Meals minutes: 2014-04-09

Agenda:

Limits on meal attendance
Online meal system

Minutes:

Attendees: Tammy, Kathy, and Willie

Limits on meals - it can be disappointing when there's a limit, but just as
we give cooks discretion about what they're cooking, we should also allow
them to cap their dinners as long as they're reasonable. Sometimes this can
be due to capacity of oven space, etc.

What would be acceptable principles?

We want meals to be open to as many diners as possible. Cooks may have
ingredient or cooking capacity challenges, we might ask cooks to consider
modifying their menu to make it simpler, or reconsider their preparation
needs. Encourage people to draw on other cooks as a resource in making
those decisions.

A full meal doesn't mean it's closed, it simply means that nobody else can
sign up for that meal. However, people can still remove themselves until
the meal is closed. When people have been removed, then this leaves open
spaces such that others can add.

Some cooks will change the capacity to the number of current diners plus
about 4-5 more spaces 24 hours before the meal so that stragglers can still
signup without needing to call the cook and be added by paper.

Perhaps we could reach out to the people who modify their capacity the
most, like Heather and Sarah? Tammy has volunteered to do this.

Meals members for next season: Elph, Malcolm and Tammy plus Willie as
convener.

Meals scheduling will probably start tonight, and will run through the
19th. Willie is cutting the "bundling" feature, where you could fulfill all
3 dinner cleans in one evening because it's risky (if the worker can't show
up), and it's a difficult feature to maintain.

There are concerns about the meals online system with Adi moving out of
town this summer. We're concerned about losing local access to the signup
system, and billing software. We would prefer it be migrated over to a
third-party hosting platform, and full-access accounts given to current
residents.

For comparison, there are at least 2 residents who have expanded access to
the association accounts in QuickBooks, plus our accountant. Everyone in
the community has a limited access to see reports. It doesn't make sense
that only one person really understands the Meals system and is the only
one with access, and now is moving across the country. We should have more
than one person locally with access to the Meals system.

This is a crucial part of the community. If there's something wrong with
the GOCA system, QuickBooks offers 24-7 support, handling questions such as
"how do you do X?". Willie will discuss this with Adi.