May 2013 - PSDR - mailman.hamwan.org

VOTE: Liability insurance for HamWAN
by Bart Kus 04 Jun '13

04 Jun '13

Hello, We're starting to access tower locations which require us to be insured. This vote is to approve HamWAN opening and carrying the ARRL liability insurance policy at the cost of $200/yr. Funding to be sourced from CC. The policy is attached for review. My vote is Yay. --Bart PS: Despite the title, ARRL Club status is not required to qualify for this policy. We do intend to seek ARRL Club status shortly though.

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VOTE: Motion to make regular minimum credit card payments
by Bart Kus 04 Jun '13

04 Jun '13

Hello, I realized we should probably approve the cash spending to keep the CC happy. This will come out of either bank balance or paypal balance. (cash can be moved back and forth between them) I'll try to setup automatic minimum payments if that's possible with this bank. My vote is yes. --Bart

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New Constitution for HamWAN at last
by Bart Kus 27 May '13

27 May '13

Hello, The time has come to update some aspects of our governance and wrap up the loose ends not covered before. As a refresher, we only have 1 approved document which governs our present behavior, and that is the Constitution <https://www.hamwan.org/t/tiki-index.php?page=Constitution&structure=HamWAN>. There is a page claiming to be bylaws, but it's just a proposed draft and was never voted on. I'm in favor of not proceeding with the proposed bylaws as they introduce too much needless complexity into the organization, and leave many more loose ends. In this new proposed constitution (provided below) there are many important changes. Allow me to walk you through them in order. 1) Membership status is expanded to differentiate between Supporting Members are regular Members. Supporting Members are Members who support the HamWAN mission financially by donating at the Basic level on a recurring basis. They need to do this for 6 months before obtaining Supporting Member status. Since these people put their money where their mouth is, and have demonstrated a 6-month commitment to the project, they are allowed to use their mouth in the election of Directors and are eligible to become Directors themselves. New outside influences cannot simply buy their way in and take over HamWAN, they must always fulfill a 6 month Membership period to become Supporting Members. If they've got the dedication to do all that, then they deserve to take over if that's their intention. :) 2) Gone are fixed elections in October! Directors can be elected at any time. This, combined with the previous changes regarding Supporting Members, will allow HamWAN to empower proven project contributors sooner than just on a yearly basis. I can tell you there have been a small number of outstanding people who have really helped out in the last few months, but still cannot be empowered to vote on decisions until October. This is a shame, and these new laws will fix that. 3) Gone is the "public HamWAN voting list" concept. In its place, announcements regarding elections or decisions will be sent to ALL public HamWAN lists. This should keep everyone informed, and will not require the setup of some special 3rd list that no one is on. 4) Amendments will be changed to be voted on by Supporting Members only. This includes Supporting Members holding Director positions. After these new laws are approved, the board will make a special one-time review of the project's membership and contributions, and make public a list of Members + Supporting Members available for the first time. These lists will be used in future voting situations as identified in the proposed constitution. So, without further ado, here is the new proposed Constitution, below. Please vote with Yay or Nay. It needs 66% Yay to be adopted. If you have feedback, feel free and we can re-set the vote. But for the time being, the vote will close 168 hours (7 days) from the time of this email. *Article 0 -- Mission* HamWAN is focused on creating, operating and coordinating free