Committee Meeting Minutes: 12 October 2026

• Maggie
• Wade
• Simon
• Jade
• Sarah

Meeting held on Zoom

• Updates
• AGM Planning
• A first site

• Media: Jade in The Age, Sarah in 3CR radio
• We've done well in preparing for more contributors, Greg has been doing good work
• Sarah has a 2year part time secondment to Melbourne Climate Futures which provides more of a platform for research focusing on low-carbon computing https://www.unimelb.edu.au/climate/home#about-mcf

• Spaces / locations: somewhere we can set up a server, battery, solar panels…
  • Jade conversation with Carmen, Neighbourhood Houses in Northcote SPAN
  • Sarah conversations with Catalyst (J, Lucas) post Newkind,
  • Sarah asking friends in council to keep an ear to the ground to find a space
• Kangan Tafe site Coburg North
  • https://climateactionmerribek.org/2025/10/29/consultation-on-former-kangan-tafe-site-in-coburg-north/
  • Cr Helen Politis resident meeting discussion about stakeholder involvement and unity.
  • Encouraging community involvement, to get a toe-hold now;
  • Upshop (Mario Milici) upcycling of materials that would have gone to landfill
  • Uncertain whether there's a hidden agenda here for reaching out to community, e.g. possible change of zoning.
  • Sarah and Maggie will discuss further

• It would good to have a strong first location, as well as distributed nodes.

Need to think about operational planning for our services

• Month-to-month responsibilities and sunsetting, hand-over
• Radicalise system for opt-in volunteering e.g. every 3months: might work for Digital Lounge but not for running essential digital services such as email;
• Jade had envisaged several people would work together to steward each server at a shared location
• Can we use this first location as a way to work out how people will work together to run a server?

• 19 ppl in the node stward channel, 9 nodes connected
• Naarm Solarpunk test network. Theory: see where people are across Merri-bek, see where people are and encourage them to move a steward to a focus location.
• Getting close to many of the pieces we need for
• But underlying P2P technologies such as P2Panda are not yet 1.0, will still make breaking changes up to 1.0 so may have backwards compatibility problems
• We are currently asking node stewards to ride a lot of uncertainty. Currently need people who are willing to stay with the process, potentially work through it several times. If we can host another piece of software out of the many out there. Doesn't need to be a RPi, could be e.g. Mac Mini.

• October meet up: Weds 21
• AGM planning. Aim to send invitations this week.
  • Weds Nov 18th would be good for the AGM (already scheduled for the SolarPunk Meetup)
  • We need to finalise the finances in time for that (Rob and Jade)
  • Choose venue (Rob). Rob has been notified that there are free council venues we can use, will explore that option. Catalyst has space we can use too ;
  • Will need to send invitations by email (Simon)
  • Speaker (Jade)

• Would be good to make this a project for coming year
• Other things we will need to consider:
  • Hardware, we probably need a computer. Recycled vs power-efficient hardware. Herve might be interested in that
  • Governance and what it looks like to be a volunteer
  • MoU between us and the venue, e.g. access requirements and battery safety.
  • Strategic qualities: would feel fairly grassroots, open to the community, fairly polished. Catalyst is an activist space, sets the tone in a certain direction; would be great if we can be open to be part of that. Nor do we want to be seen as 'part of council'. We are trying to balance being a central org vs autonomy for the hackers that
  • Add-ons: having to use AI for work, would like that to be solar powered. Would pay for own server colocation hosting.

• Wade: balcony solar now becoming availability / permitted in Aus. Could be a useful pathway for hardware. Leveraging that change in the market and products that will be available to support a piece of hardware, e.g. a rack with monitoring.
• Pi with 2-3 panels and battery, and the monitoring, ingress and egress power that can feed in to the application server. Once balcony solar is sold at Aldi, if we can add panels and batteries, that
• Mac Mini peaks at about 110 Watts. A $400 battery from Jaycar could run all the static websites in Brunswick
• Earthworker Coop energy storage Tom Danby, Castlemaine has a shipping container with battery running his factory off it.

Groups are wanting:

• 1. a “Google Suite / Docs replacement”
  • Nextcloud is an obvious option but not well suited to small orgs. We could perhaps group them into orgs and help them work together to manage an instanced between them.
  • Jade notes there are many Free / open source office suites now, with support from French and German governments also
• 2. a “Facebook Groups replacement” to communicate amongst members. Sarah suggests:
  • Bonfire Communities would be a great option if we want something Merri-bek wide (because Fediverse) but doesn't currently seem ready; we can start up a conversation with them though.
  • Zulip also seems good (more like Slack) for orgs of the right size.

• AgroEcology Food Sovereignty Alliance would be interested too