ALV December 2024/Minutes

WIP

Notes: Minutes are not always chronological, they follow a logical order to prevent repetitions and callbacks. Members names have been replaced by their nickname for privacy.

1. Opening

1.1 Short reminder of what we're here for

What's the board, their responsibilities, what's an ALV, why and when do we have those, who can announce one...

As a Dutch association, we have to do an ALV / general members meeting every now and then, to vote new houserules, statutes etc. The board organizes them, although members can request an ALV and make one if the board fails to do so.

Current board: Frogeye (Chair person), Fnoerd (Treasurer), Bakboter (Secretary)

It was reminded that discussion on voting point should have happened before the ALV.

1.2 Amount of people present, proxy votes

17 members present + 3 proxy votes = 20 votes

There is not enough member (< 50%) present to change legal statutes (not that it was planned).

1.3 Finalizing the agenda; any new items?

One member asked about proposal another member (not present) made: board didn't receive an actual request for it. It was clarified that points submitted for an ALV must be sent to the board (before the deadline), and should be actionnable (should be described: how to achieve a goal, which rule text to add/remove/change...). Board can help with that process. Unclear voting points are one of the reasons voted points are not necessarily added to the rules / clear to everybody, and we want to prevent that.

1.4 Vote: Approving minutes from last meeting

VOTE: This is a yes/no vote whether to accept the minutes from previous meeting

• Yes: 17
• No: 0

Notes are approved.

2. Reports

2.1 Report from the members (this)

Thijs (and others) presented some improvements that happened in the space since last ALV, made by members:

• Replaced the powerbar system, it is much faster and less glitchy now (obp, einstein, Grey, mattronix)
• Replaced the old Cisco switches with Unifi switches (Grey, Frogeye, Thijs)
• New 3D printing corner, new member leased 3D printer (obp and others)
• Projector has a KVM (obp, X)
• General move (obp)
• New shiny label printer application (emile, X)
• Clean up of the workshop (many)
• Revival of the old CNC machine that was on top of the vending machine (atomd and others)
• Revival of the big laser cutter (Grey, atomd and others)
• Improvement of the arcade machine (X)
• Matrix instance (Thijs)
• 38C3 voucher distribution (mrCyborg)
• People have been helping around with filling the drinks
• We have Mate again now, picked up at the Drankerij (Thijs)

No one organized for a TechInc village/assembly at congress this year.

Previous drinks provider (Dorstlust) was a nightmare to handle: they never delivered on the time requested nor the one they announced.

2.2 General report from the board (frogeye)

2.2.1 New contract til 2027

New contract signed with Urban Resort, until end of 2027, when the building will be demolished. So we'll need to move out before that.

2.2.2 Paper archive state

As we haven't a huge safe space in TechInc, we store our old archive at a board member's place. Unfortunately, a board member that had this archive stepped down and didn't return the archive. We kept asking for it, proposing to pick it up, but to no avail (we also can't just show up at their door). We will now have to go through legal means, i.e. sending 3 registered mails, and if still nothing happens, do [TODO legal jargon]

A member asked if we filed for data breach with the Dutch government: this is something the board didn't think of doing yet, and will do asap.

Nature of the documents:

• Membership forms, with members and ex-member name, address, phone number, (rarely) IBAN. No ID copy (no longer part of the membership process and have been destroyed before that).
• Original notary documents
• Contracts
• Financial data

From the space inception (~2011) to mid 2023 (some documents having been already destroyed as per regulations).

We don't believe it to be malicious: it's probably also difficult for the former board member, but we do need those documents back.

2.2.3 Bakboter stepping down

Bakboter is stepping down, as per resignation schedule, and decided not to present himself to re-election.

2.2.4 What the board has been up to

Mostly the usual: onboarding tours, actual onboarding, offboarding, sending payment reminders, answering questions, matching bank transactions to members payment, collecting money deposited in the safe, paying invoices, doing financial reports...

Big time sinks are:

• Onboarding tours
• Processing payments
• Sending reminders
• Financial reports

The last three are especially not super motivating, and a big blocker in us doing some proactive stuff.

There used to be a membership system (tinance) that took care of the second point. A new membership system was developped (tinance2) with several improvements (notably, a GUI). It lacked the financial part of the first iteration though, and the devs promised it would come, and in the meantime we did the financials using spreadsheets. Alas it didn't come, one of the devs left the space, and he informed that he would try to make a commercial product out of the system, and as such allowed us to keep using the system but not modify or publish it (despite the code originally being BSD 3 clause, but we don't want to fight that).

