February 13th, 2019 IRC Meeting

Decisions/Endorsements

Officer/Pirate Council Elections

We set the date for elections to close on 4/23. Need to decide when nominations have to be in by and when voting begins.

Last time we announced on March 16 that nominations were available until April 28th before our party conference for that year. Since we did not elect anyone at our party conference, on May 9th we announced that we would close nominations on May 23rd with ballots due a week later on the 30th. See thes blog posts. Here was our nomination form for that year.

Suggest:

• Nominations open when we announce and post the form (before 2/20).
• Nominations due by 4/8
• Ballots sent out by 4/12
• Ballot due by 4/23

Bills to make the Film Credit Permanent

The Boston Globe reported that there is an effort to make the film tax credit permanent. It should expire in January 2023. This effort has happened in the past 2013, 2017. The current house bill has 100+ signatures this time around. There isn't a hearing date for it yet, but suggest that we be active in opposing this bill.

Projects

Goals for Q1:

• Organize meetups
• Organize Fundraiser(s)
• Organize candidate trainings
• Revise platform

Tech/Outreach

• find discussion/voting system
• update blog theme
• update civicrm software
• set up torrents for PirateCon videos (creynolds)
• post remaining audio for PirateCon talks (srevilak)

Other To Dos

These have been on our agenda for a long time. How do we make them a reality?

Computer Donations

On hold - https://piratenpad.de/p/MassPiratesComputerDonations

FOSS Tutorials

Worcester farm group is interested in having some FOSS tutorials. Perhaps:

• how to do basic labels in GIMP,
• work through a few sample spreadsheets related to seed cost and
• similarly applicable real-world situations, depending on the needs of the group

Basically how to do graph design & product management with open source tools. Malt will put together a one paragraph description of what we need and we can mail it out to ask pirates to help.

Upcoming Events

• 2/19, 7-9pm, Mass MeshNet Tech Meeting, Industry Lab, 288 Norfolk St, Cambridge
• 2/26, 7-9pm, Mass MeshNet Tech Meeting, Industry Lab, 288 Norfolk St, Cambridge
• early March?, morning, Boston-area Pirate Meetup, Boston
• late March?, Lowell-area Pirate Meetup, Lowell
• early April?, Worcester-area Pirate Meetup, Worcester

Participants

Observers

• ChanServ
• hvxgr_
• davidd
• Mikaela_Suomalainen
• bonelesspepsi[m]
• igel[m]