Meeting Notes 2009 11 10

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Crew[edit]

Moderator: Erin?

Note-Taker: Seth

Attendee Count: about 20

Officers: XX

Agenda Items[edit]

Announcements[edit]

Introduction and Names[edit]

What Noisebridge is about[edit]

Treasurer's Report[edit]

$24,000 in the bank

After obligations we have more than 3 months of expenses.

Very brief primer on Noisebridge consensus process[edit]

What's Going On at Noisebridge[edit]

One short sentence about each of the following:

Please RSVP if you want to attend.

Building a workbench. The shop stuff itself is almost done.

  • Mandarin
  • Project Euler group - 7:00p on Tuesdays, starting next week

Need to schedule:

  • New First Aid / CPR class from Michael (one time, approximately four hours) - please enter your availability
  • Hackers and the Law presentation - on the 30th
  • Dorkbot wants to meet here every month

Project Updates[edit]

  • Board elections. Rachel says: we need to have them. 5 board members exist but 4 have expired terms and they must be replaced or re-elected. There is a page on the wiki about board elections. We believe we like to use a Condorcet method which is good for various reasons, as proposed by Andy. We expect to have nomination process, absentee voting procedure, and an election. We don't plan to try to prevent fraud. You have to be a member in good standing as of the nomination date in order to vote in the election.

Q. Why is this voting method the best?

A. Andy doesn't remember. We are proposing to use a thing implemented by Ping.

Q. Why should we use this voting method if we don't know why it's the best?

A. This was subject of research a while ago and we think Ping knew what he was doing.

A. You can read the Wikipedia article on Voting methods for the details, including which particular Arrow's Theorem criteria each method fails.

We will consense on the board election procedures next week. Please read Rachel's wiki page on the subject to see if you have any concerns with her description.

2169 Mission[edit]

  • Electrical
  • Kitchen

We bought an oven yesterday. It cost about $1,000. It should be installed and usable by Thanksgiving.

  • Library -- Johnm still plans to work on shelves, must fix radial arm saw first.
  • Network

Webpass presentation. They provide 100 mbps to Jake's house for $40/month.

A profitable, local San Francisco company that's existed for several years. Point-to-point microwave radios. 114 buildings, ca. 2,000 customers. Ethernet inside the building via the microwave link. Capacity up to 1 gbps symmetrical. Amazon and Wordpress are customers. So are some other non-profit organizations. You can choose the network speeds you need dynamically (changing every week or something). Four backhauls: L3, Time Warner, Cogent, IP Networks. Prices are the same for all customers buying equivalent products.

Supportive of network neutrality without blocking.

Price quote is $100/month per mbit/s.

Setup fee is $2500. If you are a customer and you move, you won't have to pay again (if you move within the existing metropolitan service area).

Cost per megabit drops with more megabits.

Some members say this is pretty expensive compared to colo data service or other alternatives, including the existing data services that we're using.

You can get BGP and use this as part of a multihoming setup. You can get a more symmetrical network that helps for providing services to the outside world.

The treasurer says we simply can't afford the service.

Someone might make an earmarked contribution for this so that it didn't come out of general Noisebridge funds.

Q. How fast would we want this if we subscribed to it?

A. It's dynamic.

You can get a faster link just for one night... like for 5MOF. For example WordPress changes their speed for single events.

Q. How fast is our existing upstream?

A. It's pretty slow. There are some serious congestion and latency problems.

We are going to postpone discussion of this, but the sales guy will leave contact information.

  • Shop Work-bench -- Johnm still working on it...
  • Hack shelf

The less said about the hack shelf, the better!

  • Trip to China

Mitch just came back from a trip to China with a bunch of other Noisebridge members. The nephew of the last emperor of China did calligraphy for pay for a Noisebridge member at the Forbidden City. The characters for "excellence" were written out calligraphically and have been donated to Noisebridge.

Consensus items[edit]

  • Membership Binder

Dave Rawks is a member. Michael Prados is a member.

Discussion Items[edit]

  • Dorkbot on the 18th

Dorkbot wants to meet here at the 18th (the day before this month's 5MOF). It should be smaller than the previous one (at Tcho) because we aren't giving away chocolate and we won't have people from SRL there.

This will be presented on the list. Andy volunteers to facilitate it.

Maximum size of a primate group is determined by the neocortex of that primate. The maximum size of an unstructured group of humans is 147.8. If the group gets larger than this, chaos may result. We seem to be getting close to this.

Maybe we can do something about, but we don't know what. E.g., keeping Mitch around to keep an eye on things.

  • What your mom did last night

No discussion.

Notes[edit]