Frogeye started working on a new system (tinance3), based of the code they wrote to work around the limitations of the previous system. First they're trying to make it so it can generate financial reports for 2023 and 2024 (Fnoerd still working on manual financial reports to be safe). Ideally those reports could be generated more or less real-time and made public (anonymized). They studied systems used by other hackerspaces and open-source systems for managing memberships (thanks realitygaps for the help), but none had a feature set close to what we neede (painful requirements: bank imports and semi-automatic association of payments to memberships, fobs handling, financial reports), so a lot of development would have been requried anyways. Additionally, the opportunity to try new things is more fun and more likely for this membership system to be finalized.

2.3 Financial report from the board (fnoerd)

New (and last) contract has been signed with ACTA, the rent went up but we're clear until end of 2027. They're not cheating on us or anything. We got a lot of money back for service costs for 2021 and 2022, so basically we didn't pay any rent in September nor October. We transferred that money to our saving account, knowing that we will need to move by the end of 2027, as this might cost some money (moving, having to pay 2 rents during the moving time, renovations...). Good thing is that since the building is demolished, we probably won't have to renovate this place for an eventual next tenant. At the end of next year, our monthly costs will be above €2500. This includes domain, phone, bank fees, some other things... We currently have ~108 members (transcription note: actually, a bit less than that, our spreadsheets are not synced up), the average contribution is below 25€, so if we continue like this, we would have to start taking from the reserves. Roughly, from 2022 onwards, rent and other services have increased around 4% each year, and we expect this trend to keep going. We can get reduce some of our service costs, but it will need help from members (e.g. changing phone provider, moving the wiki/mailing list VPS to another VPS with a cheaper provider). Current monthly costs are 2,473€, at the end of 2025 we expect €2,572.

TODO Include graph of members

The amount of member since 2023 is still quite stable. One night 7 people signed up at once, only for half of them to leave the space about a month later. This has been a recurring issue: one-month members are not worth the time it takes to onboard them, so we decided to only give onboarding tours once the member came at least once before, to prevent hype-based-subscriptions. We can't really enforce that 100%, but it has been working out nicely so far.

On the topic of the reasons why members leave: often it's because they move out of Amsterdam, or don't find the time to come often to be worth the contribution. Reasons proper to the space itself (e.g. drama) barely make a dent in there.

TODO Include graph of bank account

Easy to see the pattern of people paying their contribution over the month, and then rent gets taken. Service costs gets drowned in there. The recent 7000€ gap is what was transferred to the saving account. There's now ~€9000 there, originally it was made as a backup fund in case of legal issues. Rent payment has also been delayed because they stopped doing direct debit for some reason. As Piele explained last ALV, 2022 was a good year, but in the beginning of 2023 it plateaued and started going down (rent increase mostly).

TODO Include graph of revbank

This is a comparison between the amount of money people tell revbank they made a bank transfer, vs the bank transfers we received with "revbank", "rb" or "drinks" in the description. This is not perfect, there might be bank transfers with different descriptions, still need to go over those to match. For the 2022 financial those were matched but the actual number doesn't show in this graph, see the previous ALV. There's a correlation, but we can see the gap is regularly widening. This is why board is reluctant to let people pay their membership fees with revbank. We'd rather have people buy drinks and get them reimbursed by board rather than fill their revbank account to the point it becomes significant.

2.3+ Report from kas comissie (einnor)

Einnor and quinor had a look at the books from 2022, went through the transactions that came into the bank account tracking and had a look at how they were labeled, did sample all the invoices to see if those matched the payments and categories they were int. The main spending category we have is our rent, the main income category is membership fees. All those look good. A large part in 2022 were drinks, looked through the invoices, looked through revbank, that also matches up. Having gone through all this we feel the 2022 report matches up and everything was properly labeled so we could see where money was spent so in that sense we gave it our okay.

The kasko will be relieved of their duty after the 2023 report. Then, we might need new members or reconfirm existing ones.

2.4 Report from dispute committee

2.4.1 Regarding procedures (mrCyborg, tams)

The dispute committee has a bit of an issue with leaking data it seems. They started implementing measures to try to prevent that from happening. First, communication between board and DC will happen in a (ephemeral) Signal group instead of email. This also prevents internal miscommunications. Second, whenever sending communication via email, members will share a screenshot to another member of the DC to double-check the content and recipient.

One member noted that the screenshot itself is an additional risk for the data to be sent to the wrong recipient. The DC noted that and might reconsider.

