Meeting Notes 2010 11 16

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The 135th Meeting of Noisebridge

Crew[edit]

Get someone to grab the membership binder now. Get someone to take notes.

  • Moderator: Jason Dusek
  • Note-Taker: Seth Schoen

Agenda[edit]

Introduction and Names[edit]

  • What Noisebridge is about: "Noisebridge is a 501c3 nonprofit that provides a space for creation, collaboration, and learning about technology and creative projects. Noisebridge provides space, power tools, and infrastructure to help the public learn new skills and create cool things. Noisebridge continues to exist through and depends entirely on membership fees and donations. Our code of conduct is 'Be excellent to each other'."
  • Round of introductions: What's your name, what do you do, and if you are new, how did you hear about Noisebridge? Start with the moderator and go left.
  • A brief primer on consensus process

Announcements[edit]

Financial Report[edit]

Funds in bank: Not Enough! Pay Your Dues!

Shannon: In August we got $4500 in dues, yet in October we received only $2500 in dues. It seems like people have been falling out of the habit of paying their membership dues.

Membership Binder[edit]

  • Read off any names from the binder for the past month.
  • Anyone up for join this week should introduce them selves then leave the area in search of gifts for the rest of the group.

What's Going On at Noisebridge[edit]

One short sentence about each of the following:

Weekly[edit]

For locations at Noisebridge, see a map of the 2169 location of Noisebridge.

Non-weekly[edit]
  • Five Minutes of Fame
  • Bay Area Hackers Association - (Second Sunday, 2PM)
  • Monthly pwn your own meeting - this week? - generally 1st Wednesday of the month

Project Updates[edit]

Consensus items[edit]

Discussion Items[edit]

Sleeping at Noisebridge[edit]

- Al's e-mail.

- Position: There is no controversy about whether people should sleep here.

- Position: Sleeping here accidentally or occasionally when you miss transit is OK but living here is not, which means keeping your stuff here.

- Frantisek: I would crash here when I was doing something at the space that went very late, like 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning. I understand that people shouldn't live or sleep here on a regular basis, but sometimes I work here really late or during the night, occasionally. People should be able to spend the night sometimes if you know that they do not want to be here and it happens as an emergency.

- Position: Brief naps are useful!

- Position: People crashing here occasionally or accidentally is OK but coming to Noisebridge with the advance intention of staying over is not OK.

- Position: There's a lot of extra sensitivity about this issue right now so people might find themselves intentionally woken and criticized if they sleep here.

- Position: We should understand why it's not a good idea for people to sleep here.

- Position: It appears that we all agree that it's OK occasionally or accidentally, but not regularly sleeping here or coming with the intention of crashing.

- Position: People shouldn't sleep at all, ever, even accidentally.

- Position: Naps are OK during the day.

- Position: Sleeping at Noisebridge is a poor use of the space.

- Position: It shouldn't generally occur and any other use should have priority over your use. But what's more, if you're asleep here, it might discourage people from doing other things as a matter of politeness, which would be unfortunately. So you shouldn't sleep here in order not to put people in the position of changing their use of the space to avoid disturbing you.

- Position: Sleeping here around lots of clutter creates an elevated risk of bedbug infestation. Also, if people see other people sleeping here, then it seems to create a perception that it's OK, and people might start to do it intentionally because they develop a perception that it's an appropriate place to sleep. But naps are fine.

- Position: It's important to explain why things are the way they are rather than saying "because I said so", etc. It's helpful to develop a public, shared understanding of why we do things the way we do.

- Position: If someone is doing something noisy, that is an appropriate use of the space and has priority over any sleepers. Perhaps we could have some designated to check in on the place at night to ensure that there aren't people staying here.

- Comment: On three different occasions, someone has intentionally been living at Noisebridge and had to be explicitly asked to leave after not understanding the seriousness of the consensus against sleeping here. This phenomenon may be becoming more frequent.

