Meeting notes/Meeting Notes 2025 11 25

These are the notes from the The 841st Meeting of Noisebridge.

Date	2025 11 25
Note-takers	Loren, Elan
Moderators	Loren

Previous Meeting

Next Meeting

• One or two bullet points of high-level meeting summary.

Meeting Summary

• Announcements:
• Consensus Items:
• Discussion Items:

Introductions

• Ask people to share their name, access needs, and preferred gender pronouns what they do at noisebridge

An interesting project you're working on or would like to be!

• Elan - trying to set up a k8s cluster
• Will - trying to make the DIY book scanner work
• Elle - oldest project at NB is a gown w/ a fog machine and lights!
• Julius - work on things that fly, have had a serious video project
• Mitalia - here for writing meeting, whoops!
• Adam - can only hang for a cpl mins, game dev, enjoy NB as 3rd space.
• Zach - teach laser safety class, working on CNC machine software to do a safety intro class b/c it's just sitting there!!! ppl would pay for it, become Members maybe!? looking for help with this. I also feed a caterpillar on the patio.
• Jane - working on embroidery + cross-stitch things, lots of stuff going on!
• Loren - mccint online, was working on K8S stuff here at NB. i want to run a flask web app to keep track of chores and objects and stuff.
• Khang - game developer -- working on trying to make associate membership easier. I pt 50 blank RF cards and we could potentially make them NB branded.
• Anh - normally work on designs + games, working on a NeoPet type thing
• Sophia (a11ce)- working on stuff for gamebridge jam. Also working on AI red-teaming.
• Josh - prime number
• Chris - getting ready for finals
• Derek - building webapp to make logic to gantt chart
• Daniel (R) - chemistry for finals
• Daniel(web) -

• LX - gamebridge fundraiser, looking for LED signage help or projection mapping for the party. be there 2 hours before that for party prep, come help w/ NB 16, meet others woorking on it. I'll help you make videos for your NB guild!

• IrishMASMS - occasional visitor, thanks for the 3D printing & the lazor cutter classes

• Nat - i'm into napping, surviving colds, and hanging at NB.
• Evan - 1st meeting and oops connection is down
• solderfumes -
• Nthmost - Whoever else is typing please know i can type faster than you :D
• Yuki - working on my EP

Short announcements and events

• 60-second description per item in bulletpoint.
• Copy-paste any pre-announcements for the upcoming meeting from Announcements.
• After announcements, copy them to the past Announcements list. Retire any from the Next Meeting list that aren't marked ONGOING.
• (See https://www.noisebridge.net/ and https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Category:Events for events, and welcoming people)

• 2 new sewing machines in the sewing machine! if you know what you're doing you can unbox, it if not please wait --Elle
• New sewing class up on Meetup this Monday! --Elle
• Wednesday is Game Dev meeting (8pm) --Alex
• We're in the middle of Game Dev Camp -- board games, computer games, whatever. Participate in Game Dev wednesdays and we'll help you in whatever phase you're in.

• Work will happen on Friday on shelving and related projects near the wood shop. Talk to Ken -- get on the #woodshop-wall channel on Discord and see if you can help (ask first, Ken is particular)

Excellence

Our One Rule is to Be Excellent to Each Other. (Give a quick, 1-3 sentence summary.)

What does that mean? Please see our page on excellence https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Excellence!

Golden Rule: being vulnerable enough to try to help someone

You don't need to be friends w/ everyone, but you do need to respect everyone. Excellence is that principle. (Be friendly as well)

Anti-Harassment Policy & Community Standards of Excellence

Noisebridge has an Anti-Harassment Policy https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Anti-Harassment_Policy Everyone is expected to follow the Anti-Harassment Policy, please familiarize yourself with it.) More approachable & specific guidelines, https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Community_Standards https://safespace.noisebridge.net/ is one way to quickly raise issues which will be seen by people in Slack.

Accessibility

We try to be as accessible as possible, pay attention to accessibility lanes and keep things as maintained as possible for all types of people.

news.google.com/home?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en

Brief Kudos

Recent examples of excellent participation, say 3, unless the passion moves you.

• LX: thx nthmost for doing history time and sharing stories!
• Yuki: to Marty for starting the songwriting group with me
• Elle: to Ken and Eric and Angello and Derek - folks who helped make the Thanksgiving event great

Derek: to Elle for putting on Thanskgiving Erik: Josh for having multiple pizza nights. Zach: To JD for responding quickly on discord and giving us the instruction to shut down the laser quickly. If we didn't have people like him, it would just be down forever, and it is one of the things that really drives membership and engagement.

