Meeting Notes 2026 08 18

These are the notes from the The 878th Meeting of Noisebridge.

Date	2026-08-18
Note-taker[s]	Daniel (Web), nthmost
Moderator[s]	Chaz

Previous Meeting

Next Meeting

Meeting Summary

• New Core members:
• New Access members:

Introductions

• Weezy: favorite number is zero, and starting a church about zero. Likes making music and hanging, and playing with computers.
• Ciara: noisegarden (private cloud! :D :O) favorite number is 7
• Faren: Big yapper. Graphic design things.
• Naomi: Likes to climb on things. Favorite number........ gosh 22 (oops)... 1 it's a funny number
• Newman: Sews. 2.
• Jane: (just took a bite of burrito) Sewing. Team 7.
• Daniel: Computers. 2.
• Noah: Electronics. laser cutting. Favorite number also 7.
• Zacchae ("Zackie" is short for Zacchaeus): I hack (generically). 8 is the best.
• Carl: Favorite single digit number is i (didn't specify real vs. imaginary) (Naomi is loudly exasperated) [lol]
• Jaur: Loitering and hanging out. 9.
• Lucifer: Favorite number is 8.
• Heather: Sewing, laser cutting, 3d printer, opens the space in the morning. Favorite number 6 (decided this as a child)
• Kavya: [lost to time] 7
• Chaz: 8
• Drynn:
• LX: 9

Short announcements and events

• Heather: Jonathan has purchased a new lock for the music room, a keypad similar to the sewing room. "Musicians need access!"

• Carl: NB18 pin project in progress! need someone to help me with the laser cutting!

• Naomi: Oct 16-18th there will be our annual NB party. Full on rave :O Pitch in and help with the nb18 discord channel, see also NB18 on the noisebridge.net wiki. We should announce this every meeting.

• Chaz: Drynn has acquired new sharps containers for the bathrooms.

• Chaz: the killer queen ppl are requesting the KQ cabinets for mid-Sept for an event.

Excellence

Our One Rule is to Be Excellent to Each Other.

What does that mean? Please see our page on Excellence !

WE/Z: the most excellent man at NB, JD, came and taught me how to weld. the most excellent thing is to teach someone something new.

Anti-Harassment Policy & Community Standards of Excellence

Noisebridge has an Anti-Harassment Policy!

Everyone is expected to follow the Anti-Harassment Policy, please familiarize yourself with it.). [weird spurious parentheses in the notes template, i will fix it --nthmost]

For approachable & specific guidelines see: Community Standards

Please note: https://safespace.noisebridge.net/ is one way to quickly raise issues which will be seen by people in Discord.

Brief Kudos

Heather: Kudos to Drynn for the new sharps containers.

Zacchaeus: Yadi for scrubbing and mopping the bathroom.

Chaz: WE-Z for destroying old useless tech (the bad conference mic.)

Heather: to JD for replacing the focus adjustment bolt on the laser (quite quickly, too)

Guilds & WGs

Reports from guilds & working groups. Updates! Events! Requests!

Music guild: we should do those meetings monthly. will post to determine when, in the Discord channel. // Chaz

New Members/Access Members

Chaz: access members are kinda like the first tier of consensed upon members in which you have the ability to open and close the space. you need to have ONE core member sponsor you for this thing.

Noah: i have the keys but i'm not an access member yet.

[Heather and Daniel fight for Noah]

[Jaur raises a hand but needs a sponsor, is encouraged to hang out more and try again next week]

Noah: so i can open the space and work on projects. i just teach here - CHM -

Chaz: why SHOULDN'T we let you be an access member?

Noah: well i trust myself, but uhhh....

Chaz: you don't have to answer that [laughing]

Naomi: i'm blocing you from ever saying "i just teach here" ever again

Zacchae: yeah for context... Noah's been carrying the CHM torch, the only event series that's been running continuously at NB for the longest time [since 2008, actually! --nthmost]

Chaz: congratulations. no one needs to know about Core Membership? awesome! that's my preferred situation, if you wanna know about it, ask.

