Board Meeting - 09 Jul 2026
Attendees: Ethan Espie, Nat Henry, Stephen Mangum, Stephanie May, Karsten Vennemann, Reily Love, Jude Restis
Location: Seattle Climate Innovation Hub, 1215 4th Ave 15th Floor, Seattle WA 98101
Time: 5:00 pm
Meeting agenda
- Zulip vs Discord vs Slack
- Fall meetings
- Stephen in Fall
- Board
- Website
- Spring Fling
- Action items
1. Zulip vs Discord vs Slack
17 responses to the survey; 15% in favor of migrating, 15% in favor of sticking with Slack, the rest with no strong opinion regarding Zulip, Discord, or other Slack alternatives; no clear winner emerged, so we recommend staying with Slack.
Motion passed unanimously to establish a private board-only Google group. There was additional conversation about which discussions are best suited for email rather than Slack; for example, Slack conversations cannot be exported. The current Google group remains open to all.
2. Fall meetings
We still have Bloedel Hall reserved through winter quarter. Beyond that we need a new location. Consensus is we prefer a location on the UW Campus, but we need a UW affiliate to book the room. Additionally, we need a UW student or staff member to attend each meeting so we can get into the building after hours.
We also discussed cross-posting information from the website to the Meetup page.
Unanimously approved: create a workflow for updating monthly meeting agendas.
3. Presidential succession
Stephen (VP) will take over as acting president for several months in the fall while Nat is out on leave.
4. Board
The next board elections are in January; the president position will be up for election. We discussed that we should encourage others to consider running for board in January, with an emphasis on diversifying the board.
5. Website
The website has a lot of technical debt, with an aging codebase and deprecated features.
Stephanie is planning a website refresh. The refreshed site structure will present a slimmed-down version of the following information:
- Community (entry/participation)
- Events (flings): this should be preserved
- Projects (website, BBoxFinder)
- Governance/org details
- Historical record
Possible options for rewriting the website include:
- Stick with Jekyll
- Eleventy: everything written in markdown
- Hugo
- Astro
Consensus is to move forward with Eleventy provided it can support key features like an embedded locator map. It will be the easiest for member volunteers to edit.
Historical website content will be archived.
6. Spring Fling
The Spring Fling will likely happen in March; Ethan will assist with initial planning. Next steps will be to follow up with current UW students to help find a location.
7. Action items
- All should reach out to UW affiliates willing to book a room in their department for our regular meetings AND/OR a suitable space for the Spring Fling
- Stephen will take over as acting president in September and October while Nat is out on leave
- Stephanie will stand up a prototype and post a plan for the new website
- Ethan will assist with initial planning for the Spring Fling