Zoning & Permitting Standing Item

• We had a bit of a fire alarm when someone called in claiming NB was running a distillation workshop due to some meetup we had online from 2 years ago. The inspector is being pretty chill and it's sort of over, since there's no evidence of this remaining.
• Woodshop wall will have shelving after this Friday... Woodshop has been approved but not painted

Membership

Derek applying for membership!

Why applying? D: I want to make sure this place survives. Would like to start an operating systems meetup.

Fav part? D: Sense of community i get here

What are you inspired to create or learn? D: Good at programming so usually something new i'd like to create, don't want to rehash -- chasing the dopamine hit

When the time comes for a Meetup do you know how to do it? D: No idea! [members let Derek know the process]

Are you on discord? D: Yep, I'm Derek

Derek needs a Member sponsor! [a cpl people volunteer including Loren]

Big C Consensus Items

Nobody likes 3 hour meetings, only explain if new people are present. https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Current_Consensus_Items

Consensus Items

Only for talking about Big C consensus items, small c consensus items should be discussed with people at the space at the time of the change/new item or can be reserved for the discussion section of the meeting.

Discussion Items

It is recommended to post items for discussion ahead of time at https://pad.riseup.net/p/nbmeeting. (Check that the template for the meeting is in place already, and that last week's notes have been moved to the wiki, of course)

Item prompts should follow the format:

Discussion Item X

From/Raised by: [your name here] Seeking [decision/outcome/advice/something else] On topic: [topic]

@everyone tag

From/Raised by: IrishMASMS Seeking decision On topic: [topic]

Restrictions on using @everyone tag in Discord, expectations on opt out

• IRISH: I work in infosec, deal w/ spam etc. the expectation is opt in, not opt out. the majority of them have restricted who can use the @everyone tag to tag everybody. this morning there was a CONCERN but not everyone in the NB discord needde to be notified about this. there should have been an approach where individuals who are maybe members or helping run the space on an active basis should have been notified about this, not @everyone. there's that aspect of being respectful to each other. randomly messaging everyone is not helpful esp. in the middle of a workday. "You can just opt out" is not helpful and not respectful.

• Elle: joining a community is in a sense opting in. this isn't a public channel, this is a NB channel. this issue was important. it wasn't clear to the person posting or reading it who would have the relevant info. for all we knew, YOU would have that info. i don't know you but i didn't know who might know. In a community like ours, when an issue is kinda big, everyone's gonna hear about it. The couple minutes you spent reading something you didn't want to read, but you did opt in to NB.

• IRISH: i did not opt in to getting @everyone alerts, and if that's the position NB has, i'm going to LEAVE and TELL EVERYONE you guys suck.

• Elle: lots of members don't go on the discord, you can keep being a member and not be on Discord.

• IRISH: i want to keep talking

• Moderator well we have a stack.

• LX: not every participant has perm to use @everyone. There are some things we can do and maybe change default stuff about notifications. Ppl can change options on servers, but not everyone knows how to use them. Irish if you would help me validate we can work on the notifications together, but we do sometimes have things we really do want to notify @everyone about sometimes.

• IRISH: I can work w/ you on this, but lemme tell you there are other servers i am on things went to a moderator group instead of pinging everyone. Because this thing left a real bad taste in my mouth TBH.

• Sophia: Discord has DND settings you can set for yourself.

• Yuki: Seems like we already have restricted use of @everyone tag and i think it was a valid use thereof. Appreciate LX's suggestions

• Loren: IRISH, thanks, i think as we grow we might want more people to be ongoing donating members, and we'll have more cultural clash stuff as we grow, so it feels valuable to figure out ways to sort this out as we grow.

• Elle: there's an @everyone notice going out tonight about fundraising, intended to go out to everyone b/c everyone could possibly donate. so.. if you want to opt out, better opt out...

• Loren: if you're starting to get more involved now -- we mostly don't like to have specific formalized power or leaders and we have a lot of systems that rely on patterns of communication rather than people being named as specific things. JD is the most active person in the permit group, i think he probably could have been effective if he'd told certain people instead of everyone.

• M: we have a channel called #metagesis just to talk about communication systems.

• IRISH: those of us in infosec are trained that alerts mean we have to jump to attention, so it is a little triggering for us in that culture.

Zine Digitization

From/Raised by: Will Seeking [decision/outcome/advice/something else] On topic: [topic]

• Will: interested in skateboarding, lots of old skate magazines that exist in physical space and not online. huge gap in preserving that history. person in S california w/ a project to compile libraries of these magazines, has a pretty complete collection. Been looking into DIY book scanners and NB has one that's defunct. it's missing a piece of glass, no cameras, but otherwise seems like it's pretty good. i put a message on Discord about potentially borrowing it to take to S Cal to scan a cpl thousand magazines but I thought i'd ask if i could take it on a road trip first.

