Category: Meetings

Annual Meeting Oct 3 @1pm

Posted on by oldpostholder in Events and meetups, general, Meetings, Membership, Posts

Annual Membership Meeting On ZOOM: Saturday, October 3

We’ve scheduled our annual meeting for Saturday 10/3, starting at 1:00pm .

To keep everyone safe we will be holding the meeting and election remotely. You be able to attend the annual meeting via Zoom, look for more meeting information to come.

We’ll go over the previous year’s financial s and major happenings, and talk about future plans. We’ll also be voting for two Governing Board seats that are up for reelection this year. There will be more information coming out as we get closer to the meeting date.

Which brings up a couple of sub-points:

Nominations for board positions are open

Have a member you think would be an excellent leader for out organization and want to nominate for the Twin Cities Maker 2020 Election? Please do email nominations@tcmaker.org.

Eligibility Requirements: Any member in good standing and 18 years of age or older may be nominated to the Board.

The board terms are for 3 years and will expire in 2023.
Please review the Board Position and Expectations and Code of Conduct before making a nomination.
https://wiki.tcmaker.org/about_us/org_chart/duties/board
go.tcmaker.org/conduct

Want to know what a board meeting is like? All of our meetings are open to members! The next board meeting is Tuesday 9/8, starting at 6pm here: go.tcmaker.org/boardmeeting .

The meeting agenda is also open

Got something you’d like to discuss at the Annual Meeting? Let the Board board@tcmaker.org know that too! We need to get the agenda at least mostly set by Friday 9/25, so please submit your items before then. There will still be the chance to bring things up at the meeting, but 9/25 is the last day we can get it onto the agenda that will be sent to all members. (Why do we send it out to all members? We want members to be involved and state law says we have to!)

Want to get Involved another way? We have open shop positions that need Leaders to fill them.

These positions are an excellent way to make a positive impact on the Twin City Maker community, the lives of others in it, and those who are touched by it’s impact.

Shop General Manager

Facilities Manager

Logistics Coordinator

Robotics Team Coordinator

Marketing Team Volunteers

Position details and responsibilities can be found on our wiki here: https://wiki.tcmaker.org/about_us/org_chart/start

 

 

Prop Party Saturday, November 16

Posted on by oldpostholder in Events and meetups, Meetings, Uncategorized

Join local members of The Replica Prop Forum for a party, with props!

Do you have an interest in building props for cosplay or your own collection? Come in and meet some local prop builders, learn some techniques, find some sources.  This event is open to all prop builders, collectors, prop curious, costumers and cosplayers.

TC Maker Members drop in whenever you want, otherwise please register on through our class registration system.  See you then!

https://tcmaker.org/classes/class/?event_id=78400466907

2019 Member Meeting official notice

Posted on by oldpostholder in Meetings

Download the meeting information packet:

https://wiki.tcmaker.org/_media/governance/2019membermeetingpacket.pdf

Annual Member Meeting

When: Saturday, September 21, 2019 at Noon
Where: The Hack Factory, 3119 E 26th St, Minneapolis, MN 55406 

All members of Twin Cities Maker are invited and encouraged to attend our annual membership meeting. We need a minimum of approximately 30 people to reach quorum, so your attendance is important. This is your opportunity to talk about organizational and shop issues that are important to you. The meeting will probably be wrapped up by 2pm, if not earlier.

Current items on the agenda include:

Recap: We’ll have a brief review of the past year of the organization, and discuss what we’d like to see for the coming year.

Dues: Our rent was raised this year. We’re going to talk about raising membership dues and would like to hear your thoughts and questions.

Payment processing: Twin Cities Maker currently offers nearly unlimited ways to pay your dues. We want to talk about possibly changing some of this to better serve the membership and organization as a whole. Limiting payment methods may come to a vote by the membership at this meeting, so you might want to attend.

Board Elections

Two board members will be elected to serve three-year terms on the board of directors. We will be voting for individuals to fill those positions at the meeting. Download the information packet (linked both above and below) to read profiles of the candidates. Members in good standing (i.e. your dues paid up) as of Saturday 9/21/2019 are eligible to vote.

