Sudo Room

Meeting Notes 2025-12-28

Revision as of 18:37, 28 December 2025 by Judytuna (talk | contribs) (→‎7.Review New Members: fix bulleted list nesting)

Sudo Room Meeting - Sunday December 28 2025 4pm-6pm

Meeting Details

Roles

  • Facilitator/s: Michael
  • Timekeeper:  Peter
  • Notetaker/s: Judy

Attendees

Ivan Peter Paige Michael Mick Lo Phae Elaine Leah E Jake Martin Romy Judy

Agenda & Notes

  1. Finances, our money problem, 30 min
  2. Member Matters, 30 min
  3. Communication mediums/channels?, 15 mins
  4. Recurring member meetings, 10 mins
  5. New event: Wiki Meetup, 5 min
  6. Discuss FNB, conflict involving SR member, 10 mins
  7. Review new member applications

1.Our Money problems

  • How much is our income, and where is it coming from?
  • How many accounts do we have, and who has access to them?
    • Now we have a single bank account, which is Provident Credit Union. Paige and Jake have access to it. 
    • People whose names are on the bank account who can write checks are the 3 officers: Paige is President, William (moved away) is Secretary, and Ajay is Treasurer
    • Paypal: Paige, Marc Juul, Jake
    • We used to store money in Paypal, because we used to share a bank account. Now that we don't share the bank account with others, Paige has set up automatic transfers from Paypal to the bank account
  • Can we diversify income sources? Grants? Cisco possibility? Selling things?
    • Cisco has work volunteer program. Cisco will donate to nonprofits that their employees volunteer with. 
    • To access Cisco's grant money, we would first have to register Sudo at, https://causes.benevity.org/causes/840-994999638 - Paige can register us for this
    • Peter: there exist several "vetting" sites for nonprofits that entities want us to be registered with before they donate money to us.
    • Peter: someone is volunteering at the Temescal fixit clinic and Cisco is contributing $10/hr, so if she volunteers for 2 hrs a month, it'd be $20/month? Wants to see how it works.
    • The idea is maybe someone who comes to volunteer on Tuesdays would want to contribute their work's donation.
  • eBay has a nonprofit option, sell items to benefit Sudo: https://www.ebayforcharity.org/get-involved/selling-for-a-charity/
  • Michael: EBS internet for members
    • $125/yr modem with unlimited data. Ask members to contribute $20-$60/mo in exchange for bandwidth? 
    • example: Calyx Foundation has an "internet membership" 
    • https://calyxinstitute.org/membership/internet
    • (7 members voting yes is the quorum)
    • This is new, will send out email to clarify the details and for the community to decide
  • Next month, see how much money we bring in through normal contributions. Can we get to our rent of $2500? 
    • $2500 rent, but at some point we'll have to get our own insurance (we're riding off of Omni's insurance)
  • Paige: help me with insurance. You can get it cheap, but I wanna make sure we're covered well. 
  • Mick: How is Sudo Room registered as an entity? Paige: nonprofit, 501c3. Mick: what kind of insurance are we gonna need? Paige: we're required by our landlord to have general liability insurance, that's it. There's a million and two million aggregate thing, but it's pretty standard. Mick volunteers to help Paige look at insurance
  • Jake Proposal: Increase our minimum membership contribution to $20.

2.MemberMatters upgrade

As part of moving Sudo over to MemberMatters (a more robust subscription management service than Sudo Humans) we've set up a system to allow members to pay with their credit cards and get charged monthly or annually.  There's also an option for doing a work-trade.  You can try out the registration process here: https://backers.sudoroom.org/register.  Feedback is welcome (perhaps on the sudo-discuss list?)

Wiki page for the MemberMatters project:https://sudoroom.org/wiki/Membermatters

We want to cut over to MemberMatters soon.  Can we get consensus on the membership plans/levels?

  1. Work/trade membership - this is for folks who can't afford $ but have some time.  Is this something we want to offer in exhange for a key?
  2. Monthly recurring membership - between $10 - $100 month
  3. Annual recurring Membership - $500, $1000, $2000, $5000

People could still pay through bitcoin, paypal, in-kind trade, etc.

If there are no objections to the above, we'll activate MM and switch the registration over in the early days of 2026.  In this case, we = Jek, Juul, Ivan, Anca, Sean.

  • mm is already live and connected to stripe. We just need to finish making our UX adjustments (which includes some Docker hacking) and move over existing users to it. 

Meeting notes for MM discussion

  • Jake's intro: Sudo humans was a web portal with Stripe auto-donations. We have to pay for an extra digital ocean VPS to host it on older debian software (insecure). User interface is hard to use (no way to reset password. username is case-sensitive. requires a lot of direct interaction with admins logging in directly to the server). So for a lot of reasons we are moving to MemberMatters, which is continuously maintained and used by multiple hackerspaces around the world. There is a local developer in our sudo room discord, Recnor.
  • Jake: We need to reach out to our community of people who may not be paying but meant to pay (maybe their credit card expired or whatever), and we need to direct them to move over to MemberMatters. We need more people to work on MM. 
  • Michael: I think we have agreed that moving over to MM and deprecating sudo humans is a good idea, it just take work to do that. 
  • Jake: this contribution can look like "ssh into the server and make it use a docker from disk" to "log in to MM and take notes on 'this was confusing' or 'this didn't work'" because that's where we're stuck right now. Leah has written up a list of people who have their credit cards expired. But the hold up is that we don't know whether to ask them to login to sudohumans or to create a membermatters account.
  • Ivan: I've been working with Anca on the front end of MM. When you first create an account, what is the path for a new member? We've worked on membership levels. We were able to add "work-trade membership," "monthly membership," and "annual memberships." But there were 16 tiers of monthly membership and the CSS makes them all look combined. That's a technical problem, but it's connected to the question of "should we have 16 tiers??" or "should we have people enter their own amount?" or "do we even want to offer work-trade membership?" or "how does annual payment work?"  
  • Michael: what does membership look like?
  • Jake: I come at this with a lot of history with hackerspaces. We're not a makerspace where we buy membership that pays for workers that takes care of the space for you. When someone becomes a member, I hope they understand this is a collaborative effort that requires them to do stuff in order to keep this thing going. It feels like the work-trade membership would be suggesting that we turn Sudo Room into an employer by saying we turn some comrades into "employees" rather than co-creating the space. I think if we become their boss/"manager" then that destroys the relationship. If someone wants to be a member and others want them to be a member then they should maybe pay for their membership
  • Michael: considering our current financial situation in which we cannot currently pay our rent from membership dues alone, having a work-trade agreement is out of discussion. 
  • Ivan: the reason we added it was the webpage said no one is turned away from lack of funds. So we were trying to figure out how the membership form still remains open and friendly to everyone. It doesn't seem like work-trade membership was what was meant, and I'm fine taking that out. 
  • Michael: we are short on money and volunteer hours. Work-trade would be going between two things we're short on. If the problem fo money is a problem for anyone, then we can have an idea of finding an exissting sudo room member to "sponsor" their membership. What about a "community bounty" to reward people contributing to sudo room? 
  • Paige: CCL does classes. If you generate money, you get a cut of it. We're not really in a place to give funds to people because we don't make rent. 
  • Ivan: sudo humans has a tier called comrade. what is that? 
  • Jake: comrade is default, a checkbox in the software, then an admin has to do an action and check the "member" checkbox. We shouldn't replicate this tier over to MM. It's up to us to rething things. 
  • Ivan: when we export user accounts from sudo humans to member matters, should we only export users who have Stripe set up? 
  • Jake: yes, MM actually works and we don't need the old accounts of people who've not been here in years. Sometimes we get emails coming in from info@ to get people off of their stripe automatic payments and Jake manually removes them. We can take down sudo humans after moving to MM.
