High Desert Institute

2025-04-25: Board Meeting Minutes: Workshop recap, financial update, next steps

  • Board members present (3/3):
    • CJ Trowbridge
    • Joe Whisher
    • Julia Heim
  • Also Present
    • Tree Forester
  • Cyberpony Express Workshop Recap
    • Discussed how they went;
      • Hardware Strategy
        • Ongoing project was allocated $500 budget by the board for development of experimental nodes including rich services like
          • IIAB
          • BBS
          • MUDs
          • Local LLMs
          • etc
      • New Partnerships
        • Amateur Radio Clubs → Repeater sites
      • Opsec
        • Best practices for security
        • Understanding limitations of encryption
    • Discussed future plans
      • Ownership, Organization, and Governance Workshops
      • Land Trust Workshops
  • Cyberpony Express Disatches/Podcast
  • Discuss new website
    • Anyone can submit a change for any page.
    • Planning to move all the other partner websites over to this model so anyone can edit any of those websites
    • Anyone in “the org” which we haven’t really defined yet can approve these updates.
  • Financial Report
    • Approximate balance of accounts, including pending transactions and estimates of pending fees.
      • General Unrestricted Funds
        • Balance is $759.52
        • Most of the donations to this account have come from people choosing to optionally donate while subscribing to the HDI substack. Thank you!
      • Cyberpony Express Funds
        • Received $10,721 in donations so far.
        • $6,656 in new donations since last meeting.
        • Fiscal sponsorship will take 7%.
        • Interchange is around 3%.
        • Gross is around $9,648.90.
          • Most of this is not yet realized because of how long GoFundMe takes to disburse the money.
        • Allocations so far;
          • $307 for ten nodes to give away to people who came to the first Cyberpony Express workshop.
          • $189.64 for T-Decks for Joe and Julia to work on understanding and explaining the system.
          • $500 for cyberpony express hardware development
          • $1948.43 for a large batch of nodes to give away to whoever wants to host one, prioritizing intentional communities, community gardens, etc.
        • Net is about $7,203.83
        • Minus allocations is about $6,703.83.
      • Land Acquisition Funds
        • Received $1,897 in donations so far.
        • $25 in new donations since last meeting.
          • (We haven’t been pushing this at all since then.)
        • Fiscal sponsorship will take 7%.
        • Interchange is around 3%.
        • Balance is about $1707.30
  • Board Votes
    • Board voted to allow CJ/Multiverse to allocate the remaining radios we have purchased to the people who have applied to recieve one.
    • Board voted to buy a T-Deck for Tree so that Tree and Julia can demonstrate them to intentional communities as they travel and produce their own Cyberpony Express content.

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