digital networks. These digital networks are used for: 1. emergency communications when other systems go down 2. research and development in the realm of microwave networking 3. a means of free digital communication for anyone who is or becomes a licensed radio amateur 4. an educational resource in spreading the knowledge of how to create, operate and use such networks All knowledge generated and gathered by HamWAN in the realm of microwave networking is made freely available to the public for unrestricted consumption. Coordination services provided by HamWAN ensure the interoperability of other similar networks not directly under HamWAN's control. *Article I -- Members* HamWAN membership is open to everyone.There are three levels of membership: (1) Member, (2) Supporting Member, and (3) Director.A Member is accepted by default, after having gone through the www.HamWAN.org enrollment process, unless the board votes to reject membership to a potential member. A Member can also become a Supporting Member by donating to HamWAN at a minimum of the Basic level for a period of 6 months.A lump donation does not eliminate the 6 month Member status time requirement before becoming a Supporting Member.A Supporting Member must continue a minimum of Basic level donations to remain in Supporting Member status.Donation financial levels are defined at www.HamWAN.org. *Article II -- Board of Directors* The board shall be composed of three or more Supporting Members serving as Directors, one of whom is also acting as Chairman. Directors shall have no predefined duties. The only special duty of the Chairman is to resolve vote ties; the Chairman effectively gets two votes in this case. Board positions shall be valid for one year, and obtained by election of the Supporting Members.Only Supporting Members are eligible to be elected to board positions. *Article III -- Elections* Any Supporting Member may announce his or her intention to be elected as a Director at any time, and must set a 7-day voting period to end no later than 21 days from the initial announcement of intention to run.Supporting Members are entitled to one vote each.Election of a board member shall be successful if the candidate receives more "Yay" votes than "Nay" votes. Directors wishing to serve as Chairman can announce their intention to be elected by notifying the acting Chairman.Votes for Chairman can only be cast by Directors, and voting will conclude 24 hours after a Director announces his or her intention to become Chairman.The new Chairman shall be the candidate with the most "Yay" votes.The acting chairman shall be a candidate in any Chairman election by default.Ties shall be resolved by the acting Chairman.The new Chairman will assume the acting Chairman duties on the day following the Chairman election. *Article IV -- Decisions* Director decisions or actions which: 1. impact HamWAN finances in excess of $100 USD 2. or contractually obligate HamWAN in any way 3. or are reasonably judged as significant shall be announced to all public HamWAN mailing lists. Voting will be considered complete 24 hours after the mailing list announcement of the issue at hand. Decisions shall be rendered approved by a majority vote of the Directors who voted. Directors unfamiliar with the issue at hand are encouraged to abstain from voting. Non-Directors cannot cast votes, although they can communicate with Directors to influence their votes on issues. *Article V -- Director Removal* Directors can be removed from the board by a "Yay" vote of 75% or more board members. *Article VI -- Dissolution* Should the board vote to dissolve HamWAN, physical assets can be liquidated. All resulting and remaining assets, liquid or physical, will be distributed to like-minded charity organizations. *Article VII -- Amendments* Any documents of HamWAN governance, including this constitution, can be amended by a 66% or more vote of the Supporting Members. Proposals for amendments shall be published to all public HamWAN mailing lists, and voting shall be considered complete 168 hours (7 days) after the mailing list announcement. --Bart (my vote is Yay)

