Meeting Minutes

July 23, 2019

We were in Diesel Cafe this week, as none of our consistent meeting places were available. The meeting began at 7:00, and lasted for two hours. During the first hour, we had an open forum about our organization's future. Notes from that portion of the meeting are below. We spent the remaining hour having break-out conversations and getting some testing done.

Attendance

• Chris -- first meeting
  • found through WOM green rainbow party
• Keegan
• Yeron
• @Stephen304
• @igel
• @jokeefe
• @Lurker42o

Co-op Discussion

• How do we define membership? is it workers, users, node providers, etc...
  • Who owns hardware?
  • Could be several levels of membership
  • Who decides what our direction is overall?
• What's in scope/out of scope for what the coop handles?
  • We need to provide technical support to interested consumer coop founders AND evangalize them too.
  • In-mesh services???
    • Distributed search engine???
    • Splash page bulletin board???
      • Concerns about spam
      • What about nazis?
    • We could defer this whole thing to people on the network, and not put anything at all on the splash page.
    • It's a bit weird to build in a bulletin board/directory service on the mesh nodes.
• How is value created by the coop shared?

Fiscal Sponsorship Discussion

• Who will be our legal firewall, if anyone?
  • How do we minimize our legal risk, personally?
    • Should talk about LLC or the like in order to limit our potential risk.
    • We need to make a lawyer friend.

Next Steps

• Let's set up dates to talk about specific issues RE: Co-op formation.
• Let's model liquid democracy.
• These meetings ought to be in person.
• We should break out questions we have in itemized lists.
• We should also foster self-organization of our membership in some way. It would help if more people were involved in coordinating meetings.
• We should start recording more of our interactions, whether it's in photos, videos, or audio clips.
• All hands on deck for the August 31st field day in Leverett!

July 16, 2019

Attendance

There were 7 people present, two of whom were with us for the first time.

• @Stephen304
• @igel
• @Lurker42o
• Micky Metts of Agaric(dot)coop
• Anne
• Hailey -- First meeting
  • Foreign exchange student visiting for the summer. Found us through our website. Searched "internet freedom."
• Keegan -- First meeting
  • New to Boston. Javascript and Ruby developer. Heard about us through word of mouth.

Takeaways

• We have to identify neighborhood captains that will be willing to do things like coordinate meetings, stay in contact with dev team, and potentially handle billing? Basically, we need at least a few people who are willing to be more engaged than pay a membership fee.
• We need a better idea of what buy-in entails.
• Good financial and organizational integrity 'ought to be part of our value proposition.
• Our supply chain for this could be comprised of cooperatives, as is the case with Agaric(dot)coop. They contract an accounting coop for their books.
• OpenCollective(dot)com may be a good platform to utilize for even more radically transparent finances.
• We should connect with RoundSky(dot)coop about advice on becoming a successful cooperative.
• We should connect with People Who Give A Damn about fiscal sponsorship.
  • I already reached out to ben(at)agaric(dot)coop, and we're setting something up for this week. I'll share a URL and time when I get confirmation. :)