Present: Jade, Rob, Simon, Maggie, Sarah, Wade.

At Assemble, Stubbs St

• Membership expectations
• Working group / working meetings
• Volunteering pipeline
• SolarPunk meetup for next week
• Website updates
• Update from Wade and Maggie re. working through RPi Node doco

• Rob and Simon: get info ready for the March meetup
• Jade and Rob: prepare call for involvement of volunteers for node stewardship at Feb meetup
• Maggie: prepare to take signups. Do we want an online list of volunteers?
• All: for the Solarpunk meetup consider bringing food, or help Jade with catering arrangements - e.g. from Green Refectory
• Sarah, Jade, Simon: update website to provide up to date info about membership, volunteers and getting involved.
• Sarah, Jade: continue to pursue joining Coop Cloud federation

• A key benefit of setting up nodes in people’s homes (rather than organisations) is that it enables building volunteer base; engaged node maintainers. A pathway for hobbyist engagement.
• Should we aim to find a solution to the challenges of getting a static IP, to ease participation? Not a priority. The CGNAT issue shouldn’t be a barrier. Tailscale or similar may be a way forward

The roadmap (See https://lores.tech/roadmap/ for more detail)

• Wikipedia is low hanging fruit
• Static websites would be next
• Community centre / organisational nodes and home-housed nodes are part of the vision - Then building relationship with community facilities can come later
• After that need to start investigating the connectivity question and providing other services

• Will be a big win for Jade to have someone else maintain our Kiwix recipe
• Ideally we want about 10 volunteers who can steward notes, requires a moderate level of technical engagement. 1-4 hours per week for the average,
• Envisaged that some may get more involved; contribute to open source coding to help solve problems.
• The LoRes website has a technical roadmap but we don’t have a roadmap for personnel and governance.

How do we funnel interest from potential volunteers at the Solarpunk meetup?

• Sarah suggests light touch approach: website info about what we need, request they email us. Maintain a list with info about what they are interested in doing / learning. Let's dedicate every other Meetup to a working bee, and meet and greet for new / potential volunteers.
• Jade: we should also add them to our room on Matrix

• Can we find someone who wants to take ownership of recruiting and onboarding 10 volunteers?
• Sarah notes that volunteer management is a tough gig. Ways to make it manageable: reduce, automate, pay someone?
• Let's reduce it: aim for 3-5 volunteers who can be node stewards. Maybe we'll find one who is willing to take on training or coordination after a few months.

• Doco currently assumes someone with a bit of technical knowledge and skills; e.g. assumption was that they might already have dual booted Linux.
• Wade: A lot of the documentation could be a script. A prepackaged image that can be put on a RPi with some config. Or perhaps we can keep with what we’ve got for now for debugging purposes.
• BUT Blackboxing not ideal because we want people to be familiar with what's going on: node stewards are more important than nodes.

• Rob and Simon: get info ready for the next meetup
• We can put out a stronger call for involvement of volunteers for node stewardship
• Maggie can take signups
• At the March meeting, the following month we will be hacking stuff: Build your own RPi node and learn how to maintain
• All: consider bringing food, or help Jade with catering arrangements - e.g. from Green Refectory
• Sarah, Jade, Simon: website update to provide up to date info about membership, volunteers and getting involved.