Mnstf board meeting, Thursday Oct 28, 3pm, in person at the Halloween meeting at Dreampark. Fully attending board members: Matt Strait (recording), David Dyer-Bennet, Linda Lounsbury, Scott Raun. Late board members (arriving during "officer reports" below): Lilly Watson (formerly known as Isaac Schneider). Others attending: Stacey Lam, Evie Bogie, Will Pell, Sharon Kahn. == Approve previous meeting's minutes == Approved! == Review TODO list == * (2023-08) Scott will ask Carol for confirmation that the bank statements of July 31 and following, inclusive, have been balanced, and for the latest checking account balance. No answer. But Carol appears to be still be active. We wonder if Carol would like to pass this job on, since she's done it for many many years. We think she isn't trying to get out of the job, and that she'd tell us straight if she did. == Review recurring task list == * October: Pay the rent on the PO box. We are notified of this by e-mail to board-at-mnstf-org on the first of the month for a bill due at the end of that month. We also get a paper bill in the PO box. As of June 2021, this is an automatic credit card payment. Carol says that the payment has, in fact, happened for 2023, or that it will happen by Oct 31. Oh, ok, sounds like we need to follow up on this, making sure what the frequency of payment is and what we've paid this month. * Get a report from the Quartermaster. Matt will bug him. * Send bills for past due accounts. Matt will do that as usual. * Get our bank and investment account balances. Scott will bug Carol and Matt will bug Aaron. == Officer reports == Can we get more regular reports from officers? I guess we're really talking about treasurer and quartermaster. Scott will call Carol. Matt will bug Jim Porter, as above. Lilly reports that the storage locker was ok as of last weekend, she picked up stuff from it. * Einblatt Our Dreamhost announce list for Einblatt appears to be broken. Scott will send Lilly information on how to fix it. * Rune Matt hasn't heard from guest editor Jeanne lately. Linda sent her an article. * Archivist Not much has happened. Life has been crazy. * FANPA Some scanning has happened lately. Some photos received. Nothing big. DD-B did make a box with buttons on it, to display photos on a TV. That worked very well. Improvements will follow for future cons. * Membership secretary All caught up, Scott says. * Correspondence secretary Linda has some mail that she forgot to bring. She'll bring it to Matt tomorrow at the Minicon meeting. Nothing urgent. Speaking of which, what about incoming e-mail? We don't treat that as a job of the correspondence secretary. Scott gets info@mnstf.org and board@mnstf.org. It has been a long time since we've gotten a general query sent to these. People apparently find what they need on the website. Or they e-mail an upcoming con instead of e-mailing the club. The only sorts of relevant stuff that comes to these addresses are announcements/advertisements that might be interesting, which Scott forwards to natter. So this is all working fine. == Conventions == * CONFelicity It happened. We had 48 total members. We made a profit of around $200 or $300. The hotel tried to overcharge us by $700, but Clay made them honor the contract instead. Stacey and Hershey have decided against running a CONFelicity 2 in 2024 for reasons of personal energy. Is this kind of a con still viable? We did make a profit, but we had to beat the drum pretty hard to get it up to break-even, which included a $500 sucker GoH, getting $100 cash donations from members on Sunday, and a fair amount of begging people to come. We should call for volunteers to run a fallcon or any other format/timing of small con. Our request for any kind of con like this is just that it doesn't lose much more than a few hundred dollars. We lost about 10 members to people who always used to come to everything, but still aren't going to anything because of covid. At this scale of con 10 people makes or breaks the finances. The economy of scale is amazing when each person pays $50 for their membership and whose marginal cost for the con is only about $10. Call for volunteers: MNStF business meeting today, give Aaron wording to post to social media, Einblatt, natter. Lilly will also talk to Aaron about whether are social medias that we might want to use that he's not on. * Minicon 57 Proceeding apace. We are not happy with the DoubleTree Park Place and are not recommending them for future Minicons if another viable option can be found. Park Place is being quite unresponsive when we need information or tours, but very aggressive about their policies that promote us buying their food and prohibiting us from bringing in our own food. * Minneapolis in 2073 Still planning to have a party at Windycon. We need to follow up with them to make sure we're on the party floor. * Minicon 58 Matt would like to chair Minicon 58, but he doesn't have a formal proposal ready. We have some preliminary numbers of an offer from the RadishTree which seem probably reasonable, but we have to study them. It seems to make sense to do a three-year contract if we decide we like them. (A one-year contract makes no sense: by the time we need to set up the 2nd year, we won't have had the first con yet. A two-year contract suggests we might move between M59 and M60, which Matt doesn't want.) The board unanimously supports the concept for a three-year contract. It would nice to have some kind of a clause like "if all your banquet staff turns over, we can cancel the contract", but we're not sure that's reasonable to expect. == Minicon policy == Matt has suggested not comping so many former GoH at Minicon in the future. Those who have been comped before would be asked to pay, but also "if this would be hardship, you can be comped". Should it be opt-in (to pay) instead of opt-out? Ease this in in the most gentle way. If this is done, the letter should be up front that we're solving a financial problem (i.e. not snubbing the recipient). Would the board like to tell the future Minicon 58 chair anything? The board is going to say to the Minicon 58 chair that they have to talk to the board before implementing this. == Next meeting == 3-4pm (one hour limit!), Sunday Nov 19, on Jitsi. == Review new TODO list == * (2023-08) Scott will ask Carol for confirmation that the bank statements of July 31 and following, inclusive, have been balanced, and for the latest checking account balance. Scott will also talk to her about how we'd like regular monthly reports and offer to find another volunteer if needed. * (2023-10) Matt will ask Aaron for our current investment account balances. * (2023-10) Linda will ask Carol about the payment for the PO Box. What frequency do we pay, how automatic are the payments, what did we pay in Oct 2023. And it's paid on her credit card which when then reimburses herself for, right? * (2023-10) Matt will get a report from Jim Porter, quartermaster, and encourage him to update us more often. * (2023-10) Matt will send bills for past due accounts. * (2023-10) Scott will send Lilly information on how to fix the Einblatt announce list. * (2023-10) Lilly will call for volunteers to run a small con (in fall * or otherwise, like our recent fallcons or otherwise) in the Einblatt. * (2023-10) Scott will call for volunteers to run a small con (in fall or otherwise, like our recent fallcons or otherwise) on natter and also send the same wording to Aaron for disseminating on social media. He'll run the language by the board. But he doesn't need a majority of the board to formally approve it to send it out.