Meals minutes: 2014-10-14

Agenda:

Future of grot.org and the online meals system
Grills

Minutes:

Attendance: Willie, Deb K (from TS) and Malcolm

Willie:
- nag shoppers to update inventory list
- poll community for additions to inventory list
- start the conversation around design of the meals scheduling system.

Tammy
* review meals committee job descriptions, make sure they're accurate
and generic
* For Hobart issues, like E3 errors, we ought to create a
troubleshooting cheat sheet and post it on the wall above the Hobart

Elph:
* put the proportions on the side of the big rice cooker: 1 cup white
rice to 1 cup water OR 1 cup brown rice to 1.5 cups water.
* ask Nicholas to fix the wheels of the veggie grill
* Elph will add a label to discard the extra rice cooker in December if
we haven't found the insert.

Malcolm:
* research good deals on grills

Deb has joined us to learn more about how our meals system works, how to
better our CH, and to figure out what to anticipate for when they get
their own meals system up and running.

The future of "grot.org" and the online meals system. Willie got an email
from Adi where he wrote:

my plan is to spend time migrating it off my server onto
the cloud this year and then separate out GO stuff from my other stuff
next year. No adding new features, just bug fixes.

By the end of this calendar year I hope to have the database segregated
enough that other front-ends can use it, and then it becomes a matter of
implementing stuff in PHP or whatever someone else can maintain without
changing the data model.

This will have to be written, so we need to figure out which features are
needed and hire someone to write it, so need to budget for this work and
then put out a Request For Proposal to get a coder.

Budget for writing the meals signup program is not clear. One amount that
was thrown out was $2000, but we don't know how realistic that is. Also
need to figure out how to spread the cost between the users (communities).
Possibilities include the communities all chipping in a certain amount up
front (possibly by how much the communities use it) or GO pays for it and
the other communities pay a monthly fee for the use of it (subscription
model).

Willie: Contact Tom Smyth about allocating money in TS budget 2015 for
making meal system program.

When jobs come around, we'll add a position to lead the design process for
the new meals system, Willie will take this job, as it's what he does in
his day job. Willie has had a conversation with Tom Smyth, will be and
involving TS and SW in the process.

Reminder that we agreed to split the assistant cook jobs in half, making
twice as many spots, but cutting them down to 1 hour each, as there would
be 2 meals per season. We started talking about splitting cleaner shifts
too, but didn't reach a final agreement.

We need to budget money for re-writing the meals system. Let's start by
asking for about $2,000, and then we'll need to have conversations about the
scope based on the design, and how TS & SW would share in paying for the
system. Would this be based on size of community, or frequency of usage,
etc?

Should we buy a new grill? The veggie grill is falling apart. There was
some talk about getting a new "meat" grill, and then giving the vegetarians
the hand-me-down again, but the meals committee wasn't terribly happy with
that. The new grill should be for vegetarians, since as far as we know, the
meat grill works fine. Willie contacted the meals billers to find out if we
have any money in that account that could be used for this.
If not, then then we should be asking for money to be allocated from the
association. Or maybe we should increase the pantry fee? Can we get a
report on the meals books? Willie sent email asking about it.

There was no feedback on the change of meals schedule, so we'll make that
change in January. In addition, Willie needs to change the meals scheduling
system to not include thursdays, but do every tuesday.

Wille has added Deb Krause to the meals mailing list.

Willie will also create a doodle poll to figure out good times for the
committee to meet next time.