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 these things in pairs might be helpful.

• Action: consider how to divvy up the roles
• Maggie and Jade could partner on the outreach and communication space.
• Donna: Fawkner is exciting place for community groups at the moment. Migrant populations with skills and motivation.
  • Ask for a space inside the resilience hub.
• Simon and Rob could partner on running a Solarpunk event soon. e.g. Lily's talk on how programmers influence society. Tech for activists. Some old dude to talk about appropriate technology.