ALV April 2024/Minutes

1. Opening

1.1 Amount of people present, proxy votes

• 18 people present (+1 Piele as non-voting guest for 2022 financial report)
• 5 proxy votes

Total of 23 votes

1.2 Short reminder of what we're here for

• There are not enough people to add or remove statues.
• Any votes for house rules can be added via majority vote.
• Point 3.4 is not a vote, but a notice after a unofficial Urban Resort communication which said that De Alliantie rental contract has been extended until 2027, and rent will be incrased by 10€ per m^2 per year. This does not equate in an equal raise in costs by UR, whose hike in price might be higher. With our current membership fees alone, we would have a plus of 7€, only counting the rent.

(+1 voter, total 24)

1.2.1 Introduction of the board and its responsibilities

• Frogeye: new chair since the last chair left. position for external entities to contact us.
• Bakboter: new secretary
• Fnoerd: treasurer

The board does not do drinks, (reminder to) clean up, etc. The space is run by the members, the board is only present for the legal stuff.

The maximum of board members is 7, the legal minimum is 2, but the practical minimum is 3. The sweetspot would be 6 (primary + secondary)

(+1 voter, total 25)

1.2.2 What is an ALV, why and when do we hold those, who can announce one

There's a legal framework around the TechInc association. We have statues and house rules. Statues cannot violate the law, and need a certain amount of people to change. House rules can be voted in and out more easily.

1.3 Finalizing the agenda; any new items?

• Quinor candidates for Kascomissie
• Tim candidates for board

1.4 Vote: Approving minutes from last meeting

The minutes of the previous meeting can be found: https://wiki.techinc.nl/ALV_June_2023

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

• For: 22
• Against: 1
• Abstains: 2

Notes are approved.

2. Reports

2.1 Report from the board

The board will present a small overview over the period since last ALV, June 2023 thus far.

We started and ended 2023 with 102 members, we got and lost 31 members.

(+1 voter, total 26)

Of the 31 leaving members, 10 were from new signups, 9 of which left within 3 months.

• We have a laser cutter which was broken and got fixed.
• There is a nice floor in the kitchen, more labels.
• The sound station has been remade.
• Regarding online services, mattronix and Piele have worked on single sign-on (SSO).
• The board has moved to Zammad for board-member communication and incoming messages. This allows to keep track of communication more easily.

- All switches have been switched to Unify. The WiFi network was upgraded, Home Assistant, phone system, etc.

Overall, a lot of member improvements, a lot of "power" has been handed back from the board to the members. Over time, members have expected the board to do things, but as this is a member-run space, members are the one that take initiative.

For instance, providing drinks are a member initiative. Due to the difficulties of providing a lot of drinks, a "russian black market" appeared, which was run by a member, where a small amount was donated to the space. This could open the door to "money laundering" issues, as one might want to withdraw money from RevBank.

(+2 voter, total 28)

2.2 Unofficial financial report from the board

Thankfully the amount of people paying less than 25€ has reduced drastically. The icentive from the previous board was put in place to make everybody step up and pay the normal membership fee.

For the month of March: 105 total members

• 93 members pay >= 25€
• 12 members pay < 25€

Members cannot stay on a lower membership fee simply because they used to pay that amount. On a yearly basis, a revision is done where members paying a lower membership fee are contacted. "Doing a lot for the space" is not a valid reason to pay a lower membership fee. The lower membership fee is a "scholarship" for students, and people with very low income. The membership fee is the cost to be part of the association, and not correlated to the time one spends in the space: not spending time in the space is thus not a reason to pay a lower membership fee.

The only income is membership fees and donations. It used to also contain drinks. The expected income is between 2400-2500€. The speculated raise in rent of 12.5% would not give us a lot of wiggle room. The possible membership fee raise would be of 5€ to 30€. More calculations are required, but this is the current idea.

2.2.1 2022 Draft financial report

A draft of the financial report of 2022 has been presented by Piele, who was treasurer at the time. It has not been approved by the kascomissie yet, as it is lacking members (hence this ALV).

