[ml] Noisebridge Weekly Meeting Reportback

[Jared Dunne]

Hi MLers-

I attended the weekly Noisebridge meeting and wanted to report back to
the ML group on what happened and my thoughts.

Some things I learned, which you should know:
- The members at the meeting did not bite and were very welcoming to
all (as advertised)
- The Noisebridge funding outlook has rebounded thanks to increased
member dues, onetime donations, and back dues coming in.
- While we are back to having a nice 3 month buffer of savings, we
need to keep the dues and donations coming in.
- I now have a good sense of the membership process/rights, so let me
know if you have any questions/interest
- You can setup reoccuring monthly paypal donations of any amounts
($5, $10, $20, etc) without formal membership
- You can do onetime donations through paypal or donation box
- Both of the above are tax-deductible, but proper membership "dues" are not.

My thoughts:
- Despite the good news on the funding recovery, I'd like to see the
machine learning group collectively contribute more financially to
keep NB afloat.  In that vein, I volunteer myself to give a quick NB
fundraising pitch before each ML talk/workshop to solicit donations.
Additionally, I have some other fundraising ideas, perhaps we can
discuss at next meeting if there is any group interest.
- I also see there being a need for more communication between our
group and the collective Noisebridge membership.  For example, there
is already a natural place in the Tuesday NB meeting agenda, when we
can announce upcoming ML group talks/workshops and report back on what
we have been up to lately.  Since I'm planning to start attending the
tuesday NB meetings regularly, I volunteer to be a bit of a liaison in
that sense.

Feel free to discuss further or ask me any questions on or off-list.

Jared-