- Comment: There is a tragedy of the commons phenomenon where there is a gap between what's good for each individual and what's good for the community as a whole. That gap may be quite large at this point.

- Position: We shouldn't use this whole meeting to talk about this.

- Frantisek: I have discouraged other people from staying over here. There should be some planned activity late at night to make sure that people are actually here at night, which means that you'll have people around here to discourage living here. It could be helpful to have people who clearly don't need to stay over stay over sometimes in order to keep an eye on things.

- Shannon: I'm going to start a midnight shop class. We are going to (loudly) make a CNC router!

- Q. Will Frantisek stay here less often?

- A. Frantisek says he will not stay over anymore but he might be working late at night.

- Q. What do people do when they miss BART? It might take them hours to get home in that case. Could we have a system where people could request to stay over at someone else's house?

- Comment: There could be a list of people who are willing to host people or willing to transport people late at night. The list could be posted publicly.

- Q. What is the purpose of this space? Is it a community or work space?

- A. Both.

- A. It's a community based around a work space.

- A. "I thought we were an autonomous collective!"

- Comment: We could have a Noisebridge couchsurfing group. People probably wouldn't respond to a stranger on couchsurfing quickly but they might respond to a fellow Noisebridge members.

- Comment: We should distinguish between measures to help people who get stranded and the acceptability of sleeping over here.

- Comment: We could also have a coffin hotel.

- Comment: There is a huge industry dedicated to the task of finding and providing contingency sleeping space for people whose normal sleeping accomodations are unavailable.

- Comment: But it's not open source!

- Q. What if I write a "How to Open a Hotel" document?

- Comment: I talked to the city planning commission today. Our use category is somewhat ambiguous.

- Q. Why is it a good idea to have an unambiguous use category.

- Comment: Without asking the commission to rule on our specific use. The entire block is zoned as non-residential use. That means that you just can't sleep here. Nonpunitive enforcement mechanism. They are required to serve you a warning. They do this if they evidence that you are noncompliant. The practical consequences could be a warning. Nonetheless, you are not allowed to under the city's rules. If we decide that we want to have someone here overnight in limited circumstances, there is a provision to allow us to do that.

- Comment: We don't want to have the city investigate our use of the space or decide that things we have done or are doing are improper.

- Position: Don't sleep at Noisebridge. Don't sleep at Noisebridge. Don't sleep at Noisebridge.

- Comment: Maybe we can use caffeine to prevent from sleeping here.

- Comment: Look at the starving hacker page.

- Comment: Thanks to Frantisek's cooking, there are no starving hackers in our vicinity!

- Comment: It's often a matter of people not knowing about resources that are useful to starving hackers. You should list these resources on the wiki page!

- Position: People say that they spend the night because they are working on things extremely late at night. But if they are in this situation, they should start their projects earlier in the day so that they won't end up in this situation.

Fundraising[edit]

Frantisek will organize two parties in the near future that can be used for fundraising purposes.

Stuff[edit]

We have a lot of stuff here, such as extra bikes, a big printer, and lots of other things. It's problematic to have one personal unilaterally decide what to throw away, so we need to consider this question as a group. If we haven't done anything with an item and we should have meetings to get rid of things.

Comment: We can have distinct meetings or events for this purpose.

Comment: We can have a shelf which is "things pending discarding".

Al is forming a committee to decide what to do with stuff.

Q. Can we have a rule for how to get rid of unclaimed bikes?

DrupalBridge and CleanBridge[edit]

Proposal: to create DrupalBridge and CleanBridge. They will be posted to the mailing lists.

Items that were supposed to be discussed but were not discussed due to general restlessness[edit]

  • Proposal for a button to be added to the touch panel that displays the current bandwidth usage by each user connected to the noisebridge network. Sometimes the network slows down and it is important to figure out who is eating up all the bandwidth.
  • Sai removed from press@ alias
  • Proposal to display trash can icons on the touch panel in order to show people which days the garbage shuld be taken out.

End of Meeting[edit]