Treasurer's Guild

Financial Report

Anarchist societies under a capitalist state need money to survive and thrive, yo.

Spending Requests

Daniel: I bought pizza for the opensauce afterparty. bought 5 for $50 then was told it wouldn't be anough. so then 10 on doordash and they wouldn't let me cancel it. So then was out $200, even though the party didn't benefit from it, but the tuesday meeting did. NB benefited from it.

Zacchae: in the past ppl have asked the treasurer to authorize certain am'ts of money. i am happy to reimburse if the folks at meetings think it's cool. do we want to reimburse this? Some yeas and no nays means we do it.

Carl: $50 for NB18 party supplies (pin things i'm working on)

Kavya: People have been asking for needles, pins, black thread, sleeve board (should be under $99)

Reimbursements Approved

Web Daniel - OpenSauce - $250

Carl: NB18 badge materials - $50

Kavya: Sewing materials - $99

Fundraising Update

Naomi: NB18 is our next big fundraising opportunity. Go to the wiki page or Discord channel.

Discussion Items

Discussion list

Daniel: Hivemapper stuff, Kevin doesn't want to be like the "lord of the hivemapper" things so this will be discussed here first. Ideally we move this process onto Discord.

Carl: round 2 of cleaning

Ciara: about alcohol in the space

Heather: front door RFID issue

Kavya: how we can get knitting machine training actually squared away w/ Drynn [Heather suggests maybe this is a Discord conversation, Kavya agrees]

[Note to note-takers: the mtg notes processor reformats attribution if it sees a single name on a line with ":" after it. No need to indent. Works best with DOUBLE-enter between utterances. see https://nbarchive.nthmost.com --nthmost]

1: Hivemapper stuff

On topic	Hivemapper stuff
From/Raised by	Daniel
Seeking	decision

Daniel: requesting 3 hivemapper modules. Context: NB had 140 of these neo little dash cams donated, most were working, some broken, but the parts that broken not that important. RPi hiding inside! kevin + derek were thinking of selling a bunch, but i think they'd be more valuable IN the space for doing things. already cracked a few open and MOSTLY didn't break them. so i want three of the rpis, one will drive the xcarve in the woodshop. one for the meetup calendar, needs a new one. and one for a realtime cumulative subscription revenue for NB display.

Chaz: I'm not totally familiar w/ Kevin's procedure, but...

Carl: why are we as a group doing it this way?

Daniel: uhh well actually someone told me to do it this way, but i figured i'd do it this way once and then you could all say "let's not do it this way again"

Heather: there was some contention 2 weeks ago and in order to resolve that we do it by

Daniel: one person was unilaterally trying to claims all of them, Kevin wanted to see it done in a group way.

Carl: we definitely don't want to do a discussion for each and every one

Jaur: they're definitely worth some cash yeah

Heather: strong support for the XCarve [nthmost: yes yes plus one]

Chaz: qs before we move on?

Zacchae: we should at least address the fact we're bringing it up. as long as there's transparency in the distribution such that it can be brought up if something goes awry, that's good. as long as public record + recourse, it's fine.

2: round 2 of cleaning

On topic	round 2 of cleaning
From/Raised by	Carl
Seeking	decision/outcome/advice/[?]

Carl: lemme be more specfiic. literally moving large scale items, like THIS THING BEHIND ME, the stage, benches covered in garbage. CHM is tripping over stuff. There are ppl who might have opinions about what stuff goes, etc. So a little more open forum besides this meeting, ppl who know about this stuff in the hackitorium, pls come tell us what.

Naomi: OK, so! [gets up and gestures around passionately] [i will backfill this in, or someone else can... -nm]

Newman: what do we do about these 2 tables LX wanted. they keep getting covered in crap

LX: the plan is that we attach monitors to these to become workstations

Chaz: ok do we need all of this space

Newman: it blocks access to the lockers and it's a lot of space being taken up

LX: the goal is to finish cleaning all of that area

Carl: ok so many let's get the names of the parties

Naomi: hi ho hi ho it's off to the crap mines we go, is the only thing that ever seems to work. meetings to have meetings doesn't typically result in anything happening. whatg generally happen perhaps an after-meeting cleanup is in order!

