3:30 - Meeting comes to order. Present are Troy, Rebecca, Tunna, Joshua, Danielle. Lee phones in at 3:51 PM. Also attending are Clove and Lovelace. Lee arrives at 4:21.

Troy gives town hall meeting wrap-up:

23 people attended. Rebecca and Troy elected to 2-year seats. Tunna, Joshua, and Lee elected to 1-year seats. Everyone agreed that co-op ownership model was desirable.

Bylaws:

No hard discussion right now. Board to continue to review, when we have it at a point where we like it, put it out to the community to review. Troy points out that doing it shortly after end of fiscal year might be desirable. Target of putting bylaws together before end of fiscal year (March 31).

Resolved: Board to finish reviewing bylaws by Feb. 14th board meeting.

Action items for next year:

Brainstorm online to get requests for action items for next year. Some of this will come from Afterburn reports. Not desirable to do this face-to-face in the meeting.

Troy: The roles he's playing. Business Manager of the event and Event Lead. Suggests formalizing the business manager role going forward, especially if we move to a co-op model. Is business manager the same role as treasurer? Probably so. What this is really about is a formalization of the structure of the event. Tunna asks at what point do we need a dedicated outside accountant. Troy says probably not this year, but maybe next year?

Resolved: To open a bank account for the organization, with two signatures required for every check. To do before opening of ticket sales.

Resolved: To work out online, etc... a more formal description of what role the Treasurer and/or Business Manager would play and what responsibilities and powers they would have. To discuss at next board meeting

Danielle suggests and all agree that we need to work out the details of the co-op model first.

Team Descriptions for this year:

Are there any teams that we want to add or subtract based on our experience from this year? Danielle thinks that the scope of the media team was too large. Tunna asks about separating on-site signage from pre-event communication. Tunna suggests that APW be the ones to take on on-site signage.

Troy: really need to find someone who is excited to be managing the web site etc... Troy and Lee suggest putting Conexus as its own team. Rebecca suggests nixing Volunteer team and putting any of those responsibilities that we want to keep under a Conexus team. Did Volunteer team add value to team leads? No slight on the Volunteer team lead, but not really. It basically amounted to tracking the spreadsheet, but volunteers really seeme to contact the team leads directly. Volunteer team was originally for team leads who weren't interested in finding their own volunteers.

Troy: Team leads aren't building teams where they're sharing effort. At team lead meetings, some team leads didn't show and didn't have anybody else on their team they could send. So was it really a team if the team lead was the only one who could fill that role? Danielle: Training for how to recruit, or a section of the wiki? Troy: team leads really need to be building a team where the team lead is not a single point of responsibility for the team. Challenge is getting people involved and developing relationships with members of the team so that we can know what people are capable of and can rely on them.

Discussions about team lead meetings: were there too many or not enough? No single meeting had all teams represented. What about splitting team lead meetings out into sectionals where groups of related teams focus on their issues?

Troy: Alchemy mixers at regional burns in order to expand community.

Troy: There is work that we could be doing all year long, such as permanent signage. Danielle: Quarterly work weekends? Giving people an excuse to get out of their houses and congregate. Also gives us opportunity to hold formal or informal town hall meetings.

Resolved: Nix volunteer team. Create Conexus team lead that incorporates at least some of the volunteer team lead. Conexus also to do on-site calendar. Pre-event no volunteer team lead, but try to do some personal development with team leads on how to recruit.

Troy: Media team renamed to Internet team and let them focus just on the web site, online calendar, survival guide, and the newsletter. Board to remain source of PR. All approved.

Invites and tickets used to be under Media team. Troy requests to think about that a little bit.

Resolved: Table the invite and ticket question to discuss online.

Resolved: All vote to table the description of what exactly Conexus team is.

Go through all teams considering roles and thinking about what we want to keep and what we want to change. This drifted a little bit into specific discussions of how to word the team description, which I have documented here, but we eventually pulled it back onto the topic of adding or removing responsibilities from the team.

Art team: Troy suggests that interacting with artists and running the fundraiser are two different skills. They can be the same team, but it should be recognized that they're separate. Rebecca asks Clove for input, to see if the fundraiser should be under art team or not. Clove says definitely yes.

Conclave: Troy suggests redefining as a more general Fire Performance coordination. All agree to table after very much discussion, not noted here.

Fire Safety: Add responsibility to description for coordinating with local authorities--fire safety plan, etc...

Greeters and Gate: Split gate and greeters? Lee, Troy, Danielle think it's a bad idea. At some point, probably split, but not now.

Lamplighters: Fine as is. Question: whose responsibility for transport of poles etc...

LNT: Already decided we are going to work on that.

Media: Previously Discussed.

First Aid: Fine as is.

Mobile Art: Question about breaking out parking and traffic flow with Art Cars, but probably fine as is.

Music: Tunna thinks DJs can coordinate themselves. Lee thinks DJs will kill each other if required to coordinate themselves. Rebecca spoke with Justin and he doesn't think the DJ tent is working out well. Recommends speaking with Justin before we kill the team. What about conclave music and night-time music on the hill? Troy: Conclave music can be a one-off. No need for a tent. We may not need music team if we have sufficient sound camps. Revisit discussion online.

