AGM 5 Feb 2020
N.B. I've flagged agenda items that are uncertain in italic, these will need finalizing in Jan.
Where: Electric works
When: Saturday 8th Feb 2020 @ Noon
Chair: Caolan
Contents
Attendance
In person: Ed, James, Mat, Caolan, Gary
IRC: No-one
Via Proxy:
Apologies: Kingy, (Richard is also absent)
Co-op Administration
Board incumbents: Ed, Caolan, Mat, Richard, Gary
Board resignations: Mat, Richard, Caolan
Board elections: Mat re-elected back to the board.
Are we trustworthy enough to not need auditing? The new board votes to opt out of being audited.
New Board composition: Ed, Mat, Gary
Treasurer: Gary (voluntold?)
Action: Email the accountant to introduce new treasurer contact.
Secretary: Ed
The state of the Co-op
Finances Update
- Amount brought in through membership subs: £915
- Amount spent: £924.08
Notes of interest:
The money spent is split between: Domain renewal, hosting costs, co-op fees, banking and accountant charges.
We are no longer paying for SSL as Letsencrypt is used now (yay) but it did mean we compromised on wildcard certs (boo)
Hosting was pretty much half the outgoings, but we hope to reduce costs by implementing keycloak and retiring the discrete ID server.
Membership Update
We lost 2 members this year. Reasons cited:
- Email list was broken (and therefore found themselves shouting into the void)
- Unable to contribute enough and ended up running his own services
Not proven to be very good at retaining members. Do we want continue this formalised path that allows for many users? Or remain a small informal group?
- If we are less formal, we can avoid paying for some things (avoid a business account, etc) but this is less likely to grow the group.
- But since we have the formal structure in place, maybe we should resolve to use it better.
Things we can improve:
- Communication in general (IRC and email, about coop days and meetings)
- Can we make the coop structure better fit the way we work, or vice versa
- Although hackdays happen regularly, meetings do not really
- Proposed having an AGM and only GMs on an adhoc basis when needed instead of mandating them (revoke article 19?) -- it is suggested that this change would more accurately reflect how we work
- People in important roles should be responsible for communicating important information and setting agenda
- The secretary should sent out agenda ahead of meetings
- Contributors should communicate post-hackday about changes and updates
- Meeting chairs should send out the minutes of the meetings
Proposal to add to the agenda for the next GM to address further the membership retention question. Find out why people who hover around the periphery have not joined yet, etc?
Services overview
All current services are well used and should be kept with the exception of:
- Social (pleroma) which is only lightly used very occasionally. It could be useful for outreach purposes, but could also easily be retired
Anything we want to start/stop paying for
- Do we want to stop paying for bytemark post-aquisition?
Bytemark's new owners are much less FOSS friendly, which was one of the primary reasons for signing up (that and them being local.)
But need a proposed alternative before we can address this. Suggestions welcome.
Action: Create a wikipage to suggest and compare options for this
- Do we want to switch away from .org after the venture capital takeover?
The .org was purchased by some shady operation, bug again we need a proposed alternative before we can address this. Suggestions welcome.
Action: Create a wikipage to suggest and compare options for this
Monitoring
We've had problems with both the mailing list and server space this year. We need a plan for noticing those things earlier.
Mailing list on separate infra is not terribly helpful. We should think about this.
Monitoring should be a factor in how we consider new hosts, too.
Ticket overview
We went through all the open tickets, please see report 1: https://issues.darkpeak.org/report/1
Plans for the coming year
Co-op Days
We plan to continue coop day events on the second saturday of the month
General Meetings
- 11th April set for the next GM
- 9th May - Co-op copyrite https://issues.darkpeak.org/ticket/45 and articles
Organizing the next AGM
We plan to repair the timeline and reconcile with the beer festival as it used to be. The 10th Oct is the second Saturday, but the beer event may be the prior or following weekend. TBC.
Any Other Business
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