FREE GEEK Michiana

Recorded by Mike Cook, Secretary

Board Members Attending: Fr Robert Bower, Mike Cook, Tom Brown

All attendees were present at 6:00 PM.

Although we had a quorum, since there were no agenda items, an informal discussion was held about the state of the warehouse and LUG (Linux Users Group).

Fr Robert said that due to poor attendance he canceled the Wednesday meeting for August. He also mentioned that we are attracting people from out of the area to the Saturday meetings since there are few LUGs in the region. The Lug format will continue to be presentation based for the monthly Saturday meeting and Q&A based for the monthly Wednesday meeting.

Tom mentioned that he was giving a presentation the the Roseland Rotary in September. He wasn't sure what to ask them for since the warehouse is currently in no position to accept any large donations, we have no opportunities for volunteers and haven't given out any Freeboxes in over a year except to volunteers.

We discussed ways that we might improve the situation. Tom feels that we must organize the warehouse before we can attract any volunteers and that we need to concentrate our efforts on one thing at a time. Mike felt that we need both the heated and the unheated storage organized and that both could be done concurrently if we could get more man-hours on the project. Conversation included discussions about where and how to get more bodies on the ground and how or if it would be possible. In the end Fr Robert suggested that we should tell the Rotary that we are currently looking to build infrastructure and that we need shelving and volunteers who like to swing a hammer. Tom said that he could ask Big Bob about available used shelving and/or racking. In the end we decided the schedule for the next 4 weeks would be to:

• 9/3 - Sort and organize for the pickup of 8 skids;
• 9/10 - Sort and organize for the pickup of 8 skids;
• 9/17 - Load truck, work on organizing inventory and building shelves; and,
• 9/24 - Locate used shelving and/or build more shelving.

I will discuss with Dale: Working on sub-assemblies for shelving in my shop at home, where I have facilities to more rapidly make the repetitive cuts and assemble the panels, and then bringing the sub-assemblies to the warehouse for final assembly. This may be done on some Thursdays.

We closed the discussion at about 7:45 PM.