Meeting notes/Meeting Notes 2025 10 28

These are the notes from the The 837th Meeting of Noisebridge.

Date	2025 10 28
Note-takers	Julius
Moderators	Elan

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Meeting Summary

Discussion Items:

• Renaming membership to clarify roles
• Reworking event hosting

Introductions

Elan - I like to hack on cloud computing and wikipedia and stuff

Daniel - I 3D print stuff and do sign stuff

SigInt - computer security stuff, lots of CTF

Cynthia - comes to pick up good ideas

Jane - I do robots and also crafty DIY stuff

Reed - I'm Reed, I'm trying to learn robots with Jane

Julius - co-organize spacebridge, likes things that fly (balloon, drones, birds)

Derek - functional programming, plays drums

Carl - electronics, circuit-hacking mondays, background in physics(optics, lasers) and teaching

Lauren - into architecture, design, and furniture making

Anuya - work on hardware + electronics

Short announcements and events

1) I've heard rumblings of a halloween shenanigan happening this Friday evening

2) Upcoming meshtastic meeting attached to the anarchist free school (Nov 2nd)

Excellence

Our One Rule is to Be Excellent to Each Other. (On first Tuesdays, seek a few definitions. Other Tuesday, give a 1-3 sentence summary.)

• Being Kind

• Follow the Golden Rule

• Be ready to take yes to an answer - SigInt did a good job of articulating this - It is unexcellent to participate in a discussion with no intention or ability to absorb what other people are saying

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.) TWO MINUTES MAX 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.

Brief Kudos

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

• Carl - Noah does an excellent job at Circuit-Hacking Mondays. He does a fantastic job of organizing and it's been getting pretty good crowds. Come check us out!

• Wheezy - kudos to Daniel to lending a ThinkPad and Elan for moderating.

• SigInt - twisted for hosting DC415 meetup. Revived this meetup after many years of lying fallow.

• Derek - Wheezy for posting some sick memes

Zoning, Permitting, & Improvements -- Standing Item

Status this week? Helpful broad asks to the community? NB city bureaucracy WG -- JD & Alice, among others.

Should have an update next week

Guilds

• What are guilds - briefly describe (much like the previous section on "Excellence")

• A group of more than one person with a physical thing in the space that they are in charge. People + equipment = guild

Discussion Items

1: Improving anarchism through membership heirarchy renaming

From/Raised by: Daniel Seeking: decision/outcome/advice/[?] On topic:

Not trying to change anything structurally. Mostly just aesthetic. Someone will come along and say "I want to be a member." And some folks will say "by coming in the door you're a member". But then we explain about philanthropy/big M etc and they're confused and not interested anymore.

The main issue is we have this associate member position that feels like it's when you're "really" a member.

The main distinction is about 24 hour access. And obviously it makes sense to delay that for a while. Maybe call that something like "you are becoming a trusted member" or "getting key access"

There's a similar issue with BIG M. It's not very anarchistic. We shouldn't name it that way. Two words I propose are either Steward or Clerk.

Summary of changes: associate member has no special title. Just call it getting 24 hour access. Big M can be called something less cool.

Julius - small little guy instead of big-M,

Wheezy - Words do matter. We should be careful about words. It's not like the terms Big M and Philathropist/Associate are causing confusion about who should be doing what/who should be here, but I have seen people in the last few years who want to become Big M just because they want more power and influence in the space. Every few years we get a few new ones. The tour is people's first impression of the space. Very important. Then we get people who say "I want to donate, how do I do that?" Once we get people in the space and have them feeling empowered to do things *without* being a member and just donate, that's the ideal. I'm saying this just to bring this back to what this change looks like. It sounds like renaming things on the wiki, get people to start using it in the community.

"We're a leaderless cult around the concept of excellence."

Daniel - changing the tour wording is important. Congratulations you're a member, if you want to support go here.

Wheezy - Common for people to ask "so who is in charge around here?" If it hadn't been the case that certain people here had beeen super hierarchal in the past, it wouldn't bug me so much. But we need to make clear that we lead by example, everybody is a leader.

• lead by example
• maintain by example
• take care of the space/community by example

Josh - I like names like Petty Tyrant Wannabe. But what if we go for simplicity and make it descriptive. You're a member who is trusted. You're a member who handles finances.

SigInt - Couple points. I want to challenge base assumption is that we don't want people to desire to be a member. I think from a practical perspective we want people to come, stick around, and contribute to the space. Lowering the bar for people to give us money makes a lot of sense. I think on naming scheme, I like capability-based naming. These capabilities would be determined by big-C consensus.

Jess - I find myself agreeing with what you're saying overall, but it seems like there needs to be some loose structure laid out. Because it already isn't clear what you need to do specifically to become an associate member or Big M. We do want people to contribute and do more and more.

Elan - I think it's a good idea. To sigint's point, I like the idea of a capability system. I am a big M member, but I'm not trained to re-focuse the laser cutter. I like the idea of saying everyone is a member. You can be a Supporting Member if you want to keep the lights on. I want to bring up that legally we are required to have a hierarchy in a small sense. We are required to have a board. We are required to have a way that people elect the board. But the board is still bound by consensus. Legally we have a hierarchy, but we have made it so that it is as toothless as possible. The minumum hierarchy is who can vote on the board and who can't.

SigInt - Focusing the laser is an example. Having root on certain boxes. If this capability is given to someone, can this do lasting harm? So what is the actual mechanism for enacting this change? Is it Big C Consensus?

Elan - Yes it is. That would be something for next week. Coming up with the wording for the proposal is a good idea. Coming up with some suggestions for titles/language

Julius - something we're missing is a way to authenticate who is who. I think we should use RFID systems for more thing. Laser cutter seems like a good use case for this. Current implementation is fractured and essentially an honor system. Unified access control system would be really helpful. Another one would be gate-access which could be even more permissive.

Daniel - I don't want things to get scope-creeped and propagating changes. I see

Elan - I would recomend membership software from Spaceport/Matterport from the Calgary makerspace for a potential management of access control.

SigInt - Splitting proposal for renaming things and splitting capabilities (blocking big-C, voting on board, endorsing new capabilties).

Julius - we don't want to add administrative burden

Elan - maybe we can use the guilds to manage the permissions

SigInt - trying to think of how to plugin/replace existing system vs just renaming

Josh - We're massively drifted from the proposal, which is to change the name.

Daniel - The idea of a clean ACL proposal isn't in scope. If someone wants to do that then go ahead.

Josh - I think a centralized database of permissions is not very Noisebridge. I like

Elan - I feel similarly. With a few exceptions. Someone was using the wood shop in an unsafe way, but then they were asked to not do that.

Daniel - Maybe the laser since you could kill other people or poison people.

Josh - The laser people will know who the laser people are, and if they have issues they can reach out to the larger community.

2: Improving how-to-host documentation

From/Raised by: Seeking: decision/outcome/advice/[?] On topic:

https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Hosting_an_Event

• Is there documentation on how to post events on meetup?

Add some notes describing how to use the Meetup Organizer app (separate from the normal meetup app)

• Being able to get into the space is important.

We should make sure event organizers have door access.

It was unclear if Noise Cafe was an every-week thing or not, and if that would mean we would have consistent access that time of day.

3: Noisebridge Wishlist

From/Raised by: Jane Seeking: decision/outcome/advice/[?] On topic: