FreeGeek Chicago held a public meeting on March 13th. These notes were taken by Jim Campbell, and edited for content and style by David Eads.

In attendance were Jim Campbell, David Eads, Jim Craner, Steve Mohr, Flor "Steve" Ramos, Myron Nash, Mike McCune, Jim (from Park Ridge), and Taylor Hales.

Recycling

We discussed the need do another round of recycling waste items (i.e. bad or unuseable computers, monitors, drives, etc.), as many of these items are starting to pile up.

• Main hurdle in this scenario is that we can't aggregate stuff to take to free city recycling because we'd need a special permit to do it.
• We could take in 5 or so monitors at a time without any problems (i.e., no need for a permit).
• David says we have the money to rent a truck, so we have that as an option, but we think we could borrow a car/truck/van from friends of FreeGeek.
• We need to schedule regular times to clean and recycle.
• Someone mentioned using the first saturday of a month for taking items in cars/trucks to th recycling center.

Closing To Conduct Cleanup and Reorganization of Workspace

Dave noted that we need to reorganize the facilities because work areas are getting too cluttered up, and we think we could better utilize our space with a different layout of our inventory. We also discussed a few things we could do to help keep the facility organized.

• We plan to be closed for all of april for a spring cleanup/reorg.
• After some discussion, we decided to not allow work-for-computer volunteers in the center at all during cleanup hours, but would still accept computer donations.
• Volunteer hours (which are normally applied toward earning a computer) would not be tallied for workers during these cleanup sessions, and cleanup help would be done on a true volunteer basis only.
• In regards to where we will place our computer stock, testing stations, and breakdown stations, one concern is that there's less power "on the other side of the fence" of in our work area.
• As a way to regularly maintain facility cleanliness, someone mentioned closing at 5:00 on Sundays, but starting clean up at 4:30.
• We need to get word out about the April closure ASAP, but did not mention how we would do this.
• Specifics related to where to move our stock and testing/tear-down/build stations have been tabled until our first closed date, or a meeting just prior.

Being Open During Weekday Hours

We're looking to add some weekday hours to increase business, and to help maintain cleanliness of our facility.

• Friday was determined to be the best additional day to be open, based primarily on convenience for staff volunteers.
• Possible volunteers for friday include Santiago, Steve, Dave, and Taylor.
• We proposed being open from 2-6 or 2-7 on friday afternoon/evening.
• We need to make sure that someone with a key would be available to open the facility.
• Jim Craner, Dave , Taylor, and Steve Mohr have keys

Governance

We discussed governance as a way to ensure continuity of the group, and to bring us another step closer to 501(c)3 status. Dave covered the mission items as required by FreeGeek Portland. FreeGeek Portland has board and a council, based on a consensus model, where one can only veto once.

We discussed how we might apply these items to our group

Discussed 501(c)3 status requirements, but did not cover all of them in explicit detail:

• Board insurance and liability insurance were mentioned.
• Spatial changes may impact liability insurance, so we'd want to keep those in mind during our reorganization.
• We don't need to totally mirror the structure of Free Geek Portland, as long as we have structure that follows their guidlines.

Computer/donation Stream

We currently don't have a steady/sustainable donation stream, and are presently low on computers. We discussed means to improve this situation.

• Part of the problem is community awareness. How can we improve this?
• Flyers: Dave can prepare. Santiago can likely assist with translating the flyers into Spanish and/or making them bilingual.
• Develop collateral for local businesses (need 501(c)3 status or fiscal agent before we do this if we want to make the collateral pieces very effective.)
• New Website
• Search engine optimization is lacking on present site: A search for "computer recycling chicago." doesn't bring up FreeGeek Chicago.
• Intake - getting mass donations
• Use Experimental Station as our fiscal agent (http://www.experimentalstation.org) for the time being.
• Picking up computers from people's homes and the like was discussed, but this is presently not possible. Many of us don't have cars, and we don't want to spend our FreeGeek volunteer time driving around the city.

We discussed "What can we do about our computer stream now . . . " Who will do the work to get our name out?

• Action subgroups were mentioned, and we should follow-up on this, as we have more regular volunteers who are participating now.
• Flyer, we need to get it ready, and also translate it; taken up by Dave
• Need to launch new website; taken by Dave and Steve
• Flourish, UIC open source conference; taken by Taylor
• Jim Campbell mentioned Linux and general computer-oriented groups and user groups (MySQL user group, Python user group, etc.) that are in Chicago, and doing an outreach to them.
• Etrade/financial service organizations - Mike said that many trading organizations get new computers every two years, so we should check them out as a source of used computers.
• Colleges - IIT, COD, other colleges were mentioned.
• Smaller businesses
• How are we going to actually do the outreach?
• Fridays will be good to get that going - we'll have two hours of that administrative stuff, but we need 501c3 status or a fiscal agent to really make this workable.

Funding opportunities

We discussed recent help we've received from a volunteer, Tony Cox.

He wants us to serve several south side churches; we think there are approximately 16 churchs, and we figure about 2-3 computers per church.

In exchange, Mr. Cox wants to help FreeGeek with city funding opportunities.

We discussed the need to actually figure the needs of the churches, so that we can see if we can meet their demands.

Jim Craner mentioned that the process of donating computers to the churches potentially goes outside of our established procedures - Dave thought that we should proceed but use established FreeGeek procedures for getting the computers to these churches.

Tony has discussed several items with Taylor, including several possible grant opportunities. We would like to explore these options further, so after some discussion, we agreed to meet with Tony as a group and discuss our plans with him collectively.

The meeting was ajourned at 8:45pm, but Dave and Steve Mohr stuck around to cover some mailing list and website issues.

Final follow-up items

• Get explicit 501c3 requirements
• Check with "Experimental Station" about using them as our fiscal agent.
• Schedule regular recycling dates and procedures (must do recycling in small batches bc we don't have the appropriate permit to do mass recycling).
• Formally communicate plans for April closure/cleanup to community groups.
• Schedule Friday hours, and set staffing for Fridays to ensure we can be open on those dates.
• Develop flyers for Free Geek Chicago. (edit: Perhaps take pictures during / after closure/cleanup?)
• Connect with Chicago-area groups that can assist us and provide better computer streams.
• Connect with "Flourish" group at UIC to get a booth at their FOSS conference.
• Schedule meeting with Tony Cox.