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Re: [HamWAN PSDR] VOTE: Approve purchase of 2 cell sites worth of gear
by KL7WM＠aol.com 20 May '13

20 May '13

I like your voting Daniel KL7WM In a message dated 5/20/2013 8:27:27 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time, me(a)bartk.us writes: Voting is now concluded. 1 Yay, 0 Nay. The proposal is approved. Let's get spendy. As an aside, one forethoughtful HamWAN member bought out the entire Baltic Networks stock of 5SHPn modems in anticipation of this. They're available there @ $15 less than anywhere else. We should have a decent deal on these in this round. We'll still need to get 4 more on top of that purchase though. --Bart On 5/19/2013 8:35 PM, Bart Kus wrote: We're @ 0% interest until Oct 31st, then we go up to 20.99%. --Bart On 5/19/2013 7:17 PM, Benjamin Krueger wrote: Can we have more details about the terms of the credit account please? On Sun, May 19, 2013 at 7:09 PM, Bart Kus <_me(a)bartk.us_ (mailto:me@bartk.us) > wrote: Hello, We're moving into a busy deployment season. We must be ready to capture sites for expanding the HamWAN network as they become available. The sites don't work on our schedule, we must be ready to work on theirs. The discussions we're holding with site owners are indicating we're about to need 1-2 more sites worth of gear in the next few weeks. This spending request is to approve a purchase of enough equipment to stand up 2 cell sites, with a spending limit of $4000. It should come in just a little above $3000 from what I can tell. Despite the low current donation levels, we have a credit limit of $8000 we can use. I believe it'd be best to get the network on the air, allow the user base to expand, and then pay down the initial build-out costs. The only reason we have anything on the air right now is because of this policy. We do have enough cash on hand (about $1400) to make interest payments on this debt for a year should the fund raising continue to be a challenge even with a larger network footprint. Since my report of last week's fund raising, we've raised another $100 dollars, making for a total of $220 raised in the last week. I'm trying to hang on to at least $1000 of cash as a float in case of emergencies, so we're still shy $1100 on the cash-only cell site purchase. Directors, please cast your votes. My vote is for approving this spending. Voting will close 24 hours from the time of this email. (Monday, just after 7PM PST) List members, feel free to talk to directors to influence votes. --Bart _______________________________________________ Board mailing list _Board(a)hamwan.org_ (mailto:Board@hamwan.org) http://mail.hamwan.org/mailman/listinfo/board_hamwan.org -- Benjamin _______________________________________________ PSDR mailing list _PSDR(a)hamwan.org_ (mailto:PSDR@hamwan.org) http://mail.hamwan.org/mailman/listinfo/psdr_hamwan.org _______________________________________________ PSDR mailing list _PSDR(a)hamwan.org_ (mailto:PSDR@hamwan.org) http://mail.hamwan.org/mailman/listinfo/psdr_hamwan.org _______________________________________________ PSDR mailing list PSDR(a)hamwan.org http://mail.hamwan.org/mailman/listinfo/psdr_hamwan.org

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VOTE: Approve purchase of 2 cell sites worth of gear
by Bart Kus 20 May '13

20 May '13

Hello, We're moving into a busy deployment season. We must be ready to capture sites for expanding the HamWAN network as they become available. The sites don't work on our schedule, we must be ready to work on theirs. The discussions we're holding with site owners are indicating we're about to need 1-2 more sites worth of gear in the next few weeks. This spending request is to approve a purchase of enough equipment to stand up 2 cell sites, with a spending limit of $4000. It should come in just a little above $3000 from what I can tell. Despite the low current donation levels, we have a credit limit of $8000 we can use. I believe it'd be best to get the network on the air, allow the user base to expand, and then pay down the initial build-out costs. The only reason we have anything on the air right now is because of this policy. We do have enough cash on hand (about $1400) to make interest payments on this debt for a year should the fund raising continue to be a challenge even with a larger network footprint. Since my report of last week's fund raising, we've raised another $100 dollars, making for a total of $220 raised in the last week. I'm trying to hang on to at least $1000 of cash as a float in case of emergencies, so we're still shy $1100 on the cash-only cell site purchase. Directors, please cast your votes. My vote is for approving this spending. Voting will close 24 hours from the time of this email. (Monday, just after 7PM PST) List members, feel free to talk to directors to influence votes. --Bart

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funding / additional sites
by Rob Salsgiver 19 May '13

19 May '13

Greetings all, Consider this my lobbying effort - not so much to board members as to list members. Bart already covered some of this, but here's my shot. I expect most of you have joined the list because you see the potential of the HamWAN project. Most of you have also been involved in other efforts - expanding your own systems, packet networks, or other digital systems. All of us pretty much know what the potential of the system is and what it could mean to disaster communications, experimentation, and furthering amateur radio as a serious player in modern regional connectivity. HamWAN is at a critical stage. Many similar efforts fail due to the inability to make advances fast enough to get established and flourish. Without the ability to move - and move quickly - when the opportunity presents itself, site owner interest will fade as the opinion of "another flash in the pan" takes root. With 3-4 operating sites under our belt, we can involve enough active users to keep the fire kindled and move the effort forward through the winter and into next year. I am not much in favor of buying the equipment on credit unless absolutely necessary - but I AM in favor of doing it getting it done - and if doing it on credit is what it takes, then we need to do it. I am asking all of you to consider donating some funds - whether you can spare $5 or $500, it all counts, and NOW it is important. Two years from now we can afford to take our time with fundraising if needed, but NOW is not that time. Another chunk is in your inbox Bart. Make it happen. Rob Salsgiver - NR3O