Chaz: seconded! [recalls when we did that a previous time, cleaning up that back corner] also we can consider Elan's Warning Stickers a useful thing that seems to work. [ppl nod and agree]

Josh: i will move the enviromental chamber tonight [everyone cheers]

Chaz: I think some were lost in this manner already and that's trying to be prevented. OH YEAH! The KQ ppl want to take back the cabinets for late Sept.

3: about alcohol in the space

On topic	about alcohol in the space
From/Raised by	Ciara
Seeking	decision/outcome/advice/[?]

Ciara: reiterating what was said in bravespace and Naomi's points in the Discord chat, i asked Naomi directly, can we not have Caitlin bring alcohol for right now or do less of it or adjust the approach, and i was frustrated that she was just kind of out-of-it while she was drinking, i like drinking but i was not happy to be there. and i think you said it well i think she can be very pushy when she's doing it. in the best world to me is that caitlin brings less alcohol. i dunno if that's reasonable or fair to ask, but thats' what's on my mind. not saying never no alcohol, etc. but consider it.

Newman: is this more about them leaving alcohl unattended? about Caitlin?

Ciara: no. yeah about her. and also if there's someone getting really drunk and making ppl feel uncomfortable it should be fair to ask if they can tone it down.

Newman: do you feel empowered to tell her that?

Ciara: sort of. i msged her directly, said "I felt kind of afraid of you in the space when this happened" and she was like... i try not to be in her business but now it just feels like she's now in my business, in my personal space. and i did drink when she brought it, but i still. and her reactions have been kinda rude. wish she'd be a little nicer.

Zacchae: one of the things that makes this convo difficult is there's clearly not a problem if someone is here with a beer just hacking. when you give someone else alcohol, you're inviting an intoxicated version of that person to the space. it's like our access to the door. you don't know ppl that intimately it's kinda crossing a line. diff't when it's like "here everyone, take alcohol!" sure we have parties but we plan around those. thats a different situation.

LX: the last time we had this discussion -- [indicates he has things written in the chat, which i am posting here]

https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Safety Alcohol safety language drafted after last discussion: Alcohol Minimal responsible alcohol is allowed at parties and fundraisers but all concerned must maintain our Excellence policy while doing so and remember some safety guidelines and excellence issues we need to take seriously. Do not get highly intoxicated or encourage other people to be highly intoxicated at the space as it can encourage unexcellent behavior and create an uncomfortable environment. Do not allow people under 21 years of age to drink alchohol in the space. If you see someone who looks possibly too young drinking or asking to drink, it is excellent to ask for them to show identification before allowing them to continue. If someone does not agree to show identification and tries to drink in the space, they may be asked to go elsewhere If someone refuses to refrain from drinking or being asked to drink elsewhere it may escalate to a non-negotiable Ask to leave. Refusing an Ask to leave is unexcellent. Highly intoxicated people pose heightened risk of escalating to an 86 (permanent ban). Do not store alcohol at Noisebridge anywhere minors could access it. (Temporary drink storage for Fundraising should be locked up.)

Ciara: this is reiterating but also this is a specific person causing this issue.

LX: i understand it's about a person doing it. just saying is there anything you could put in front of this person

Naomi: mmmm the issue is that likely if you put this in front of her she'd pretty much blow that off too

Chaz: have we contacted and followed up with this person?

Naomi: we have... and i will follow up again.

Daniel: i think we shouldnl't do anything systematic things, we'd just be avoiding the interpersonal thing, it's not an issue w/ p[olicy. we should give this person a customized mandate not to bring alcohol here, and if they do bring it, they'll be asked to leave. it's an ongoing issue, they show disrespect

Daniel (Door): you should be up for managing the room when you're serving alcohol. excellent to not be sloshed while you're distributing alcohol.