• Julius: Curious if our scanner is good for images and other things?
• Will: Yeah it's built from plans online based on Internet Archive's book scanner setup
• Elle: are you going to do repairs before you take it down?
• Will: yep,
• Josh: have you checked w/ IA.org ?
• Will: yeah, been difficult to communicate, i did go on a tour. would be prohibitively expensive to donate these into the IA b/c the guy doesn't want to digitize them or donate them himself. So we were thinking of doing it ourselves.
• J: how long do youp think it'd take?
• Will: about 3 months. i'd be installing it at his house so it can be done in a non-death-march sort of way with a team of people.
• Will: Stuff will be available at wiki source and my own site as well.
• Sophia: what does 3 months mean?
• Will: several weeks of sprints of digitizing, pretty much parking my van in the driveway.
• Sophia: I'd be willing to step up to help repair and digitize.
• Josh: when you approached the IA, did you visit on a Friday to chat people up?
• Will: i should go back, i did go on a Friday but there were like 60 ppl.
• IRISH: can the space rent it to them? and some sort of deposit paid? The space could use the funds.
• Will: working on a rich DB of annotations for these magazines so ppl can learn more about what's in them.
• Julius: I think we get value out of having it be repaired and having it be used. I'd just like to know that there's a time frame. I don't want to see it just kind of disappear. Do you have plans to be back here in the Bay?
• Will: Yeah, i live here.
• Julius: Oh then i feel a lot better about it.
• Loren: I think i do want to suggest that we have something, like we ask for a deposit, and having a schedule would be nice.
• Will: closing thought, i'm not 100% thinking i will borrow it, i might want to just build one so i don't have to be held to a strict timeline.

[Seems like general consensus that this seems cool, Will still considering whether to build a new one himself.]

• delta.skateboard.fyi

CoinBase status

From/Raised by: Yuki Seeking [decision/outcome/advice/something else] On topic: [topic]

• Yuki: anybody know?
• Loren: finished the upstream paperwork, creating an organizational user account, found a champion for us within Coinbase and now we have an account waiting for us. I need to finish making an organizational account for us on the exchange to link it to.
• Elan: and we need to file our taxes...
• Loren: right
• Loren: I wanted to check the exchange rates first and all of the tactical concerns with that plan. Good idea you raised, it raises more questions. looking into it.

z

Event

From/Raised by: Chris+Daniel R Seeking [decision/outcome/advice/something else] On topic: [topic]

Chris: checking in, we had an event (a rave) and wanted to make sure everything and everyone was cool. We had 3 more events we want to plan, liked the idea of event insurance.

Event dates (proposed):

• 3rd Jan
• 24th Jan
• 14th Feb

• Loren: ppl went out through the fire door during the event. we don't need more trouble w/ our landlord and the city, so...
• Wheezy: 90% of ppl won't try this door if we put up a giant laser cut sign saying "ALARM", so
• Elle: so great that you brought a fundraising idea, and how great the insurance was (and so cheap) and i'd like to propose at another time that not only should we require this, we should consider getting insurance for our events every time.
• Chris: covers hurt, damage to the space, e.g. if laser cutter was damaged.
• How many ppl you working with?
• Chris: cpl different ppl, one of them a SOPHOCLES-THEMED RAVE event community,

https://www.google.com/search?q=sapphic&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS1180US1180&oq=Sapphic&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqCggAEAAYsQMYgAQyCggAEAAYsQMYgAQyCggBEAAYsQMYgAQyCggCEAAYsQMYgAQyBwgDEAAYgAQyBwgEEAAYgAQyCggFEAAYsQMYgAQyDQgGEAAYgwEYsQMYgAQyBwgHEAAYgAQyBwgIEAAYgAQyBwgJEAAYgATSAQgxODgwajBqN6gCALACAA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://www.bing.com/search?q=sophocles+was+a+lesbian+conspiracy+theory+youtube+short

Sapphic ^^ :D

there are some others as well.  We had security, no problems, no cops.  The toilets didn't even get clogged!

• Daniel: I help organize a lot of events [helped w/ this one]
• Jane: for future events, if they're going to also be open to folks at NB, i'm sure at least a handful of us would be interested in attending, volunteering.
• Elan: There was literally word on the street that we had a cool event.