File:2022 Financial report DRAFT.pdf

Balance sheet (page 1): asset and liabilities. Top is nearly the same: inventory and deposit we paid to landlord. (3) and (4) are current asset: amount of money still owed to us: membership fees that were not paid, pledge that were not paid, payment by board member done using the wrong card that still need to be returned. (5) liquidity: sum of what we had on bank account (saving included) and safe in cash at the end of the year, substantial increase from the year before. Bottom of the page: liabilities. Equity went up €4,800, it's the profit we had over this year. The 3 numbers below some money we still had to pay for 2022. Huge amount of money that was prepayment of membership dues for next year. €954: amount of money we ought to pay at some point to members returning them (before this was a purchase).

Overview of income and expenses (page 2): 4th column: expenses 2021: result of €-608. 3rd column: initial budget for 2022. 2nd column: better approximation of budget for ALV 2022-11. 1st column: expenses 2022: did quite better than anticipated. Explaination: gained much more income from membership. A lot of people moved over to pay the 25€/month fee or more. Initially it was pay what you want, thought we were going to lose a lot of memebers, in the end didn't happen so much, also gained a lot of new members. A lot more income from drinks. 2021 was still COVID year, so we weren't very open, thus not so much drink income. On the expenses side: housing cost increased: energy was getting more expensive. More costs for drinks since we sold more. Reduced banking costs because we quit Triodos bank in favour of buying the Sumup device, allowing payment to be done directly.

Going to page 5 to explain (20): Repairs: €65, cleaning products, bought fobs, extra invoice for service costs of 2020 from Urban Resort. Had a 10/11 years party. Reserved €250 to make an awesome party, only ended up using €177. Cash difference: having a blue box open all year gives irregularities: €59 short of what we should have received. Most can be explained, there's a revbank feature that allows to take cash from your account to put in a vending machine, but we had no idea if it was money taken out or something brought from the fridge. Later that year we added the unlisted withdrawal function in revbank, which helped as the number stays roughly the same after that.

Page 6: overview of the drinks. We had a certain stock at the beginning of the year, bought 3,488 items of drink. Some stock left being converted to next year. In one year, we consumed 2933 drinks, a value of €3,949.5 , we received €4,025.81 so a difference of €76.

Again, still a draft to be checked by kascomissie.

The Kascomissie checks the insight and numbers, not the job of "why money was spent", job is to see if it can be followed up, if it's transparent enough, whether numbers match and make sense.

2.3 What we know/learned about the space lease

Has been done earlier in the ALV: - we did not receive the email directly, but got it forwarded - the mentioned increase is of 12.5%

Why: Alliantie is increasing 10€/m²/year.

We do not get energy costs billed separately, they are part of the rent payments. They did decrase slightly from 2022 to 2023. According to Tim, those costs have increased by 62% since 21 months ago, for the entire building.

We'll get more definitive info around june from UR. At that point, board will do calculations and most likely propose and increase in membership fee accordingly. In the meantime, we'll just do a confidence vote regarding potential increase of membership fees.

2.4 Report from dispute committee

There were 3 dispute cases, which resulted in 1 individual leaving, one that couldn't be taken on due to the reported not being a member of the space.

The dispute committee would appreciate another member as Quinor is stepping down. The dispute committee needs 3 members to function, and unless another member joins, it would need to find a member to help for any case that might pop up.

Quinor is stepping down from the DC. Cristiano says he might be available for it.

2.5 Report from other committees?

Event committee: no activity since Feb. 2023 in the Signal group. Note from fnoerd: the event committee was established to give support to people wanting to organize events: where to go, where to get drinks, how to setup the event.

Social media committee should be looking for more people and should work more closely with the event committee. People running the social TechInc presence did relay the open days, so we're not missing much.

Maintenance committee was put in place during an online ALV during COVID. Someone proposed it to get the space more organized and functional, as to get the space more organized and functional: reparing stuff and providing tools. It has been quite busy and active the last months. A lot of the new things on sees comes from their work.