Board proposed to auto-moderate members from the DC on the mailing list. It will simply delay intended emails. Board remarks that the amount of moderators on the mailing list is low (currently: Frogeye and Mattronix) and could use more.

Third, DC wants to document its internal procedures (i.e. not the dispute procedure that is voted in, but how the DC organizes itself internally) publicly, for transparency and for future DC members.

DC hopes that with those extra measures, people regain trust in the DC to handle their cases properly.

DC would also like to call for volunteers. Cases need 3 members, they're 3 members in the DC, a fourth one would allows to rotate for a bitter "work"/life balance.

2.4.2 Report since last term (mrCyborg, tams)

Between the last ALV and now, there has been one (closed) dispute, or rather, a recommendation request from board.

Board also requested an answer to the following questions for transparency:

• How many disputes have been made against board (members): 0
• How many disputes have been upheld by board (members): 1
• How many of the recommendation that the DC made have been followed by board: 1/1

2.4.3 Other

The board deplores that the current dispute procedure is only really codified for disputes between one member to another. But there are other cases in which we want to consider properly: 1. A member not acting excellent in community spaces (phyiscal or digital), in general or towards a guest. We ought to behave the same to any other person as we would to any fellow hacker. 2. A guest in our community spaces not acting excellent.

So far, what has been done: 1. Board (although it doesn't have to be them) have been upholding some disputes on behalf of the space and its reputations. 2. Only real action that can be taken here is banning those people out of the community spaces, and if their identity is known, put a note on the membership registration system so the (future) board knows that person needs to go throuh a dispute if they want to become a member. While for members we want to take the time to discuss with them and make sure they understand they did something wrong to prevent them from doing it again, with current board/DC capacity this is not something we want to go through for non-members.

Board also thought this clarification was needed: while the members@ mailing list is called itself because it was originally intended for members, no one actually implemented a verification nor a procedure to remove leaving members from the list. As such maybe only 50% of members there are also TechInc members, and renaming is complicated. This is a call to remove outdated documentation that would say otherwise, and for people with technical knowledge to help with the mail system especially if they want a mailing list that is guaranteed to only contain TechInc members.

3. Voting points for rules

STOPPED AT 01:34:35

All voting points will be introduced, and potentially clarified. They are not to be extensively discussed. Such discussion should happen beforehand, on the mailing list or other. Last minute changes can happen, but for the sake of proxy voters and present member's time, they should be avoided. Once all voting points are introduced, there might be a break, and then the actual vote.

3.1 Proposal to increase the membership fees (fnoerd)

[This might be replaced by a proper budget proposal should we have other things to change]

Following the financial report and the status of our rent, the treasurer thinks we need to increase the membership fees from next year to keep the lights on on the long term.

VOTE: This is a yes/no vote whether to increase the membership fees by TODO €.

3.2 Accountability & Inclusion committee (mattronix)

I [Mattronix] would like to propose an Accountability & Inclusion Committee that will have 3 Primary Objectives

1. Rules & Record keeping ensure all ALV voted mandates & rules are understood, easy to find and are being followed.
2. Board & Dispute Committee Accountability: Ensures board and dispute committee decisions, record keeping and ethics are inline with the agreed house rules, bylaws and ALV’s
3. Code of Conduct Supervisory ensuring dispute and board are aware and actively encourage safe conduct in the space.

Full Goals of the Commitee

• Independent of the Board & Dispute Commitee
• Consisting of members of various backgrounds
• Audits the Board
• Audits the Dispute committee
• Evaluates Legacy Rules and raises community awareness about them
• Ensures COC is working by gathering board statistics
• Establishes a central record of all current rules and previously agreed rules from the ALV’s past and present.
• Ensures agreements made between committees, board and community are honored.
• Gathers Statistics abouts things such as disputes resolved, board financial decisions.
• Audits board meeting outcomes and decisions for ethical and negligent behavior.

3.3 Other voting points

I'll let people that submitted points make an entry here.

4. Voting for people

All candidates should be introduced, before the break or maybe after for last-minute candidates. Then they will be voted on.

4.1 Voting in new member(s) in board

The board is down to 2 members. Suffice to say that this is not sustainable.

Votes can be made for:

• (no candidate yet!).

VOTE: This is closed vote whether to accept candidate(s) for joining / continuing on the auditing committee.

5. Any other business (wvttk)/rondvraag

Bakboter is organizing a 13-years party that will be on Friday the 13th of December, also celebrating him stepping down from the board. Probably going to be renting a DJ. Announcement will be sent later.