LX: i can add that to a bartending guidline section. the policies help in showing it's not just one person picking on her, it's a policy we agree to. we usually all hang out during DC415 and ppl typically bring beer, it's social on top of technical. so... nothing we're saying here prevents that for continuing.

Heather: I didn't go this month but the last 2 months there was one person bringing a LARGE amount of beer at DC415 and getting pretty intoxicated. might also give this person a headsup not to come and drink a whole case of beer while giving another whole case to the table

Carl: in general i don't think we need a formal policy, but just to be considerate of the existence of recovering alcoholics and how that changes the space.

Naomi: i posted this in #bravespace --

1. So -- I like the cocktails @caitlin brings. I like clinking glasses with @blitzkrieg and getting a little sloshy with comrades. however, there have been -- and continue to be -- a couple of issues with this that haven't totally been addressed: 1.1. Frequency. We had a discussion about this at a weekly meeting as @Elan (Lané) linked in. It was responding to a specific incident, but the discussion trended towards "we're all feeling like we want to have a little less alcohol in the space anyway" 1.2. Intensity. While we're getting things out there, the biggest critique @caitlin has been what's observed as a "proactive drink distribution" posture as opposed to a bartender / "wait for someone to come up" posture 1.3. Blast radius. When drinks are proactively pushed out as opposed to more demurely offered, there's a tendency for the area-of-drinking-activity to extend a little more widely than it would otherwise. The effect is to turn large communal areas into more bar-like spaces ... as opposed to spaces sort of just "having alcohol" as an interesting spice 2. nthmost — 12:07 PM 3. And then there's the trickier one b/c i cannot name the people in this, i just need trust that this is a thing: 3.1. Recovering alcoholics. Individuals struggling to remain sober have a very hard time being in the presence of alcohol and not immediately having their cognition hijacked so that all they can think about is resisting the urge to take "just one sip"

Ciara: regarding the bartender thing, it just befuzzled me her being kind of irresposible in her response

4: Door Access System

On topic	Door Access System
From/Raised by	Heather
Seeking	decision/outcome/advice/[?]

Heather (uses "we" to refer to herself): a LOT of discussion in the RFID description -- fort hsoe who don't know, when the space is closes, the way most ppl get in is by tagging a card on a reader outside. Standard. any system is going to have some record of what's happened on that system. THIS particular system has been coded in a way that is sends logs of not just status stuff and enrollments to a remote service, and this remote service is very easy to check on your phone in your living room.

`ntfy` - you can set up push notifications from it. if you have the `ntfy` url so you can get a notification ANYTIME the door is open w/ an access card.

this wasn't disclosed to the membership at large. the wiki page on the RFID system points to an old 2003 copy of the source code. at some pt it was made private, and there's a different code w/ a lot of changes in it. and in that source code, the entire existence in this log is only in that private source code. as someone who comes into the space fairly often in the mornings, i feel like it's important for ppl such as ourselves to know what's going on and have some sort of commnunity accountability.

The computer system in question is padlocked. b/c obviously if you had access to it physically you could change how it worked. so that makes sense. which is why it's really disappointing that whether by accident or negligent oversight the maintainers ended up setting up a remote spying system. we brought it to their attn and at least one of them kinda doubled down on the secrecy.

So WE have been using our physical key to get into the building since thursday. we're priv'd to have one. but just bringing this to the group's attention.

Daniel (solderfumesandtea "the one" - Chaz) / Door Daniel: I built the door system and i didn't intend for that to be added, was added by someone else. it does shout out the UID of the card and a handle, and it shouts it out to the broader internet which i don't appreciate, but if it's not shared -- it's Heather me and Loren ...