  • Ivan: would a good action item be "everyone here move to MM and test it out?" 
  • Jake: yes, participate in trying MM, troubleshoot it, test it, and if you wanna get on a signal chat or something to cooperate about this, we can do that. We just need to get MM going.
  • Peter: How long is the list Leah has compiled to contact?
  • Paige: she has "cards expired," "who stopped paying," but a lot of them are like "we're in a different country now" or something. Cards expired is dozens.
  • Jake: Leah's lists might have over a hundred people.
  • Peter: If we contact 10 a day, we could get through that list. We shouldn't wait for MM to be done before contacting people.
  • Jake: the only problem is we're not sure if MM works, Judy tried changing her membership tier to $20 and it gave her an error. 
  • Ivan: MM is pretty close to being ready. If we all do QA in the next 2 weeks it will be ready. One problem: if we all create new accounts now, we're listed as inactive and someone with admin power in MM has to go in and change you to active. it's basically ready, we need QA to touch up those things and we want it to be a frictionless experience. 
  • Peter: we can start contacting people and say "try mm" then a few days later "did you try mm, did it work?" 
  • Phae: let's set a date. within a month, everybody here should be signed up and paying with MM. After another month, unhook sudo humans. Chicken and egg problem, let's do both approaches to get everything ready. 
  • Peter: let's say people miss December and January, that's revenue we've lost forever
  • Jake: can we make a Signal group right now to work on Member Matters? 
  • Michael: existing sudo humans members, what are the steps to move them to MM? 
  • Jake: it's on Stripe. they don't have to do anything.
  • Mick: I'm happy to help with this. I second that a Signal thread would be a good idea. Do we have a document written somewhere with order of operations, with contact info for each person, and assign us to reach out to certain groups of people, and then we'd be responsible for reaching out and getting a response from everybody on that list? 
  • Michael: how much should membership cost?
  • Mick: is it possible to have a sliding scale with suggestion? e.g. electronic tips and gofundme have suggested donation but you can change it if you want to. I think we should suggest people donate $20/mo but there's a lot of value to keeping membership open to people who can't do that. 
  • Ivan: i didn't see a way to do that but maybe there's a way. That's why i had to enter the 16 options
  • Jake: you have to create tiers (aka "products") on stripe in order to get stripe and mm to work together the way that we want it. The products are "$10/mo" or "$20/mo" etc. No, we don't have ability to allow members to adjust the number themselves. 
  • Mick: I am a project manager
  • Jake: can you make us do this? 
  • Mick: yeah we need a spreadsheet and a workflow.
  • Jake: Ivan, is there anything you need from this meeting before you can do whatever else is on your list? 
  • ivan: everyone here, go through the account creation process and write down what's broken. Mick, create a spreadsheet to see where everything needs to be completed. One thing I can do right away is take the "work-trade" tier out. Log in and see that the tiers look janky, and someone go in and fix the CSS. The tiers range from $10 to $500. 
  • Phae: just turn it into a dropdown
  • Jake: we shouldn't let legacy html prevent us from showing the tiers 
  • Michael: question for this meeting: should we remove the $10 tier? One reason to remove it could be "if we have surplus money then we can have a fund to sponsor those who can't afford
  • Elaine is creating the Signal thread right now 
  • Judy: what are the tiers? There are some duplicate tiers. Move this to the Signal thread.
  • Mick: do we have financial analysis? Michael: Paige's google spreadsheet. 
  • Mick: so the monthly expenses are currently rent, and in the future, insurance and fiscal sponsorship? Yes.
  • Mick: how many paying members do we have right now? 
  • Ivan: 115 paying members.
  • Michael: avg donation is $27 on sudo humans. 40 people pay on other things.
  • Peter: it's the 28th. when's the rent due? 
  • Paige: it's due the 25th. We paid it. There is a 5-day grace period. 
  • Peter: what are the consequences of being in default? 
  • Paige: they could evict us, but other groups have been late before. 
  • Paige: we have it in our lease that it will be raised by the greater of 2% OR 1% + the CPI, so starting next month, we will probably have a raise in rent of around 3%. 
  • Michael: let's not tie dues to CPI, because that would be confusing for everyone.  