Rangers: Fine as is.

DPW/APW: Tunna and Lee have some ideas for how to break up the team, but unknown whether that should be three separate teams or just sub-divisions under a single team lead. Discussion of integrating LNT with APW. Lee: Two parts of LNT. Education pre-event, and cleanup at the event. Cleanup has a lot of overlap wit APW with the event at this size, but that probably won't stay true forever and we should probably leave it alone.

Theme Camp / Site Layout: Tunna proposes just doing first come first serve. Joshua points out that won't work for e.g. sound camps on top of the hill creating sound complaints for the whole event.

Danielle: COCK? All abstain.

Volunteer party recap. Rebecca: let's not do that again. Volunteers should do what they want, not because they expect a reward. Rebecca has already started to see some sentiment where people start to expect some kind of payback, and she doesn't want to encourage it. In a way, it cheapens the volunteers' contributions to give them a keg of beer or a sub sandwich by way of saying thanks. Lee: It was so far from the event that it was kind of disconnected from the contribution. Also it was fucking cold and people didn't really come out.

Resolved: Not to do another volunteer appreciation party and to re-think how best to express appreciation of volunteers.

Time Frames and Timelines:

What things do we need to set timelines for? Art Fundraiser. Inventory and go through the storage locker (spring or when it's warmer). Need to spend our remaining approx. $4500 before March 31.

Resolved: We want to do the art fundraiser again.

Danielle: Quarterly work weekends?

Resolved: Ticketing to open April 1. Tiers and prices to be same as last year.

Lee is going to summarize the financial reports into something a lay person can read.

Troy to update the Afterburn reports to reflect Chandler's death.

Danielle's concerns about Joshua's emails:

Joshua responded to the musician who emailed about our festival and Dereck request for help for Chandler's family. Danielle wants to establish protocol for responding to inquiries. Troy: There is probably value in the community having some expectations about how quickly the board will respond to their inquiry, or at least for us to set goals for ourselves. Lee: The problem with the response to Derick's email was that it didn't go through the rest of the board. Rebecca: It was just saying that we would discuss it at the board meeting. Troy: Anybody can decide to add something to the agenda, and that is what Dereck was doing. Lee: Then let's make that a form letter and not a one-off every time. No room for personal dialogueingeingeingeing (sp?).

Action Item: Review the form letter that people get when they email the board and revise it per guidelines that will let us all feel comfortable that people who email us have the right message.

Resolved: To all set ourselves up with board@alchemyfestival.com on our Gmail so that we can reply to people with board as the reply-to address.

Resolved: We only want to use our subscriber list (which is not opt-out) for information directly related to the event. We can put a link to the paypal donation in the newsletter and we can put Dereck in touch with Dennis so they can coordinate if they want.

Items for post-burn newsletter: Link to afterburn reports and brief blurb about the event. Layman's financial from Lee. List of dates for stuff currently going on. Work weekend date. Ticket sales, dates for '09. Town hall meeting blurb. Blurb about the new board. Where to get minutes. Blurb about chandler and the incident and how to contact the people working with them.

Action Item: Troy to compose email response to Dereck letting him know what we're going to do.

Steven Raspa's requests for information from us:

Troy: What value is Steven going to provide by us providing this info, other than creating a time capsule, which we have already done? Danielle: Steven maybe wants to consult with BM's lawyer and other BM pros who have experience in areas related to deaths. Tunna: Want to keep that stuff close to the chest. Danielle: What's the hesitation? Lee: Want to keep control over the info, not having it going around willy-nilly. Rebecca: What are they going to offer us now that he's dead that wasn't available when the incident happened. Why the attention now? If they're just trying to cover their asses, they should say so. Troy: Let's separate our concern over the request from our disappointment over the way the communication has been handled until now. Think it's reasonable to give BM the police report, Joshua's write-up, insurance papers. Danielle: Their interest has been there since the beginning, but she stopped pressing in response to the emotional reaction she got from the board right when the incident had just happened. Rebecca: Concerned about this information getting out much wider than it has previously been shared. Joshua: Police report is fundamentally public record and we should treat it as such.

Rebecca, Lee, and Joshua (at least) both express reservations about forwarding our internal write-ups outside of the Alchemy organization. Our "time capsule" docs were written as a brain-dump for us, not for public consumption.

Troy: Three docs I'd be willing to send. Event report from Try Me! Insurance docs. Police report. And Afterburn report, of course. Would want to secure an agreement of confidentiality on the internal reports. Rebecca: If there is anything in the docs that could be used against us in court, we need to not send them on, because shit happens and stuff gets out.

Move to vote on what to give up, but Rebecca abstains because she can't say yes but she doesn't know why she wants to say no. We all agree to table the decision until Rebecca can figure out what's going on. Lee: Abstention is really not an option for this decision, so we need to just wait until everybody can come to a yes or a no. All agree.

Vision statement: Move to table. All agree.

Move to table all other agenda items. All agree.

Meeting closed at 7 PM.