Annoucing: Monthly Member Meetings

[Larry Works]

At last nights Board meeting, we decided having a regular monthly Member meeting is a good way to hash out ideas where everyone gets to have their say in a less formal manner.

The first meeting is going to be Sunday, August 23rd from 2pm-?

Suggested topics/activities:
- Finish Waynestock
- Design and build a Retro Compute Pod
- Build a Bounty Board (prizes for doing good stuff)
- Tool learning and maintenance
- Should we stay here or go elsewhere?

Lots of fun stuff!

This moving queation will likely spin off as a separate effort so the Board of Directors gets a solid plan to ask members to vote on before our lease is up next May.

Re. AHA'S future.  Last night I mentioned a third option to moving and that was closing.  Stated just so folks know that an end state can either be planned or unplanned.  But to my mind, failure of
AHA is not front and center since our work is far from done.

I prefer to think of AHA'S future as "Should we stay or should we grow.".

Too often we've taken the path of least resistence.  Simply because it was easy and didn't require much effort.  Members would rather work on projects they can see and touch.

I hope enough people will gather to outline what our future should look like.  After that we can address the question of "where" AHA can best evolve.

Always subject to change, having a strategic plan to strive toward usually ends up with a better result.  IF we allow the communities resources to organically evolve (ie  do little or bi planni g) I think the natural result will be a slow demise.  And that would be a crying shame.

From a fundraising perspective, the larger grants have much stiffer requirements before providing funds.  Including: What's your plan?  How will you get there?  Where does the funding go?

Therefore, with where we are now, smaller grants are the way to go.

Cheers
Larry

[Larry Works]

Just a reminder that AHA will be kicking off Monthly Membership meetings on Sunday.

There's plenty to do and/or talk about.  Suggested topics/activities:

- Finish Waynestock
- Design and build a Retro Compute Pod
- Build a Bounty Board (prizes for doing good stuff) 
- Tool learning and maintenance
- Should we stay here or go elsewhere?

For those interested in helping decide AHA's future accomodations (here or elsewhere) a discussion of what we see AHA becoming in the next 5 years would be a good place to start.  I'll be out of town but look forward to hearing about what happens.

Cheers.

Larry

PS.  btw - starting in Sept., we need another volunteer to take on the teaching of Saturday classes for Soldering and Arduino.  Let me know if you're interested and I'll bring you up to speed.  Thanks.