Committee Meeting 2025-11-10

Present: Jade, Simon, Rob, Sarah, Maggie

• Check in
• Year kickoff
  • General Ways of Working together
  • Vision
  • Values & Principles
  • 3 year mission
  • 1 year mission
  • Project management
  • Roles & Responsibilities
• Current business
  • Multi-node wikipedia
  • Solarpunk meetup
  • Local social media
• Next meeting
  • Facilitator, scribe

• Check-in: lots of people feeling busy
• Agenda discussed and agreed
• How we like to work together
  • Rob: no strong preferences. Prefers some face to face.
  • Maggie: Happy with some remote, this F2F is good. Likes being prompted. Likes working in pairs.
  • Sarah: also likes working in pairs
  • Simon: used to working autonomously. Pairs and mentoring approaches work well. Used to working asynchronously.
  • Jade: likes meetings but finds them Likes to be given the outcome desired rather than being told how to do something.
  • we can do hybrid meetings in future

• Vision, values, principles
  • Homework: Read the About Us tab on Merribek.tech:- vision, values and principles. Bring suggestions for changes at next meeting. E.g. we're missing the social media project (though the next page has more info, includes the 3 things: reduce carbon, resilient in the face of outages; digital justice through local grassroots). This could be better captured. We will discuss next meeting.
  • Simon will think about how we operate as a committee

• 1 year mission: what do we want to try to achieve in the coming 12 months.
  • Review the rules of association and improve on them.
  • Host something on some resilient tech.
  • Jade feels like a bottleneck and there aren't many volunteers contributing many hours. Relationship here at Balam Balam seems like it could move us forward. Time to
  • LoRes Roadmap developed by Jade: Wikipedia is the first item on the roadmap, then mirroring websites, then hosting static websites. Requires e.g. user accounts. Subsequent step would be email; mailing lists. Those allow us to target community groups. Consider e.g. Wordpress plugins that allow local groups to generate static sites from their Wordpress. A future project: consider

Local Social Media

• There is a case for doing one thing at a time
• Mastodon feels like a reasonable choice
• We have a local server here in BB
• It's hard to see what we would learn from e.g. Mastodon

How do we spread the focus and avoid things bottlenecking at Jade? The things that need to be done.

• Partnerships & relationships
• Communications and outreach
• Cluster meetups, courses
• Making sure the solarpunk meetups happen each month < this could be rotating
• Governance. Processes, policies need to be written
• Volunteer coordinator

6 of us plus James (technical). Maybe Ben. Matt less available, sometimes available on request, pulling back. Also some twistable arms.

Doing this in pairs might be helpful.

Simon and Rob could partner on running a Solarpunk event soon. e.g. Lily's talk on how programmers influence society. Tech for activist Some old dude from appropriate technology

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