Finance & Legal minutes: 2003-03-26

Minutes:

Attendance: Jim G, Dale, Willie, Judith

MONKEY: Willie will take much of the feedback, and rewrite the proposal. He will get some feedback from the committee, edit and send it out again, at which point others should see it.

- Everyone else in F&L will massage the proposal one more time and send back suggestions.

- Willie will collate these responses, and ensure that the proposal still makes sense when he will send it out once more.

- We will then ask someone else with survey experience and interest, not familiar with this work to read this over, and see if they can agree with it.

MONKEY: Judith will ask Mellisa and Kelly.

MONKEY: Dale will ask Debbi. MONKEY: Dale could write the genetic algorith analysis program. MONKEY: Dale will create a graphic that people could toy with.

MONKEY: Jim will ask Gail if she can create the room-sized community display for discussion at the next meeting.


New Meeting time:

The first mtg of the month will be on the first monday, this one will be April 7th.

The second mtg of the month will be the 4th sunday, April 27th. I think that this was scheduled to be at 6pm, though the discussion moved on before my fingers could take note. We'll figure it out by then.

We'll see how this schedule works out, and adjust accordingly.


Budget Creation Process Proposal:

We talked about where the cut-off line is, and that we'll nail down the priority list first. Months down the road, we'll find out what the final dollar amount is, and what we have left. We discussed how to allocate the rest of the budget when we'd run out at the priority line, such as this example below:
[ example buget total of $300 ]-----

A) Common House - $200 B) Landscaping - $85
cut line -----------------

C) Workshop - $50k D) Laundry - $10

After some discussion, we chose to proceed in this manner:

1 - partially fund item on the cusp, if plausible 2 - if not plausible, skip to next affordable item

The LTCRF will be an item on the survey itself that people will have a chance to fund regardless.

Breaking down the items in the common house upgrade:

We probably shouldn't mention all of these items inside the proposal itself, but instead give an overview of the type of items that will be on the survey. These details are more appropriate for the various committees sponsoring the bids to flesh out.

Each of the items that make it onto the survey (for all categories) need to be sponsored by committee.

Discussion on Points vs. Ranking:

There was general support for "spending" an allotment of points - perhaps 100. This allows for differing priorities, and reduces the chance of a tie in the final analysis. This approach will be simple, and something that people should understand - much like spending money.

This does bring up the downside of allowing someone to "dump" their points onto one item. On the other hand, they would lose their chance to vote on the lesser items. The analysis for this would be a piece of cake, as could simply add up the points.

Judith feels that if there many items, she might put her time and thought into choosing the top and bottom priority items, while ignoring the middle ones. She feels that we should use a linear ranking.

Dale suggests we come up with some arbitrary maximum limit of points that one could put down on a certain item, such as 20-30.

Jim feels that there should be maximum of 3 options for each item:

A) don't fund at all B) fund at a base level C) fund at an upgrade level

If we assign points, wouldn't we choose to assign zero points to something they didn't want? Is the first choice necessary?

At this point, we started to lean towards the option of just using a simple ranking system for simplicity.

Points Cons:

- if there is a base plus upgrade choice, the points can get split, and this muddles the importance of the base choice

- Judith felt that the middle points wouldn't receive much consideration, and they would get disregarded, but this is about where the priority line will fall, so it's where we should put our best thinking.

- Jim feels that assigning points might get confused with spending money, and the cheaper items might give the smaller items, smaller points.

Dale presents another 2 possible ranking methods. The first one involves a trianble of choices that could be made. Everyone else's eyes instantly glaze over with confusion.

He then presents another possible ranking-method process which involves proportionally sized pieces of paper that fit together as a puzzle to build the order. The other 3 of us are blown away with the elegant simplicity of this solution, and want to use it to help direct the main community meeting.

Dale also suggested comging up with a genetic algorithm to come up with the best possible combination to make everyone happy. Jim and Willie could see that this would be a really good idea, but both asserted that many people will probably not trust a genetic algorithm, as they probably won't understand it. We propose that this genetic algorithm would be used simply as a guide. (That is if Dale wouldn't mind spending the time creating this software).