If you can’t make it to the meeting…

…you can still cast your vote! You can mail in your ballot, or you can grant proxy voting rights to another member. Forms for both options, along with instructions, are in the information packet.

10th Anniversary Shindig

Twin Cities Maker is officially celebrating its 10-Year Anniversary! So, we’re throwing ourselves an anniversary party following the annual meeting. We’re planning to have food, drinks, and live music. Other activities may include a show-and-tell for all your awesome projects, robot demos, and an amateur radio event.

Invite your family and friends! The party starts at 2pm and goes until we’re all too exhausted to continue.

Download the meeting information packet:

https://wiki.tcmaker.org/_media/governance/2019membermeetingpacket.pdf

First “Hardcore Hacknight”

Posted on by oldpostholder in Events and meetups, Hacking, Meetings

Hack Factory hosted its first Hardcore Hacknight on March 22nd. This is a recurring event for software developers to mingle, share their projects, and collaborate. We had a packed room, definitely more than thirty people. The event brings an increased software presence to the space to complement Hack Factory’s abundance of physical wood/metal/electronics projects.

a full room
Part of the room at the first meeting of the hardcore hacknight

What We Worked On

The general format for the event is to get a group of interesting programmers together for pizza, beer, and pair programming. After eating and chatting, we go around the room and each person says briefly what they’re interested in working on, or things they want to learn.

There were lots of cool projects. We had Eric talking about generating Erlang from Idris, Ioannis showing some cool C-based X11/graphics demos, and Dave busting out a development environment totally inside a smartphone and doing M4 text processing. The room was full of conversations and lore about everything from BSDs to embedded devices.

coding on a smartphone
World’s smallest development machine

Team Rust commandeered a whole table. Boyd was going deep into writing algorithms in Rust without using any standard library functions, as low level as you can go.

rustlang strike force
“Team Rust.” People kept joining this table throughout the night.

There were quite a few people who either knew or wanted to learn about Haskell and functional programming. Darren was leading a table on some game design and I think doing it in Elm. Then there is Scott who has many years of experience with Common Lisp (even Maclisp, straight out of MIT), Racket, and Clojure.

We also had people exploring new computer interfaces, like Craig who does a cross between C++ development and fine arts. Or David who likes making music and has a project that maps syscalls into a complex chorus of sounds so you can hear your computer’s processing.

Ian and some conspirators were building a neural network from scratch, and struggling with the intracacies of backpropagation. And speaking of networks, Neil was distributing tasks between machines with ZeroMQ, experimenting with the ventillator pattern.

In addition to all the above, let’s not forget the intrepid beginners who showed up. As Alex, a code bootcamp student joked, “I’m understanding only about one out of every ten terms I’m hearing tonight, and it’s awesome!”

Join the Next Meeting

Our second meeting will be Thursday, April 26th at 6:00. If you’d like to attend please RSVP at the meetup page. The event is free, but we do ask attendees to bring a few bucks to chip in for food.

Twin Cities Maker 2017 Member Meeting

Posted on by oldpostholder in Events and meetups, Meetings

Twin Cities Maker will hold its annual Member Meeting on Saturday, September 23, 2017 at 2:00PM, at our offices at 3119 E 26th Street, Minneapolis, MN 55406.

The agenda of the meeting is as follows:

  • A report on the financial condition and activities of Twin Cities Maker.
  • Election of 2 Board Members to replace Board Members whose terms of office are expiring.
  • A Q&A period for members to ask questions or bring up any suggestions or motions they may have.
  • Act on any other matters that may properly come before the meeting.

The meeting will start at 2:00 PM. Afterwards we’ll pull out the grill and feed everyone!

Members in good standing of record on the books of the Corporation up to the close of the meeting on 9/23/2017 will be entitled vote at the meeting or any adjournment thereof. Member in good standing, for purposes of the annual meeting, means a Member who is current on payment of monthly membership dues.