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Results of fund drive to raise $1500 for cell site
by Bart Kus 18 May '13

18 May '13

Hello, It's been a week since I've called on everyone to help raise enough funds to order replacement hardware for the site that was deployed so that we can keep deploying. The results are in, and this week we've raised: *$120* Three people stepped up to make this happen, and I thank each of you. Sadly this is only 8% of what is required to keep us going here. It's almost summer time, the mountain top sites are melting and finally becoming accessible. In the next 3-5 months we will face our largest growth period to date as a result. We will need to keep plenty of hardware in stock to deploy to these sites as they open up. We must not miss this summer's window of opportunity. That is exactly how projects die forever. There are 50 people on this mailing list. I would like to ask each of you to look at your monthly Internet bill and donate just ONE month towards creating the network. We are funneling the money 100% into hardware, and have not (amazingly!) entered into any recurring cost situations. This is a one-time investment which will pay off for years. I estimate the average person's Internet bill to be $60/mo. If everyone donated just that we'd raise $3000 and be able to deploy 2 more cell sites from just that 1 round of funding! Remember, these sites serve huge land areas, not like typical mobile phone cell sites. By month's end I'll publish the coverage models for the 2 sites coming online right now, after they're fully configured. I was really (pleasantly) surprised when I saw the models one of the project engineers did (thanks Tom!). If you'd like to help in beta testing the sites as they're being built, come join us on freenode in the #HamWAN channel. It's been quite active lately. If you have suggestions for how to improve fundraising, I'd love to hear them too. (on-list is fine) --Bart

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New cell site donation drive almost over!
by Bart Kus 16 May '13

16 May '13

Get them moneys in, and I'll report on Saturday with how we did at replacing our $1500 deployed site. --Bart

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Time to dig through your couch cushions...
by Bart Kus 11 May '13

11 May '13

Hi All, This week we got part of a site deployed! Two more sectors still need to go up since there was an issue with a supposed-to-be-present-but-was-missing ladder. We should be able to get them up in a couple weeks from now and finish up the site fully. I'm asking everyone involved to keep the site location private for the time being since the network config is still in a shambles and the site is open to abuse right now. It should be fully configured by end of month and we'll announce its Grand Opening then. :) But this good news comes with a flip side. We're now out of inventory and need to back-fill it. This site deploy has cost us about $1500 of hardware, and the majority of that came out of my personal pocket. I'd like to re-stock HamWAN's inventory so that we've always got a site on hot-standby ready to deploy. In fact, if we didn't have a hot standby ready we wouldn't have scored this location! We had 48 hours notice to prep everything and deploy. Everyone came together really well and equipment is live, flying high and on the Internet. *So, it's time for all of you who would like to see more sites come online to dig through your couch cushions and donate to HamWAN so that we can raise $1500 and replace the deployed equipment. You can donate by clicking PayPal Donate or Subscribe buttons on the HamWAN.org website.* I'm not in a personal financial position to purchase the next site. In a week from today, I'll announce how much money we've managed to raise. Thank you all in advance for your support! --Bart

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Hamwan Weekly Meeting Reminder
by sneaker＠knr.dissentradio.com 07 May '13

07 May '13

This is an automatically sent reminder for the weekly hamwan meeting. Weekly Meeting Details How: Mumble(external link) voice + text chat software (v1.2.4+, install the beta if needed). Please use a headset or enable Echo Cancellation. Where: Connect to server "BartK.us" When: Tuesdays @ 7:00PM PST for 1 hour You can also hang out in the project's IRC channel on irc.freenode.org / #HamWAN. If you have any questions or problems with this automatic reminder please contact noah pugsley, KF7BFL: noah.pugsley(a)gmail.com

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