I'll apologize in advance for my uber-anal-retentive meeting organization tendencies, but I've had too many horrible meeting experiences to not take some precautions. I hate to be the square guy making up rules on the playground, but it's gotta happen eventually.

So it sounds like March 11th will be the first official "get down to business" meeting. I think we'll have a lot to talk about, and Common Roots limits us to two hours, so we need to have some sort of agenda that we can stick to if we're going to get everything done. So, in that spirit, I open nominations for agenda items. What I'd like to see discussed:

Group name- we might be able to do that online before the meeting.
Level of formality- we should make some decision about this early. Are we a club? Do we elect officers? Draw up by-laws? Are we going to incorporate as a non-profit? Do we charge dues yet? If so, why?
Meeting schedule- how often do we get together to "do business"? Do we have full group meetings and officer-only meetings?

I think these three things need to be hammered out, written down, and agreed upon before we go any further. Once we have them nailed down, we can move on to the fun stuff, like plotting a course to finding a space, organizing classes that we can charge for to raise revenue, or deciding whether or not to kit up items for sale.

i don't knwo that we need officers and bylaws yet. i think deciding on a structure and some initial committes would be good.

i.e.
project committee - folks organizing a parafe float, or whatever shinding we're gonna manage.
business committee - folks sorting out pros adn cons of how we actually incorporate our selves either as an informal club or legal body.
pr committee - web presence, logo, flyers
core committee - meeting chair(s) treasurer(donated crap inventory manager) secretary.

until we get more of a really committed group that's *doing* something other than beer, pie and coffee together, we'd be putting the cart before the ox.

You've also brought up a good point about establishing the group as an entity:
I wanted to make sure it got included in this thread.

(More and more, I'm thinking we'll need to get the attention of a committed local visionary angel, like the Twin Cities equivalent of a Wozniak... and, y'know, recruit some really good fundraisers.)

*Putting on sarcasm pants*

Too bad Carl Pohlad is dead.

The man had balls, though.

ok, so other ideas?

some of this we can sus out here in advance, and some of it we're going to need actual counsel to advise on.

what sort of structure do we want? from the sounds of things early on the co-op model was appreciated, so do we want to try to form a "board" as it were to prep ideas, adn then present them to the whole?

One thing we will definitely need to discuss is Studio Bricolage, re: possibly joining with them under the Leonardo's Basement NFP umbrella, or just being friendly & hanging out at their 4301 Nicollet space with them sometimes, or striking out entirely on our own, etc.

Theo, in terms of the record keeping, there is a comment about keeping track of donated materials for the shop. We should put together a DB to perform this function.

Sure -- with either some integration of bar codes (easier) or RFID (harder) and appropriate hand-portable readers.

I like the idea of a barcode reader. They tend to be cheap and easy to use.