You may vote for Governing Board candidates in person, or via email or physical mail. Information about the current candidates and an official ballot are contained in the Member Meeting information packet linked here. Instructions for submitting a ballot are included in the packet. Votes must be received by the start of the Member Meeting, 2PM on Saturday 9/23.

You may also assign proxy voting rights to another member in good standing who will be attending the meeting. Please complete the Proxy Voting Form contained in the info packet, and send it to Twin Cities Maker via email, postal mail, or in person. Members who attend the meeting may revoke their proxy and vote in person if they so desire.

The governing board would like to thank each and every one of you for being a member and supporting Twin Cities Maker. The making, sharing, and learning could not happen without you!

Scott Hill, Vice President
for the Twin Cities Maker Governing Board

CNC Interest Group meet-up

Posted on by oldpostholder in Classes, cnc, Meetings

The CNC Interest Group meet-up will happen again this Sunday 6/21/2015 2:00 PM at the Hack Factory. It is open to everyone, but machine use requires membership. If you have been wanting to get a project cut on a CNC or get checked out on the CNC machines, this is where you want to be to get the process started. Hope to see a good group of folks Sunday.

Pete

Shake-mold-finishing

SPRING CLEANING (Quarterly Cleanup)

Posted on by oldpostholder in general, Meetings, Membership, Uncategorized

As a reminder, quarterly clean-up is happening this Saturday, March 28, 2015 from 10AM to 6PM. THE SHOP WILL BE CLOSED.

We are going to take the momentum we started with metal shop love day and start running with it.

During Quarterly Clean-up we are going to be doing some massive purging and hitting up storage (and items that are inappropriately stored in the rest of the shop) really hard. This is just like spring cleaning your house. It is an opportunity for us to get any defunct projects, non-project items, and other junk out of the shop. We need to get rid of clutter in order to have the space that is needed for a functioning shop.

IF YOU HAVE ITEMS STORED AT THE SHOP THIS APPLIES TO YOU:
1) If the items are not an ACTIVE PROJECT, then it needs to go home.

2) Anything you keep at the shop must be PROPERLY LABELED and PROPERLY STORED IN THE PROJECT STORAGE AREA unless you explicitly have permission from shop management to store the item elsewhere. It must still be properly labeled.

3) Any non-project or out of date items found anywhere in the shop, will be disposed of (tossed in the dumpster). We are not a storage facility. You are not renting space to store your personal items, materials for “someday” projects, or “cool things you once made”.

As a reminder, the list above essentially constitutes our general storage policy. The policy in its entirety is found here.

June 26th, 7pm – Annual Members Meeting!

Posted on by oldpostholder in general, Meetings, Membership

Hey folks! Just wanted to give an update to the community about our annual meeting on June 26th!  FYI- the picture below is hundreds of people watching Riley Harrison launch balloons at Northern Spark!  What a great turnout!

IMG_4069

Acting President (David Bryan) here giving you an update!  We are having our annual member meeting on June 26th 2013!  If you are paid up on your dues, you are eligible to vote!  If you want to come in a see how this runs, this meeting is open to anyone, but topics for the meeting can only be brought forward and voted on by current members.

This year there are two board positions that are up for election.  The way our board and governance works, is that the members elect the board members, and the board elects the officers (Pres, VP, Etc).  This year our current president and secretary board seats are up for election.

Bob Poate, who is acting sectary, his board seat is up for election.  Unfortunately, he will not be running for a board seat this year, but he has been an asset for the organization and the board.  You don’t realize how important this position is, as often times it’s taken for granted and can be overlooked.  This is how we communicate with our members about goings on in our board meetings.  I personally want to thank Bob for all the hours of meetings, and times that he has spent helping us by gathering and publishing our meeting minutes and notes!  A big Thank You to Bob!

David Bryan’s board seat is up for election, and he will be re-running for a board seat.  Whether or not the board re-elects him as president is another story, however I would urge you to let a board member know your opinion, and vote in the election how you see fit.

Scott Hill will be posting a compete listing of candidates, and a Bio/Descriptions/Qualifications shortly to the TC Maker Wiki.