Committee Meeting Minutes: 12 October 2026

Meeting held on Zoom

Agenda

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

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.

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.