Meeting Notes 2024-03-27

Wednesday, 7PM. March 27, 2024

Attendees

• jake - any pronouns. icebreaker: telephone calls vs texting? i prefer texting
• carl -
• william - he/him. fine if you call me
• A - aron?
• Paige - they/them i like both texts and calling
• Alex - sudo room delegate
• Andrew W - artist, not so much of a hacker. i mostly want to know what to do with this letter. asked for contact for christina
  • Paige - letter was sent, thanks for help Andrew

Summary

• Property tax situation is still very dire. We have reached out to CAST, our Alameda district supervisor, and our Oakland city council rep. We do not know if any of these contacts will be able to help us with this, so we should look into getting a loan (as advised previously by our lawyer). The bill is due April 10.
• William will join Alex at tomorrow's delegate meeting. And might be delegate going forwards after
• Paige and Anwar drafted some changes to Omni's requirements for collective status. Some feedback given but will not be voted on.

Detailed minutes

Property Taxes

• alex - everyone up to date? we owe roughly 100k in back taxes and have a current 20k owed. big surprise for us and trying to figure out who can help us pay it. we contacted CAST and no reply yet, we have also contacted our lawyer whos in charge with talking to assessor. we've working with them a couple years, specifically to get our welfare exemption from the county, which because we are a nonprofit should be exempt
  • jake - its more that we should be exempt because of our "use" of building
• alex - i spoke with christina, said unlikely to get a full exemption, amount after will still be unmanageable but less. best we can hope from assessor meeting is a faster judgement on whether we get this exemption. another plan
  • paige - sent, peter got in contact with someone from office
• alex - lawyer also said talked to jake, and put jake in contact with someone at community vision. community vision does loans for nonprofits and could possibly be another source for this short-term stuff. as far as i know jake hasnt followed up and we should do that asap. is that right?
  • jake - i didnt follow up because i didnt know what to do, i dont have any line with the delegates. i dont know if my email is getting spammed canned, or shunned because they are surrounded by drama... sent emails, like request to be at delegate meeting, but ignored. difficult to be both be working on taxes and be excluded. i dont know how to engage with this stuff.
  • alex - why dont you get lawyer to contact delegates? instead of saying president
  • jake - says that on paper. i dont want to do any of this stuff, but if i get an email and nobody wants to talk to me, what do i do?
• jake - has anyone contacted mulberry?

New Delegate

• alex - i will go to tomorrows meeting as delegate, and would like to not go to next one. i can work next week or two bringing next delegate up to date. i know jake volunteered. any others?
• jake - william
  • william - time conflict every other wednesdays.
  • paige - i think sudo room meetings dont have to be every week so maybe could work
  • jake - used to be every other wednesday was a party. charlie would buy $100 of food, that would bring in a lot of people. if we had party thing on wednesday, if bring food in and expect to hang out, could increase participation. i think its premature to predict how often to have meetings right now. because so much stuff is happening, its not like we could say every other 2 weeks, might need urgent. i think focus on having good atmosphere every wednesday whether or not we are having a meeting. can announce beforehand if stuff to talk about
  • alex - i think nobody would reject
  • jake - not a proposal. responding to someone saying we dont have meeting every week
• alex - plan to be every other week, then if necessary to have a meeting, plan an ad hoc meeting. ideally we could settle some things remotely.

talking about alternatives to email

• william - i am able to go thursday, and occasional wednesdays. or if we have a solid way of communicating online. summary of meeting to know what to represent
  • jake - suggest not doing digest

• jake - does anyone object to me being the delegate
  • paige - i do given past performance in september meeting, also email communication. I also think its ok if sudo room doesnt have a delegate for a period of time, while we find a new delegate
  • jake - that does not sound in the interest of sudo room
  • paige - if sudo room doesnt have an active enough membership to procure a delegate, then it shouldnt need to be at omni meetings
  • jake - sounds like something yar would say
  • paige - im also happy william volunteered and would support that

william will come to delegates meeting tomorrow

• alex - otherwise we can go without delegate for a little bit

New Collective Requirements Draft

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1O6KBjrL5xV-_ks4FLznZ_1ZkjkJsBc9xepfgDvGR1iI/edit?usp=sharing

• jake - what is the reason for doing this other than because josh told us to?
  • paige - not why this was made. answering concerns from multiple collectives, like the issue with groups coming in and wanting immediate delegacy. this gives a process for that. also my personal concern, and one others have had in past, about groups of only two people having a large amount of power at omni.
• alex - mapping of delegate to board member issue with 6 month term limit. in omni bylaws, collectives are mapped to term "designator." if you switch delegates often, that may be fine for the collective, but for non-profits, it is problematic. suggest for more permanency. would make it impossible to have relative permanent members on the board.
  • william - can you not have stand in's?
  • alex - in california, board members cant vote by proxy.
  • alex - my feeling is representative democracy at omni flawed. could decouple board members from collectives. then everyone's just a member of omni, and elects a board member. then collectives with more members then would get more representatives. more straightforward and fair system. more work required to determine "who is a member" then though.
• paige - req. for meeting minutes is just a way to see groups active, and so more collective understanding. but maybe some other way to see that.
  • william - what you need is active attendees. dont need meetings. dont know of a universal standard, what you are trying to figure out.
• alex - what I think is the big governance change wanted by outside orgs is ED role
  • paige - broad support in Omni it seems for ED, but no budget
  • alex - I think the individual collectives are healthy, like sudo room isnt perfect but has its weekly events consistently, but omni is not. political structure, always explicitly volunteer. never an ED. plenty of people who were involved, worked okay. but now doesnt, people burn out really easily, no one there to catch the fallout. jake, do you know the history of why we never got a refi?
    • jake - requirements to get a refi, before interest rates went up, already uphill, need stable income for at least a year, and also all books aligned, paperwork filled out. 2020 disrupted that a lot. disruption of covid overlapped to some extent with...
    • alex - was there a plan that never followed up? or no move to get refi?
    • jake - my memory of refi process, finance group was closed, they wouldnt give out information. not most qualified to give details, sarah and jenny would be good to ask about efforts about refinancing.
    • jenny post-facto: please amend our history books to note that we were hella on top of our books, filings, and income up until omni community screwed me over in 2019. and up until then finance WG at least had weekly open meetings with publicly-documented notes and an active list. i've repeatedly shared our in-progress applications for bank & community foundation loans, but unsure anyone has done anything with them (eg beneficial, self-help, community vision, etc)