3.Communication mediums

  • discourse forum? (judy). Discourse is completely different than discord. It's something you host yourself, and is a forum
    • Michael: a forum is too similar to email list, so we should choose one or the other. It's not a good idea to have two mediums that do the same thing. General saying for hackerspace, you want a wiki, a listserv, and an IRC. A Discoure forum would fall in the middle as a discussion medium. 
    • Judy: Discourse is open source forum software that I like a lot, but I won't set one up if everyone is like "nooooo Judy no one wants to sign up for a new account, don't do it" 
    • Michael: there is a possibilty MM could be single sign-on
    • Jake: we have very little buy-in on the email list and the Discord, but we have more on the Discord and I'd like to see that grow. If we were an open source software project group and everyone was at a high level of technical willingness and ability, then moving to Discourse woul make sense, but it's just practical that we have a wide spread of willingness and expeirence, and Discord is a sweet spot of "easy to use"
    • Michael: forum is "medium" while chat is "fast"
    • Jake: we have a forum in Discord!
    • Michael: I'm not in the Discord lol
    • Martin: do we know MM has a forum that we could use? 
    • Michael: i think a better way is use MM as single sign on for Discourse login
    • Michael: Judy I think you should do it. Just let us know from technial aspect what kind of stuff do we need. Servers, domain names, any of that. 
    • Peter: if we do this, can we have an overarching guide to communication mechanisms of Sudo Room? We have sooooo many. I'm of two minds on this. On one hand, it's good to reach people On the other hand, I can't track everything! Judy: me too
    • Michael: I have a write-up on community communciation methods that I can fix up and send to the mailing list.
    • Judy: yes Michael do that.
    • Peter: what problem does this solve? 
    • Judy: I worry that Discord the company will delete their free tier, like Slack did. I would want to stop using Discord entirely and use Discourse instead, beause Discourse includes realtime chat!!!!!!!
    • Elaine: it's already happening! I can't change my name on different servers anymore, that's now a paid feature!!!!
    • Mick: Tamarack, for example, has multiple Signal threads. One is just for announcements that only admins can post to. The other is backroom organizing chat where most of the activity happens. There are ways you can organize community communications. 
    • Peter: it's consistent with Sudo Room's mission that we need to be reclaiming the internet. I'm thinking for Michael and Judy there's an experimental group and part of it is promoting it where whatever is happening there is so cool that everyone wants to join it. 
    • Michael: we should have ONE of each of these categories
      • Slow: Document store: wiki (which we have)
      • Medium: Forum but only one forum (and if we had Discourse, then we would NOT have email list, in Michael's estimation)
      • Fast: Realtime communication. This one actually can be fragmented like on Signal, Discord, whatever
  • Creating a matrix space and bridge it with our discord (Michael)

4.Recurring member meeting in the future?

two times a month on sundays?

Romy: Yeah and have something right after like Dark Mode

Kent: I like having it right before Dark Mode. Dark Mode is the carrot after the meeting lol =) Dark Mode happens once a month.

Ivan: add cleaning parties to calendar

Michael: concept of Sudo-a-thon! come in at 10am, morning meeting on oganizational matters, pizza for lunch, afternoon there's a work party on cleaning up things, in the evening there's a code-a-thon on MM or editing the wiki! 

Peter: I'm out

Ivan: Great idea

Michael: once a year a Sudo day! 

Kent: we used to have 3 or 4 cleaning parties a year in 2024

Paige: 

Mick: quarterly cuz there's so much to do 

Michael: maybe we can do a huge Sudo day twice a year if people love it!

Paige: I can't come on Sundays but I support two times a month on Sundays

Judy: What if we did once a month on a Sunday, then two weeks offset from that, pick a weekday evening?

