6/30/14 Minutes: Beehive Collective, “Sexyfest”

6/30/14

In attendance: Ashley (moderator), Jackson (moderator), Sammi, Tati (secretary)
Start time: 7:00 PM

1. Event Review: Trekkies For Humanism was great! We easily hung out after the episode for a few hours, and the discussion was great. Might even do another as early as August, as it might be worth it to do one off-calendar. Looks like the crowd wants Enterprise next time!

2. Book: Ashley’s donating The Sustainable Kitchen to the library. Ze doesn’t ask for reimbursement. We approved its entry!

3. Beehive Collective: The Bees have moved their dates to between October 1st and the 5th to dodge Huskers Homecoming. It bumps up against the date we tentatively picked for SexyFest, but since it wasn’t a done deal we’ll just move SexyFest to a different date. Sammi offers to get the Bees a contact within UNL if they don’t have one yet.

4. SexyFest: We’ll reschedule it to October 11th! We talked about renaming it, though we haven’t yet decided on a particular name. Perhaps PosiFest? It might be important to give the event a subtitle of sorts. We also discussed emphasizing that sex positivity does not necessarily involve sex itself, and to include asexuality and sex-repulsion in the event.

5. Speakers: We decided we can offer stipends for speakers and set a separate treasury for it. We’ll wait to put any money directly from the treasury into it until we figure out the amount we’ll spend on the website, and once we have some money in it we’ll start formally advertising it.

6. “Difficult People”: We continued discussing “Activists and ‘Difficult People’” particularly the sections on sexual harassment and workplace bullying. Sexual harassment was pretty straightforward, though we’ll have to take things on a case-by-case basis, and workplace bullying didn’t really apply, though Jackson suggests reading follow-up material on general bullying and dealing with people with aggressive dominating personalities. Reading the next two sections by next week!http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/01san.html

Meeting adjourned: 8:30 PM
Tabled: Networking, Website, SexyFest, Speaker Stipend, Activists and “Difficult People”

6/23/14 Minutes: Beehive Collective, Website, Treasury

In attendance: Ashley (moderator), Jackson (secretary), Tati (moderator)
Start time: 7:00 PM

1. Event Review – LSH had a picnic for World Humanist Day. We had fun. It’ll have to be discussed further at the next LSH meeting.

2. Upcoming Events – Trekkies For Humanism is coming up on Friday. We’re ready for it.

3. Reimbursements/Treasury situation – Jackson wants reimbursements for buying a box of printer paper ($4.28), button parts ($64.29), and a button press ($124.00). All are approved by consensus. Jackson should also have the treasury updated tonight after the meeting, but he reports that the new balance will be approximately $300 after new donations are factored in.

4. Library treasury allocation – Ashley proposes adding up to $20 to the library treasury, since the whole treasury is currently earmarked for picking up The Skeptic’s Annotated Bible. Ashley has a friend holding a moving sale, and ze believes that hir friend will have many books and zines relevant to our library. We approved this by consensus.

5. Beehive Collective – They want to come to Lincoln the weekend of September 27-28. They would like to do a workshop in our space on one of those two days. We’d all love to have them, but we have a strong preference for doing it Sunday the 28th. Jackson points out that September 27th is a Husker Gameday, and UNL Homecoming to boot. The logistics of competing with that are a nightmare. We’ll wait and hear what they think about this and want to do. Ashley will contact them.

6. Website – Jackson is starting to get word from our host that our site is within a couple months of expiring. As per our desires when we renewed last year, Ella will be working to convert our site into WordPress and transfer it to her server. We discussed offering payment for this service. We will be looking forward to further updates on this important issue.

7. Activists and “Difficult People” – We spent the last part of our meeting starting an article Ashley shared about dealing with personality conflicts and other outbursts in an activist setting. We’ll continue to discuss this over the next few weeks.

Meeting adjourned: 8:14 PM
Tabled: Activists and “Difficult People”, Beehive Collective, Networking, Sexyfest, Speakers, Website

6/16/14 Minutes: Buttons, Occupy Play

6/16/14
In attendance: Ashley (secretary), Jackson (moderator), Tati (moderator)
Time started: 7:00

Event review: The event on Saturday went fairly well. The turnout was a little low, but that might have been because we couldn’t plug into the students. We might do this again during a time when more people would be interested. Ashley suggests that it might be a good idea to work with the student humanist group at UNL if we want to do it again.

Upcoming events: the picnic is this weekend. We’re probably going to buy meat to grill, and maybe drinks as well. We’ll probably bring blankets as well. More promotion needs to be done for the event, we’ll all work on that this week.

Buttons: Ashley finished the button designs, ze will do a test print and then send them off to Jackson. Ashley suggests we just print one of each this round, so that way we can test them in the buttons and make sure everything looks good before investing a lot of money into it. Jackson has yet to buy the button parts, but he has a few ideas as far as the punch goes. Jackson will make the purchases this week.

