12/08 Meeting Notes & NewBCamp Test Build 1.0

12/08 Meeting Attendees:

Nathan, Sara, Forrest, Randy, Regina, Court, Maura, Fred, Kim

Moderated by: Nathan

Space:

We discussed the recent developments regarding finding space for a home for Free Geek. The target date of opening a location is June 2009.

Vehicle:

We placed an ad on craigslist to find a vehicle. We will need to have in our budget an amount available to insure and register the vehicle for business use, but we are looking.

Legal Advice:

We discussed that our Form 1023 and attachments have been sent to two attorneys, one working with the RI Bar association and another who is a contact of Sara's. Sara also called her contact this evening and Nathan will be in touch with that person in the next week or so.

Fiscal Agent:

It was brought up at the meeting that we may have a fiscal agent in order to apply for grants, that we should know by next week if we are approved. Nathan will write a proposal and work at this project.

Strategic Advice:

Nathan discussed the importance of having sound advice and the necessity to possibly pay for such advice, were we to have a budget to do so.

Board of Directors:

The group discussed speaking to others to help find other possible recruits for the Board of Directors.

Sara discussed NewBCamp, what it is and what her vision is for this February's session at Johnson and Wales University. She will write a new blog explaining NewBCamp in general terms for our community.

At the prompting of some questions regarding Linux from Maura, we discussed the benefits of open source software and the various types of Linux applications. We discussed how Free Geek's philosophy pertains to the use of open source software and why that is.

Randy brought up the idea of researching the digital divide we always talk about and suggested we find numbers to support our mission statement. Forrest discussed the use of surveys as a market research tool. The question of "How do we gauge the digital divide in Rhode Island?" was discussed and an idea Nathan brought up was to research what the big computer companies are showing as "typical household income" and using those figures as a benchmark.

It could be that persons with household incomes of less than a certain amount (statistics that we can find) might be people that wouldn't typically purchase computer equipment due to their financial situation (ie, people who's household income is less than the federal poverty level, etc).

Very good meeting, we had Fred and Maura join us for the first time this evening and both of them were invited to the site to participate.

Thanks.

NewBCamp Test Build 1.0 12/6

We arrived at Stenhouse Consulting's office space at 11:30 after gathering a few parts and pieces from our storage facility. David had a beautiful space setup on the second floor, lots of space, power, internet connections: everything we need to build and test computers on a small scale.

Attendees:

Nathan, David, John, Forrest, Kim, Renee, Jordan, Adam

Forrest was our teacher today and we discussed the curriculum and went through a hardware de-mystification module which explained all the parts of the motherboard, the various types of cards, etc and also explained how to test certain hardware through the BIOS. We discussed splitting this into two modules, hardware with no power and hardware with power.

Then we moved into the linux installation module, showing first the live mode and the actual install. We installed the latest version of Xubuntu that Randy created just for Free Geek Providence.

The whole meeting went well, everyone here learned something while putting together the curriculum with Forrest.

This was a very good first walk through.

- Nathan