Martin: That sounds like a good idea to me

New schedule for member meetings!!!!!

Sunday once a month 4-6 before Dark Mode

Thursday once a month before the Wiki meeting

Michael: some people might not live very close and maybe not everyone can come at a certain time so don't forget to emphasize the asynchronous, digital aspects

Paige: Judy was talking about Decidim, yet ANOTHER platform that lets you vote on stuff. Right now, the only way we have to vote is at a meeting. One thing that'd be great for the future is making a digital way to vote, asynchronously. 

Judy: it's kind of a long shot and would require SO much buy-in but it's https://decidim.org/

Mick: how long would people get to vote, if we did online asynchronous voting?

Michael: suggests 1 week to discuss, 1 week to collect the votes 

Martin: so if we're doing meetings twice a month that would be before the next meeting

Jake: in the past, every week we'd have a Sudo party every Wednesday and peope would bring food. It was fun, people were here, and everyone would show up eve3ry Wednesday. Then there would be a meeting once a month, and people would come on Wendesday anyway.

Jake: it's important that we address the problem of getting members through the approval process. Ivan created a kanban board but we have to talk about it, bring up people with 3 endorsements, find someone to do the rest of the process for onboarding them and sign up for paying. Also people who have applied and not gotten their 3 endorsements.

  

5.Wiki meetup

hosted by Ivan and Judy on Thursday 1/8/26 at 6:30pm. 

Meeting notes for wiki meetup/member meetings

let's do it every week EXCEPT once a month, the member meeting replaces it!!!!!!!!!

6.FNB - SR member, conflict discussion

"___, current sudoroom member, was suspended from FNB for a pattern of impersonations of people online and squatting in the building..."

Paige: I redacted their name cuz the meeting notes are posted on the wiki

Jake: they are a paying member and was approved to be a member of sudo room years ago, but the things that they've been edoing over the last few years are concerning. If anybody wants to read the email from FNB members that a few of us got, I can email it to you or you can look at it on my screen. If someone is doing these things then their Sudo Room membership should be suspended until they go through a mediation process or an explanation of why it's not gonna happen again. 

Michael: removal of a member is a serious matter

Jake: this would be suspension

Michael: I would be interested in learning more to see the evidence for people to make the decision

Jake: they've been squatting the building, which is against our agreement with the ownership of the building; if a sudo room member is doing that, then we have to suspend that member in order to not be complicit in them accessing the building. 

Paige: suggestion for process, let's say if there's an accusation against you, then you are suspended from membership, and to be re-instated, you would need to get 3 members to endorse you again?

Michael: members email list should be the communication medium for this

Jake: the problem with that is there's 1000 people on that mailing list that were thinking about becoming a member a long time ago 

Martin: i ike the idea of needing to get people to vouch for you again sounds like a good idea

Paige: and we do have it in the rules that a member can block, so if someone else wants to block, that's okay too 

Jake read information for the case, redacted for privacy Jake: we should suspend this member but also say that we are open to mediation

Jake: if we do this, then we turn off their door access, and turn off stripe payment.

Paige: the problem with "suspension" rather than "removal" is if it's "suspension" then they can still come to a meeting and say stuff. 

Jake: can you propose different wording? 

Paige: my proposal is not to say mediation. "We're gonna remove you from membership. You can apply again to be a member but if that happens then you'd have to explain why this stuff won't happen again." 

Paige: does anyone object to removal of this person from membership? No objections. 

Paige: can they come to Tuesday nights? 

Jake: let's put that as an important question to consider; if CALLI says do not let them in then we will not let them in.


7.Review New Members

Ivan's Report:

Todo items

  • Paige: register for benevity
  • Mick and Paige: insurance
  • Group chat to test MemberMatters - DONE
  • Find out from CALLI if the person needs to be prohibited from entering the building
  • Ivan: various emailing of new members and soon-to-be-members
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