20160818 Board meeting

Agenda of the Board Meeting

Date: Thursday, August 18th, 19.30-20.30pm
Place: UniverCité

Composition

Chair

• Luc as president

Present

• Sam
• Gianpaolo

Excused

• Vanessa
• Anne-Laure
• Yann P

Items

Welcome address

(Luc, 2 min)

Point 0: public minutes

(Luc, 1 min)

Get ok from all board members to upload minutes on wiki (or else discuss alternative below)

Objections? No

Point 1: Project Updates

It is important that every board member stays up to date with all main projects. Add link when relevant.

UniverCité Community meeting

Update from Luc (5 min)

A UCC meeting took place on Tuesday August 16th at UniverCité. Minutes will be linked here when accessible. At last board meeting, issues with UC communication and security were being raised. Etc.

Ask UC for task list of Juliette and future help/coworkers

P1 implementation

Update from Yann P. (5min) Yann P:

• UC should obtain the final plans for the level by next Tuesday. Based on this we will finalize the plan for the wall and the interior. As soon as this is done we show them to Benoit and will try to obtain part of the missing material through him. When this is settled, we will show these plans to Jean-Pierre which will set the walls as soon as he can.
• Got the confirmation for the course. Will be doing it on Sept 9 normally with Sashiko.
• Worked a bit on a storage system for normalizing all the notations and keep the data intact.
• My lab LIP want to see with Luc P for an online "biology" cheminfo (i.e. tools to maintain database of chemical up to date) I will talk with him to see how I can get involved in the frame of both LIP and Hackuarium

We still need Fridge, freezer, rotative incubator (which can cool), check the map proposition below

BeerDeCoded

Update from Gianpaolo (5min)
New results change our focus from wetlab to bioinformatics. More orally. In an upcoming Cell paper, the Kevin Verstrepen lab will report the genomes of 150 yeast strains used to make beer, sake and other fermented products, a project done in collaboration with a leading supplier of yeast to brewers and a synthetic-biology firm. Full interview on Nature

Living Instruments

Update from Luc (5min)

• Living Instruments was in Darmstadt on August 14th with We Spoke.

Octanis

Update from Sam (5min)

• Raspberry Pi Workshop
  • Boost advertisement
  • Help wanted for lunch, drinks

(Volunteer Ana)

• La Petite Epicerie
  • Think of items to add, especially lab consumables
  • Hang a catalogue (copy on the wiki) with location in storage
  • Fridge with glass door

Point 1.x: Accountability

Update from Sam (5min)

Directly from the survey, incl. free bias :)

Points from survey we have not addressed:

• better projector
• lab cleaning days (at least the fridge)

• Yann: totally approves the fridge! Floor and wastes are ok now thanks to the cleaning lady =)

• slightly larger community
• “Quantifiable outcome. Clear longterm view”

- how to best keep track? - what to measure?

• a calendar

Points from survey we have addressed:

• “some working space other than benches” / “more tables to work on, with plugs”

• Yann: See plan for next lab version we can make it happen on the new benches / tables that will replace the sotrage zone.

• quiet ventilation
• p1 lab
• “A way to easily know if someone is in the lab “

• Yann: Thanks for the card point you set-up I fuckin love it

• “A way to know who is going to attend or not Open Hackuarium evenings”

• Good luck with that even when people say they attend they don't

• big whiteboard
• a lora gateway
• dense presentations
• educational workshops (for people external to the community)
• “Sell what is done inside Hackuarium (art, robots, DIY instrumentation, etc.)”

What stands out from the survey:

• “Knowing that I will not find an empty lab.” “right now time seems to stand still.” “If I know more the people there” "…more people, more anti-disciplinarity, more play-ground, more

funding opportunities, more food, some salaries.” “More consumables for projects are always useful”

• 75% think we should invest more into projects, 55% say lab infrastructure, 45% say events
• 71% say we need more funding (and 79% think public foundations are the way to go)
• 66% doesn’t care about funding source used by projects and don’t believe that some should be banned
• most think that fundraising and event organisation could be done better by someone paid to do so. 35% would want to have that job at 8h/week and accept the risk that it could _potentially_ cause conflict.
• Get a vision. Where you will be in 5 years?
• Keep up the good work.

Point 2: Funding Applications

Loterie Romande

The application to the Loterie Romande for 20'000 CHF was rejected. More details orally.

La Paillasse new business model

In short: no grants, no rents of lab space but offer of free residencies to everybody in change of 5 days/month of community work. Selection based on brain&time of the applicant. The full interview to Thomas Landrain can be read on makery. Relevant passage:

For now we have no grant support, because we feel that it would hinder us from experimenting radically with new business models for research. We regularly reinvent ourselves… We recently decided to disrupt the model that we had been using since we arrived in Paris two years ago, which consisted of making La Paillasse a coworking lab space. It works financially, but we created two incompatibilities with our vision of the open and community laboratory—a derivative form of clientelism and a selection bias based on the capacity of a person or project to be self-financed in order to access the lab, when the primary resource of most of our residents is not their wallet but their brain and their time. So we decided to create a program for free residencies in order to allow even more diverse profiles to express their creative potential—scientists, makers, coders, designers, entrepreneurs, artists… These residencies (for between 30 and 50 people for 6 to 12 months) will allow them to invest fully in their project, accompanied by La Paillasse. In exchange, these people will give us five days of their time every month to work on collaborative research projects, whether it’s prospective research funded by partners or selling creative prototyping. Since May, we went from 50 residents to 20. We still have some people paying for space, but they’re now a minority.