Some question about what a committee is exactly. Tricky question. Per house rules, there's only dispute and media committee. Maintenance committee was something board-appointed (work-group). Other committees don't have any additional rights. In general: some of the things voted in didn't necessarily made it into the house rules. Would be great if someone went through the minutes, and add the missing stuff into the house rules.

3. Voting points for rules

3.1 Code of Conduct (mattronix)

The Code of Conduct committee has produced a draft for a new Code of Conduct: https://wiki.techinc.nl/index.php?title=Code_of_Conduct&oldid=28407.

This is the first iteration of a living document. If anyone vote against, let us know how it could be improved.

Question: scope of the CoC? It includes the space, communal areas, IRC and other techinc-related spaces.

Question: is a decision about drug use going to be put in the CoC? No, the CoC doesn't specify a set of rule, it just refers to the existing rules. There's nothing referring to this at the moment. Could be changed. Dutch law still apply.

Question: how to define excessive swearing? When it's a problem, to the point that people are bothered with it. Very difficult to make a comprehensive set of rules that define exactly what is and what isn't acceptable and in which conditions.

VOTE: This is a yes/no vote whether to accept the CoC as official

• For: 24
• Against: 1

The CoC is adopted. Thanks to the CoC commission for the almost 1-year work.

CoC commission found a few things in statutes and house rules that didn't make a lot of sense. Would propose to amend those, or at least look at past ALV and make sure everything has been passed into the house rules. There's some old wiki pages of things that were voted against, things that were voted in favour to change the statutes but not applied (due to requiring a lawyer). DC suggested a revision of the dispute procedure would also be useful.

3.2 Rules regarding events (fnoerd)

Reason: two recent events advertised and conducted in a questionable way. One was created by someone having just created a wiki account, unclear if they were a member and hosted the event. Another event was only announced on a non-TechInc meetup page, members had little way of knowing it would be happening. If an event is on the wiki (the "official" place to announce event), it is somewhat sanctionned by the organization, thus should have an member being a host and responsible for the event. Members also cannot be excluded from the space. Those things are already in the statutes, but not super accessible. So we think a clarification in the house rules would be useful.

Could also make the wiki aware of who is and who isn't a member of the space, and restrict the edition of (certain) pages to that. Some contributions to the wiki do come from non-members as well though.

Some suggestion this clarification doesn't need to be a rule. Could just be a clarification done by board (or event committee, or someone else) on the wiki, asking publicly for feedback.

Some concern about the second parenthesis of the proposed text being a bit unclear (e.g. using the projector doesn't necessarily define an event). Still going to vote for the text as-is (as it is an improvement), and another vote to remove the second brackets (and what's inside).

Complaints about this discussion should have happened before the ALV (in the mailing list or so).

VOTE: This is a yes/no vote whether to add the text as is on the agenda in the house rules.

• For: 14
• Against: 9

VOTE: This is a yes/no vote whether to remove the second pair of brackets and the text inside on what has just been added.

• For: 15
• Against: 4

The text is to be added without the second pair of brackets to the house rules. With an apparent consensus on improving this further later, for now moving along.

3.3 Proposal for wiki to only be edited by members (fnoerd)

VOTE: This is a yes/no vote whether to restrict wiki edition to current members.

• For: 11
• Against: 17

Non-members still can edit the wiki (generally).

3.4 Tentative to increase the membership fees (fnoerd)

Again, this is just to test the waters, see if we need to find alternatives or whatnot.

VOTE: Who thinks it would be required to increase the memebership fee without discussing a limit at the moment.

• A visible of the people present voted in favour.

4. Voting for committees

4.1 Voting in new member(s) in financial auditing committee (Kascommissie)

• Quinor was voted in the kascomissie.

4.2 Voting in new member(s) in dispute committee

• Cristiano was voted in the dispute committee.

4.3 Voting in new member(s) in board

• Tim was voted in the board.