden Falls July 2 (before the picnic). == New TODO list == * (2022-05) Scott will follow up with Carol about making sure the storage locker is paid, and a suggestion to maybe try to automate the payment more, if that seems like it would help. Bug Scott by the 6th of June about the following Scott items: * (2021-06) Scott will correspond with ASCAP to tell them we had no events in the last two years. * (2022-04) Scott will do the taxes. * (2022-04) Scott will do the MN Secretary of State check-in. * (2022-04) Scott will renew the "Minicon" assumed name and report on the current process for doing that. * (2022-05) Scott will renew our domains. * (2022-05) Matt and Isaac will remind the Minicon and Decongestant concoms how voting status works. * (2022-05) We'll think about our finances and whether we want to buy archival hard drives. * (2022-05) Scott will tell Irene that she is now going to be an owner of the USBank account. Scott will also update Emily and Kevin. And tell Irene and Emily that we want to open a third checking account. * (2022-05) Matt will get the lists of signers together and post them as part of the officers list (and put Isaac on as quartermaster). And also include Emily and Irene as "owners of the US Bank thing" on the officer list. And Carol as "cheer person". * (2022-05) Matt will announce the next meeting to officers and chairs. * (2022-05) Matt will write the amended covid policy and circulate it, then he'll tell the president about the new version of the policy.