Meeting Notes 2024-02-21

Attendees

• sierk
• alex
• paige - notetaker
• charles
• trevor
• jake

Agenda

pre-meeting unstructured convo

talking about people's programs and city of motion proposals.

• sierk: need to plan what to do if partnership is not aligned
• alex: where things go wrong is step 10, step 1 is figuring out how we would engage
• alex: how we would work with CAST still vague, what I think is great about CAST is trusted contact, for me, and experience doing this
• sierk: mission about art spaces closely aligned with what omni does. no proposal yet fleshed out yet for me to say yes. i would put most energy into cast, would need more info about others. LLC, pretty much getting loan from non bank entity, seems like lots of support, but dont know how feasible right now. i know there are people willing to put in significant amount of money
• alex: are you willing to join LLC working? someone needs to be compiling a list of name and calling people. someone with those skills
• sierk: patrik is leading a group, im willing to put time into it
• alex: start with people you know
• sierk: i know some but will not at state we are in. they need to know what the LLC structure is, and what connection to other people will be. just need clarity. some people you need to set structure, what LLC will look like
• paige: i think there was issue in that jesse cant write form the LLC, has to be outside of omni. not sure if thats true [later in meeting said not the current blocker]
• charles: L3C, not in california, in utah michigan, vermont. supposed to offer more advantages for nonprofit grants
• alex: one thought of issuing bonds, but not sure if we are in state able to do that
• sierk: dont have a bank friendly business model
• sierk: whos doing outreach?
• paige: just peter reached out to CAST, we were advised to reach out to SFCLT but nobody has
• sierk: some people in FNB in land trusts, but not involved in omni, might be good for them to reach out.

Deb Gives membership

• alex: we said 2 weeks for that, so not this week
• sierk: something im clearly in favor with. i've met them, no red flags, and makes us a little more diverse which
• trevor: diversity doesnt mean anything if its not inclusive.
• sierk: i agree with that
• trevor: can look diverse but doesnt mean anything if you dont stand on what you say
• sierk: any other feedback on deb gives?
• paige: i ran into them at weekend event and free store last week. dominic and one other were giving away free phones. they were friendly and were making connections
• sierk: i met 4 or 5 volunteers last friday, they were all very interested in the omni.
• paige: i think they are booking the ballroom wednesdays, dont know when that starts, and i think they will be on maker faire on feb 25

maker faire on feb 25

we need volunteers to table and or hang out and welcome people into sudo room

LLC update, CAST update

• jake: no update on LLC
• alex: is that person you were talking to still around?
• jake: still on my list to check on them
• sierk: ive talked to people about the LLC,
• paige: we were talking about how people interested in lending are wanting something more concrete or legal to look at
• sierk: needs to be described better
• jake: later step is to get something drafted by a lawyer. what we could do in meantime is work on a spreadsheet of list of people, and list terms they are willing to cooperate. i.e. min interest rate. some may say 0, or donate, can go on same spreadsheet. can have multiple lists to preserve anonymity as requested.
• sierk: do you have any idea of total amout now?
• jake: i dont have enough solid commitments to answer that. difference between people saying would be to those with qualifiers. i dont have concrete answer. with more work can be more developed into specific commitments. would that be based on omni functioning same as it always has?
• alex: doesnt have to.
• jake: what we've seen in scenarios where someone wants something different, lot of work to figure that out. like ED
• alex: and probably more down the line
• jake: im supportive of that. only thing im worried about is things getting more expensive that we can't handle
• alex: there vision will have things taken care of paid for
• jake: any word on if sudo room will have same rent?
  • alex: not there yet, i can ask about that, how to handle rising costs due to improvements
• sierk: other land trust mentioned, should people from SR do some outreach?
  • alex: we could do that, who would do that? 6 people here.
  • sierk: someone in SR good at that stuff? i will ask some people in FNB
  • paige: im willing to help, wondering how we talk about it with CAST
  • sierk: what about patrik?
  • paige: ya maybe, hes doing a lot, he is working on bylaw changes, ED contract, and governance changes document

Call for fundraising volunteers in Sudo Room

• alex: there is a grant calendar now, some of those grants would suit sudo room. we need some volunteers
• sierk: stop waste. food not bombs applying because of reducing food waste
• paige: peter did the stop waste one before but didnt want to do it this time
• jake: they wanted us to make it easier for people to find us on tuesday for fixit clinic. i want to set up a phone so that people could buzz that to come in. like maybe they are across the street. sandwich board to deploy. we got $4k from a different grant
• sierk: fnb gets a lot of money every year, lot of grants for food recovery. would be able to get more with a kitchen. sudo room also does things to prevent waste, and provide education. when are fundraising meetings?
• alex: tuesday evenings
• sierk: okay i will go next week
• alex: i can try to as well. dont want deadlines to go buy
• sierk: just a grant to fix plumbing, so many little things, if we put work into it, can be worthwhile.

