Meals minutes: 2018-11-12

Minutes:

Meals Committee Meeting Minutes 11/12/2018

Present: Willie, Tammy, Judith, Gail, Tom Smyth, Yi-Miau, Catherine, Elph

Agenda
Food allergies
Gather online system features
Meals Scheduling
Upcoming meetings


Concern: food allergies
We revisited our original community agreement around food allergies,
particularly shellfish. The policy we originally settled on was that if
someone was going to cook shellfish that they need to use their own
pots/pans, utensils and that dishes from that meal should go through the
Hobart twice.

Since the original policy, the Meals Committee determined that it is safe
to wash dishes only once. A member with a life-threatening shellfish
allergy does not feel comfortable eating on plates washed only once after
they had shellfish on them.

We will remind cooks not to cook shellfish using Great Oak pots and pans.

We are also reminded that the committee has plans to re-survey the
community about what allergens and food limitations people have. Tammy
will create the survey and work with Yi-Miau to get it out. The question
was also raised about including Sunward and Touchstone in the survey.


GATHER
Tom Smyth came to the meeting to discuss features of GATHER.

We don’t have a Biller role in Gather at this point. Tom will come up with
a list of what the roles are on Gather, and what each can do. Admins for
Gather from GO include Gail and Willie,

Which role can set reminder parameters? GO usually specifies cooking time
in the reminder. Current reminders is wrong -- it gives a time to head
cooks that is too early. We can have a GO admin change the time setting.

Reminders to teens--”Children” (including teens) are listed on Gather
directory, but they do not always have an email associated with an
account. We wondered then how are the teens in the work system receiving
reminders? It turns out the teens cannot log into Gather anyway, because
“Children” cannot have an account with Gather. It seems odd that some
workers do not have access to their schedule on Gather. More communication
is needed with teens and their parents to understand what their needs are
around this issue. *NEW* Tom recently updated the system to send emails to
All adults in the household if there is not an email address for the
teen.so this is an important update.


Meals reports. These are great, thank you Tom! Is there a way to track how
many meals are cancelled? Tom will set up the report section so that
cancelled meals will show in a head cooks’ meals history.

Questions about using Gather to check accountability -- are other
communities doing this? Not yet--it’s a larger conversation that would need
to happen. We talked about other ways to track the information. Meals
recently emailed all the meals workers to check in about how things are
going and we learned some helpful info. We agreed that this was a helpful
direction--check in with Meals workers more regularly so that they know
Meals cares about people coming to their shifts. Then we can decide how to
handle it when a person has an ongoing issue with attending their meals
shifts.

Feedback/Comment feature is going to change a little bit as more
communities are using Gather. *NEW* The sign-up feature is going to become
more flexible and household’s preference will show up as default.

Question about uploading all of the meal jobs for a work season at once.
Currently, we have a job called Gather meal entry person to add meals onto
Gather. It takes about half an hour to enter meals for one months. There
had been conversations around developing an automatic upload for GO and we
are still interested. It’s complicated, but still on the list of features
that might happen someday. Tom agree to bump up the priority of this
item.

*NEW* to editing meals. Head cooks can now edit meal sign-ups summary
electronically and not always have to print the paper form. (The option of
using the paper forms will remain.) Cooks will also be able to enter their
expenses online. We should talk with Billers to find out how to handle
receipts if going paperless. We are inclined not to use the option that
allows cooks to finalize their own meal, there is a slight conflict of
interest. We will follow up with Billers in the December meeting.

Non-meals related questions--
Any updates on a Book of Agreements feature on Gather? Yes, Tom is open to
this, although it will not be the next major feature.

What would it take to create a posting page on Gather for meetings? There
are so many repetitive tasks for meetings. It’s a good idea, but would be a
lot of work!

Tom is also working on a Work System program for Gather.

MEALS SCHEDULING
Meals and Willie (meal scheduler) agree to experiment another two-month
scheduling. This season we are trying out how two-month scheduling works.
Willie will send out the meals scheduling survey for January and February
in early December.

MONKEY
re-survey the community about what allergens and food limitations people
have. Tammy will create the survey and work with Yi-Miau to get it out.
The question was also raised about including Sunward and Touchstone in the
survey.

DONE Yi-Miau will reserve meeting room for upcoming meetings.

Tom will come up with a list of what the roles are on Gather, and what each
can do.

Tom will set up records so that cancelled meals will show in a head cooks’
meals history.


NEXT MEETING

Dec. 3 (we’ll need a minute taker)
Jan. 13
Feb. 11
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://gocoho.org/pipermail/meals-minutes_gocoho.org/attachments/20181117/376a894a/attachment.html>