Fundraisering

From/Raised by: Elle Seeking [decision/outcome/advice/something else] On topic: [topic]

• Elle: GoFundMe is at $20k now! TY secret person who will remain secret. We don't need to take this down and it doesn't expire! We can conceivably just leave it up for the end of the year and change the copy.
• Naomi: different?
• Elle: yeah we're not as desperate anymore so we shouldn't lie about where we're at
• Naomi: But how are things actually different
• Elle: this month is different from last month
• LX: It's accurate to say "NB was a month away from closing" -- saying what just happened and how close we still are and thanking ppl for helping us through that
• Julius: until we're certain we're net positive we should still say "NB continues to need your support" or something along those lines
• Elan: we should say something like "we were 3 months from closing", just whatever's accurate.
• Elle proposing a process for changing the copy, we can pass this around and let people weigh in on it, won't just be me or a tiny handful of ppl changing it.
• Jane: I think it would help to be totally transparent -- when i share it sometimes people respond, "why do they need this money? what are they going to do with it when they get it?" etc
• Elle: we've sent out thank yous to everyone who's donated so far
• Loren: PoI, how close were we: it's not inaccurate to say we had 1 month to go before needing to close based on real numbers.
• Julius: folks did a lot of good work getting things out there we just need to back them up
• Nat: it takes time to close a space so if we only have 1-2 months to close
• Naomi: attitude is everything, it's not inaccurate to still present ourselves as being desperate -- NB keeps getting into these kinds of situations because we take our feet off the gas way before should
• Josh: what's our actual runway?
• Loren: maybe about 3 months. Deficit's being growing over years, we can communicate this
• Elle: There is something else to discuss that is involved here but we are not discussing it yet.
• something something process? if we note the process with the process then we might talk about changing the process into something that goes into the notes but more process might be noting the change into a process.
• nthmost: there is nothing dishonest about communicating the stress of having too little runway
• Josh: counterpoint, i don't think it's dishonest to be emotional but the way that we arrive at the number we communicate should be unemotional and we did not actually only have 1 month left
• Naomi: that's not true though according to Loren
• Elle: right, if that had happened in my personal finances (where NB was at a month ago) i would have been preparing to leave in a month
• Chorus: yes we did maybe or not
• Julius: we should have a plan for shutting down ahead of time
• Elle: can we save this for a different conversation, this isn't really fundraising
• Julius: i do have other things to talk about but have to leave soon
• Zack: we think of fundraising as asking for money, but having classes increases donations and raises funds. I propose on the gate outside wall we have a QR code so ppl can scan that to get straight to our MeetUp listings of classes.(donations or classes or whatever). We're missing out on opportunities to raise funds by leveraging our classes.

new topic?

• Elle: fantastic point, cannot agree more about classes+fundraising... next thing i want to mention, i met the manager at Blick Art to see if they can help us out. They're offering us a grant, we can ask him for any amount, they might match GoFundMe, i wasn't sure how to respond to that offer. Do we accept corporate donations? They're offering straight up cash and even NB branded merch and even a SECTION AT BLICK for NOISEBRIDGE SEWING ITEMS

• Naomi: THAT'S AWESOME
• Sophia: why would they do this? why us?
• Elle: they do this for a lot of orgs. the reason is to look good in the public. we support artists. they sell things to artists. even for ppl who do come to NB, knowing we might send ppl to buy things from blick would be the benefit for them. I went to ppl at Frontier Tower (Tony, was 86d months ago from NB) and Frontier wanted to do this (with blick?) but doesnt have the pull but we do? (i think?)[what? i don't get this at all -nm]

Chorus: yes we have had some corporate donations.l

• Loren: Chris Olaj was the Thiel fellow who brought the money into NB.

• LX: we have a standing policy just like every nonprofit which is matching employer donations. Tell your employer about your donations to NB and your employer may put up the same.

[sophia: i sent a poll in discord general]

==

Elle

Potential 86

From/Raised by: Elle Seeking [decision/outcome/advice/something else] On topic: [topic]

Do-ocratic Task Board

Participation also means doing stuff to contribute to the space. Propose new tasks or pick some tasks from Github, from what needs to be done around you, or whatever, and see if someone will sign up to work on that task. Anyone can sign up and it's a great way to show you are contributing!

End of Meeting

Note taker posts the notes

• Clean and tidy the meeting notes including removing all these really verbose instructions.
• Fill out the short summary at the top listing just announcements, consensus items, & discussion topics.
• Copy paste the notes to the next meeting page. (They will become Last meeting at midnight.) https://www.noisebridge.net/index.php?title=Last_meeting&redirect=no
• Email the meeting summary to Noisebridge Discuss and Noisebridge Announce lists.
• CC on the email treasurer@noisebridge.net and secretary@noisebridge.net if there are new members and philanthropists.
• Edit the Current Consensus Items if anything is proposed for consensus next week.
• Edit the Consensus Items History if anything was reached consensus or failed to reach consensus this week.

Fun things to do after

• Do a 10 minute cleanup, bring dishes up stairs and wash them, clean the bathroom
• Have some beers on the patio
• Prepare the next weeks' meeting notes
• Lick the walls. Or just draw on them (I don't like this example at all... :P)
• sing the Hackernationale (this almost never happens)