ED

• sierk: pallavi is current candidate?
• alex: pallavi has put in bid, i think its a reasonable candidate
• sierk: i have had interaction through FNB, she seems very invested in keeping omni alive
• paige: complication that she would be funding the role
• sierk: my understanding in these kinds of nonprofits, often theres fundraising people being ED
• alex: we need to figure out what their powers and responsibilities are
• jake: whatever cast says?
• alex: i asked, was kind of vague, maybe more in round 2
• jake: in the absence of that direction, maybe we assume ed is shim between omni structure as it is, they can act as a person representing whole org, they have all delegates numbers. ultimately board has power to make decisions, so if ED makes decision the board could reverse it
• alex: interesting, one possibility that came up is LLC structure, and they put someone else's name down. they dont want to put 8 other names down. that LLC would then own omni. you can say whatever you want about peoples phone number, but we are talking about legally, this person would have a lot of power to do stuff
• jake: ive been president on paper, means nothing
• alex: board ultimately has most of the power, if the board was willing to say vote by majority, do some unpopular things, they legally could. within their power to do things, they just dont do them atm
• sierk: we have this agreement in practice. but on paper. if CAST comes in and puts LLC structure
• alex: like i said not fleshed is. but i think we should be proactive and write what we think of as the good first approximation of what the role should look like
• paige reads patrik's drafted ED contract roles
• sierk: the more we write upfront, improves our position
• alex: also how building is managed, we need to decide whats important. they advocate for separate building management. for example do we want to manage the entrance? they wont be comfortable, so we need to come up with something. do we want to die on that hill? letting people from general space into a place where they could potentially hurt themselves - we need to decide on what's essential
• sierk: how would one stay up to date with information? is that just to delegates?
• alex: right now when we meet, i have been writing a report to share. probably not ideal. i dont know if we should be forwarding emails,
• sierk: toan has been summarizing the meetings to FNB
• alex/sierk can share summary emails amongst collectives
• charles: does it matter that the list is public? sudo-members list is supposed to just be for introductions, but that might be a good one to share out
• sierk: for things that need to be confidential, better if someone summarizing in a way that details are there. cant assume a more restricted list will remain private. the more eyes on it the more useful feedback we can get.
• jake: maintenance, good example is front door access system. everything got ripped out two days ago. magstripe and door knob got ripped off. we got it fixed in very little time and was only as expensive as magstripe. and we plan to go to nfc, which is even cheaper. thats what we are here for, electronics. camera i put back in. compare this to what a company would do, would quote some huge number. this is just one example that money would just skyrocket.
• jake: for building maintenance tasks, cast would give any member organizations an opportunity to bid on doing those tasks. and for their qualifications to be judged based on somebody with objective judgement could say if ok. for example front door access. works as well as any building downtown
• sierk: we used to have a building wg. paige and silver still do work parties, but before WG had people from collectives fixing thing. could be a way of formalizing things in a way cast would agree with. we want to be more effective, but might be able to do that just with a building working group. and when we are not able to do it ourselves, this outside stuff would come in
• alex: im in favor of what jake is saying, retaining that ability. the problem i have, some of it is a perception issue. i already sense, after that thing got torn out, that we dont have a professional to do it
• jake: then pay me
• alex: thats part of the thing. image, everything has to be "well maintained," the image of a well maintained
• jake: well maintained means i come and fix it rn. the "image" of well-maintained is getting some perfect rectangular metal thing

...