Heather: no this is the doubleodown, it's just you and Loren

Daniel: we've been trying to make the code more shareable. each card has an ID that allows each person to get in. so when Heather asked me to work on this, part of the thing is hashing the IDs, you could still see the UIDs and not be able to copy the cards. otherwise what's the pt if everyone can copy the cards. this is not supposed to be the most elite military secure system. so the URL is out there but not widely distributed

Zacchae: this is a community/member-run organization. we like to have guilds of at least 3 people to make sure ppl have keys, to ensure transitions. collaboration is important. shouldn't be so difficult for ppl to be able to hack on things. at least 3, ideally more.

Kavya: i don't think i understand the issue here.

Ciara: very computery, basically we're sending each person to a distant URL

Josh: ...so ppl could track when you come in/out

Kavya: i guess technically it's a public place and we might need to know "who was here when this happened"

Josh: sure it'd be useful to know when Caitlin is here so i can get free alcohol

Daniel: we don't want ppl to be able to track you / stalk you. if the community doesn't want that at all, we can take that out.

Ciara: could you pt a camera through the door at NB, is that legal, prolly not. both Heather and I are concerned it's being dumped on the internet, there's no reason to do that. makes sense to have an audit log *somewhere* but it feels invasive and scary to have it being able to be tracked so easily. your willingness to just keep adding metadata to the project shared outwards scares me.

Heather: the UID thing. i do agree it should be hashed. that was hashed before Loren rotated the URL. that's been fixed since sunday the 9th.  Loren rotated url on the 10th. in terms of our own concern: it's not some random bot. our concern is more Loren getting into a public feud with us WHILE rotating the URL, comes across of as making it his own project of getting a private feed of ppl going into the space.

Ciara: doesn't establish trust

Daniel: we can just take it down... i have other means to debug.

Heather: can i propose a potential little-c consensus of "remove the accesses from that feed"

Daniel: yeah, totally

Naomi: I have the URL.  :)

Josh: Can we just redeploy henner's code? it was clean code, why not just use that?

Daniel: i built the system, there are bugs, Heather's found some bugs, for sure... one of the things is that it used Slack to enroll ppl?

Naomi: yeah that was earl (not SHED)

Daniel: the system is here, it's working, all we have to do is remove one module.

Josh: to my ears it seems complicated, problematic, buggy over time. Henner's was bulletproof. i dunno

Daniel: the music room has talked about using an RFID system, they can try that and validate which system they want to use.

Zacchae: I'm not an anti-surveillance person, i advocate for bottom-up tech. but being secretive about this stuff in a community space is really unacceptable. to me the offensive thing is not the push notifications, it's that ppl in the commnuity have access, know about it, and one person in particular thinks themselves the king and can just monitor us.

Kavya: not sure i understand

Ciara: there's just the fact we didn't know, and then that a 3rd party could find it

Chaz: can we propose solutions later

Heather: so w.r.t to the guild rooms -- sewing room, i will refuse to have LOren's code on there based on the way he's acting

Chaz: can i get context on this?

Faran: cpl things i have questions on. someone mentioned it could be potentially be helpful to allow following ppl -- it's called "asking them when they're going to be in the space" -- i think if you're at the point where you need tech for this, that's really creepy. maybe i wasn't paying att;n but why was this implemented in the first place?

Zacchae: to be clear Josh was joking and agreeing with you

Daniel: this was deevloped in an era when the space was under constant attack, so i understand why Loren added that kind of thing -- like "who's there at 2am" -- i have come to check on the space and make sure it's cool. but we're not in that era anymore, i think this space is well-maintained in terms of the ppl who are here.

LX: i think we're having an impromptu access control mtg. we had one 2 Saturdays ago. but understand this was important for the whole community to hear. when we have the longer meeting, we should aim for a diff't system for the door and for the guild rooms. we want ppl to be able to come through the door and be anonymous. the guilds are kind of the opposite, had numerous sewing and music things go missing, so i would suggest we opt for the guild rooms, protecting equipment, to have a log -- we would at least know who to ask if they know anything. maybe someone shadowed in, the tagged-in person might have information.

Daniel: we need to ban ppl, that's inevitable, i don't see a way to ban ppl without know who they are...

[...a bunch of ppl say their tags are attached to the wrong names...]