Books: Ashley received a few books to donate to the library, and Tati has some as well. We go through and approve most of them.

CD Library: Last week, Chris recommended that we start keeping CD’s in the library. He has some CD’s he’d be willing to donate. We all approve of the idea.

Occupy Play: A guest brought us a 1-scene play draft about the occupy movement. He’s looking for someone who was involved with the occupy movement to take the themes of the scene and reinterpret it (rewrite it, write a poem, make artwork), so they can publish it in a book. We know a few people who might be interested, and if none of them want to we can put it up on the occupy Lincoln page.

Tyranny of Tyranny: We didn’t identify with this article nearly as much; it seemed really reactionary, and was poorly edited so it was difficult to understand at points. The parts we found valuable was the discussion about the inefficiency of larger organization, and the issues of burnout. The other parts we agreed with, like that education and consciousness raising will never end, but those were parts we already discussed with the last article.

Disruptive Guests: Ashley found an article entitled “Activists and ‘difficult people'”, we agree to read it for the next few weeks. For next week, we’ll read the intro an “The Gentle Art of Verbal Self Defense” http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/01san.html

Adjourned: 7:53

Tabled: Button parts, networking, sexyfest, speakers, “activists and ‘difficult people’

6/9/2014 Minutes: Speakers, Sexyfest, Buttons

6/9/14

In attendance: Ashley (moderator), Chris, Ella, Jackson (moderator), Sammi, Tati (secretary)
Start time: 7:00 PM

1. Event review – Behind the Badge was a great show! Unfortunately it was a Wednesday, and that might have contributed to a lower turnout, but everyone who was there had a good time and learned a lot. Sammi suggested that we try asking critical questions via Facebook or similar sources, to get people thinking about the topic before hand and inciting them to come to the events.

2. Upcoming events – LSH meeting is coming up, as well as What is… Secular Humanism. Ashley needs to make more cupcakes! Jackson and Ashley will also make sure their presentation gets set up nicely on our new projector.

3. Reimbursement – Jackson bought a copy of I Am Troy Davis for $15 to help out the International Socialist Club, and a $4 stack of zines from Ben Turk, and we approved reimbursement for both.

4. SexyFest – We picked Saturday, October 4th as the date, as the other dates that were suggested fell on Husker game days, and we just didn’t want to compete with that traffic.

5. Buttons – Jackson thinks we have enough funds to buy button-making parts, so he’ll go ahead and get them. He also brought up the price of a button cutter, and we thought that it might be a little pricey to go for right away. Jackson will also look for the cheapest cutter while he’s researching for

6. Speakers – scott crow mentioned when he was here that if we offered stipends for speakers, people will contact us to hold talks here, as opposed to us asking people. However, to guarantee that we have enough money to provide to speakers, we’d have to do fundraisers outside our yearly one, and we’d like to still spend most of our energy on projects and events. Sammi suggests collaboration with other organizations on certain speakers in order to split costs between us. Ella brings up cutting costs in the House, finding ways to reduce printing costs, etc., or offering zines and buttons for suggested donations. Jackson thinks that just having a fund for speakers can be a selling point, that saying donations will be guaranteed to go to bringing speakers into the House might encourage people to donate for it.

7. Tyranny of Tyranny – We read an article a few meetings back called “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” and the discussion was really good! We talked for about an hour about what we learned from it and how this info can help the collective. We decided we also wanted to read “The Tyranny of Tyranny,” which is a critical response to the first essay, since we liked the first so much.

8. Handbill – Ella brought the summer calender handbill to edit, we checked it over for errors and called it good!

Meeting adjourned: 7:50 PM

Tabled: Button designs, networking, event moderation training

6/2/14 Minutes: Venue Rules (Concerts), Ben Turk, Paying Speakers?

In attendance: Ashley (moderator), Jackson (secretary), Tati (moderator)
Start time: 7:00 PM

1. Event review – scott crow was here on Thursday. He had a great presentation, and we had a good turnout here to hear him. He suggested that we could get more touring speakers in here if we offered to pay a stipend, and we talked more about the possibilities in doing that. Ashley suggests that we could possibly spin off a section of the treasury exclusively for guests. The discussion was tabled.

2. Upcoming events – Ben Turk is coming in on Wednesday. Ashley will email him to see if he needs any further preparations or accommodations from us.

3. Venue rules – We are amending #7 (regarding concerts) to read:

“We are able to do musical concerts on a case-by-case basis. The show must be acoustic, and the lyrics must be in line with the politics of the house.”

This was passed by consensus.

4. Website tutorial – Ashley took some time to show us how ze maintains our website and Facebook presence.

Meeting adjourned: 7:47 PM

Tabled: Button designs, networking, event moderation training, Tyranny of Tyranny, sexyfest, Paying speakers?