Others?

Luc has a list here, and will keep writing emails as soon as he has time.

Point 3: Future partnerships

Mike Horn pole2pole

...

• Yann: Yeah did we get any feedback ? I still think this could be a cool adventure

Joint Outreach with SIB

Waiting for Marie-Claude Blatter to come back to us. Maybe reminder email in September?

Point 4: Finance

Open budget for 2015

Details of spending:

Details of income:

Yann: Love it man i might recommend though: http://paletton.com/#uid=1000u0kllllaFw0g0qFqFg0w0aF

Point 5: Upcoming OpenHackuarium nights

It is important that we announce events and stick to the plan. We already discussed the issue at the last board meeting and little has been done.

Already planned

Very proud to say we have several events already planned this autumn:

2016.11.02 Wednesday 19:30-22:00: Openhackuarium vol. 122 Epidemium and Echopen: when Open Source meets Pharma and Medtech

2016.10.01 Saturday 11:30-18:30: Balloon Launch and BBQ Octanis will launch their second stratospheric balloon, so why not celebrate?

2016.09.21 Wednesday 19:30-22:00: Openhackuarium vol. 116 Hackuarium for dummies (and life science students)

Make sure we have a list of tasks to get people on board -> post-its with projects and tasks so that people can sign-up

2016.09.10 Saturday 9:30-18:30: Raspberry Pi Workshop: come test and build with the latest open source computer technology

2016.09.07 Wednesday 19:30-22:00: Openhackuarium vol. 114 Thymio: an open source educational robot

2016.08.17 Wednesday 19:30-22:00: Openhackuarium vol. 111 LoRa & The Things Network: Opening the Internet Of Things to everyone

Still need to plan the following events:

Molecular Biology day/evening

Luc (3 min)

Should be moved to mid-october so we can advertise for it at the Openhackuarium vol. 116.

• WHEN? 2016.10.12 Wednesday 19:30-22:00: Openhackuarium vol. 119
• WHO? Luc + Gianpaolo + young researchers from neighbouring institutions. Let's make a list and contact them.
• WHAT? Discussion around the state of the art as well as basic mol biol technologies.

Topics to be included in the discussion:

• DNA (5 min introduction)
• Genes (5 min introduction)
• GM (how it is applied in bacteria, years, cells, animal, plants)
• CRISPR (5 min introduction to the technique, and why it's hype)
• Biotech (5 min on why all this is relevant)

Machine learning for image recognition

• WHEN?
• WHO? Yann P. + young researchers from neighbouring institutions. Let's make a list and contact them.
• WHAT? A friend of Yann P. wants to present and bring a concrete case where we can show how with a RasPi we can differentiate things. A useful tech if for ex we want to look at wastes sorting.

Point 5bis: Other Events

Marc's Friend

Marc has a friend doing plastic conversions back to petroleum. I (Yann) met him and the project works. Marc wants to oganize an event to present the topic and then setup the project on a small scale (in the atelier) followed by an analysis of the gases. This project could be very well seen.

• WHEN: 31 august

Design Days

• WHEN? 29th September - 2nd October.

We decided not to participate to the DesignDays as the fee was too high for the fun.

Point 6: Infrastructure & IT

(Sam, 5 min)

presence tracker

New Slack functionality for physical presence at UniverCité. Comments?

• Gianpaolo: Is the board OK to ping the message on our twitter? example: fixme status https://twitter.com/_fixme/status/762272788560408576
  

• Yann: I approve on my side

• Gianpaolo: Can we opt in the person name for people wishing to automate sharing their presence at Hackuarium?
  

• Yann: It should be a parameter one can set when he recieves a card. It could also be the slack nickname to let the members know but not the outsiders

meetup

Gianpaolo and Sam are testing meetup as additional channel to reach/invite people at our events. After one week we have 32 members (update 16.8: we now have 54). Subscribe here https://www.meetup.com/hackuarium/members/

• Yann: This shit works ! I was surprised how many new faces were there yesterday

Point 7: Hacktion

Gianpaolo and Sam are taking a daily 40 min challenge. Format:

• minutes 0'-20': brainstorm actionable items that can be done in 20 minutes by one person.
• minutes 21'-40': execute one actionable item.

Join the Hacktion challenge on the wiki

Point 8: Replication

(Luc, 5 min) 3 projects in 2017

Open Nanodrop:

• Octanis hacked the Ocean Optics Spectrometer (200-1100nm) already
• UV light source (Yann?) and SMA905 UV fibre optic cables (50usd ebay) missing

• Yann: We can use the leds for sure. I still got several of them! I don't think we need optical fibers because we can use UV detectors.

• Good for DNA QC in future P1 (-> 230nm, 260nm, 280nm)

• Yep of course it is necessary for quantification! We could have gone low-cost and rely on the gel intensity.

Point 9: Actionables

To members: -> send invoice for membership fee -> Luc (up to end July, then for 3 months)
-> make a slide to insist at OH that people should talk about the place and advertise for it and become members (and how)

To board members: -> email board member and ask for dedication (2 hours a week + list of tasks) -> Luc
-> every board member should really take care of motivating members
-> implement KPI (Gianpaolo and Sam are are charge of monitoring? )
-> send a summary with membership fees and conditions