Chaz: the pt you're making is that it would be a useful resource for 86ing ppl...

Daniel: you'd have to have some pretty big balls to come in when you're 86'd

Zacchae: i think these are separate things, we're not saying that should be anonymous.

LX: i was just saying the system shouldn't LOG their ID, not that they're attached.

Naomi: we need a Threat Model and i'm starting to write one [goes and pulls out a piece of paper and waves it around like a Little Red Cookbook] -- there are plenty of things we care about and the RFID system doesn't actually solve all of them. if we don't have a threat model document -- which we don't! -- then we keep having conversations that may not actually solve the right problems.

Josh: let's protect good people, I support anonymization

Heather: if we personally trust RFID system, we'll keep using it. If not we'll keep using physical keys to door that were made as a response

Chaz: LX says "there's talk from julius of adding the RFID to the outer gate as well, even when the front garage door is open--I think opt-in access logs are a good way to let most users provide the internal log while having anon members stay anon". We have general little c-consensus for not having current log forms.

Heather: context: this did actualy start w/ the earlier accesss control mtg -- i didn't actually know Loren was a maintainer until very recently actually. we brought a few bug reports to that mtg, said we'll submit pull requests. at the time there was a leak of the raw card UIDs which yeah that needs fixing. we'd had it for the month by that point. redacting those is a GOOD thing. where things start to go south is after we got repo access, there were a bunch of changes pushed outside of git -- deployed directly, skipping the repo management. we were going to work on it to have things ready for the next meeting. so seeing new changes appear was discouraging. we mentioned this, there was back and forth on discord. at some point

[conversation stops for LOUD GARAGE DOOR; the sound pauses and everyone seems relieved, then resumes for half a second which cracks everyone up.]

Heather: dude how do you expect us to develop, collaborate, if we can't see the deployed source code. had to check this log, this is worth noting -- the evening of sunday the 9th we had to checked the same log for error msgs, so we had a legit reason to have access to this log. on Monday we are honestly ticked off, didn't bother checking again. Loren i think rotated it on 5pm at Monday, which meant we no longer had access to this log being used to debug stuf, while at the same time he had access to see when we came in and others came in, which is why i was pissed off. he ended up posting something we consider public slander in response to technical criticism and let's keep that in Discord. it was really insulting. and also we don't have access to this log. and i started copying physical keys. potential interest if this continues. and continued mentions, and we've told Loren that we don't trust the privacy and he hasn't responded.

Chaz: for all that, let's have small c-consensus decision right now (thank you for your grace note-takers)

Heather: to remove the accesses from this ntfy log, and have someone OTHER than the current maintainers validate this.

Daniel: so... who would...?

Wheezy: yeah, i could. for context Heather, i was w/ Loren and he said he felt bad. he said "I feel gatekeepy" so i asked him to take a break from NB bureaucracy stuff for a month. asked him about treasurer handoff stuff, he seemed confident there were a couple of things but it's getting there. he's still going to stay involved. He's carried so many burdens for NB and it would be good for him to take a break.

Heather: can i ask on the record -- a temp break from access stuff, included?

Wheezy: yeah, the bureaucracy of the space, like Tuesday mtgs

Heather: ah well i don't care about that...

Wheezy: actual infrastructure of maintaining door has been Daniel

Heather: no actually recent code changes are from Loren

Daniel: recent code changes w/ the HMAC have been LOren, but i built the system from the beginning

Zacchae: one thing about this, if LOren's out of the picture we need more ppl with access to the thing.

Heather: I can write code, i don't need SSH access as long as i know the code is accurate

Wheezy: will help validate new code

LX: set time for control meeting : saturday

Chaz: discuss on discord. Time to wrap up meeting.

Do-ocratic Task Board

Participation also means doing stuff to contribute to the space. Propose new tasks or pick some tasks from Github, from what needs to be done around you, or whatever, and see if someone will sign up to work on that task. Anyone can sign up and it's a great way to show you are contributing!