• alex: my point is, if we are going to maintain, is we will be expected to do both
• charles: if a company had been maintaining it, what would be different? would police get called?
• alex: would we have someone monitoring
• sierk: person who did it banned, but nobody knows who that is
• jake: happened outside
• sierk: even with security camera, nobody watches it
• jake: yea if we watched it, we'd not act
• alex: philip "we are endangering people by not having cameras" wanting us to professional us
• jake: simple statement, dont read into it
• trevor: maybe motion detection
• jake: thats built in, to almost all modern systems
• alex: my point is it cant just be a good job, it has to look like a good job.
• glen: the omni is going to have to be run professionally.
• alex: ?
• glen: what that essentially means has to look "professional," cant look janky. not just that, the omni is going to have to have an official board.
• sierk: totally disagree with that. professional organiziations, look at your workplace, thats not the problem. it often has to do with people in there. no reason why jake's implementations cant look nice. we have people who can design things. we do need to get more organized but doesnt mean we have to give it to an outside party. events, constantly trash not taken out, this weekend i found all doors open after event
• trevor: i've had that several times, someone just walks in
• sierk: defintely things we cant do ourselves, but things like door system. we have enough people that can help with that
• trevor: no incentive to do that. what's the incentive to clean up? i have to take out trash.
• sierk: building maintenance one thing, events another.
• alex: the other thing, i dont know how much money we would save by doing that. before saying we want that, we should come up with a model budget. then we can try to handle the things that are most costly. maybe a maintenance person, somone installing a door, wouldnt be so costly. we should try and understand costs before doing that
• trevor: i dont see isue
• alex: someone would have to do this work
• trevor: bring incentive to it
• alex: incentive would be figuring out how to get people to do it.
• trevor: how do you motivate someone to do it.
• paige: historically, omni gets by with a lot of volunteer work. volunteers are motivated out of love of space or mission. but how that played out is very few people do a lot of work and get burned out. almost all nonprofits, even those with more paid staff, rely on volunteers. what other positions we could hire? one thought is one paid person per working group, who would make the calls of whether or not we can handle things internally with volunteers or should out source. right now events working group pays person who bottomlines events
• sierk: paying person for coordinating, while still relying on volunteers. still going to be a lot needed by volunteers. chores by volunteers, whereas stuff people interested in doing would be hired out... i had a conversation with a clp person, after event where people got paid. i mentioned that people who cleaned, like phil and tom, was very disrespectful to those people. some people wouldnt lift a finger without being paid. other people, dont want to same names, only a small percentage of people who take out trash after events. those things might not get paid
• alex: we can talk about incentives later, big crisis right now is not enough people. like SR not enough people to pay rent
• sierk: professionalizing event rentals... means things in building go to a new standard. lot of room still in the building where we can empower people to feel ownership, like working groups, getting a role in the decision making process. that would lead to like, jake being able to be considered, not jake personally but that project, being considered alternative to outside contractors
• alex: sounds good, i dont know if it will save money. theres a whole hierarchy of new costs that will be introduced, is the entry way going to be high or low? we should focus on the high things? maybe the high thing is cleaning bathrooms and floors?
• jake: i think its more relevant because expenditure is for, but not comparable because currently bathrooms not handled.
• alex: one of their requirements might be, they have a list of people who open door
• jake: we can do that
• alex: they might be comfortable with it being professional
• jake: pay me
• alex: cloud based stuff now.. [sucks but is popular]
• jake: less reliable. even with the card reader ripped off, people could still get in with their phone. script alex wrote
• sierk: outside company takes longer, but what i care about, not just money, but also, you become much more of a passive member of community if everything handled on the outside. also how do companies treat their workers? we need to show what we are capable of, and some things we arent capable in.
• alex: we could also start a diy company with access stuff
• jake: with one client
• charles: ny hackerspace im involved it might be interested
• alex: card reader has worked well so far, but do need to do contactless
• charles: whats the reason for that
• alex: i might be making this more of a big deal, but they did mention they wanted to handle building management. i suspect they want to have information on who has access to the building. one thing came up, ken got here, he said he saw someone "just waking up." they want to be able to control for that
• talking about deed restriction, keeping building off market for non-arts purposes
• sierk: i wasnt here in the beginning, but my understanding that that was always the idea, get it off the market
• alex: i think everyone is on board with that
• sierk: current trust we have, people worried that foreclosure would put building on market.
• paige: one idea about preserving some autonomy - making door by trash room run by us, for "CCL and SR members", and we can control access. Maybe FNB and media lab interested too, would require us to make SR staircase more accessible. But then give CAST control of access to the more public spaces like ballroom and the entry hall.
• alex: the big thing, is this partnership would give us a lot of funds to change things we couldnt consider before
• trevor: SR should make an album. get some money. nerdcore on spotify
• sierk: general assemblies