2025-04-25 - Board Meeting

Board members present (3/3):

• CJ Trowbridge

• Joe Whisher

• Julia Heim

Also Present

• Tree Forester

Cyberpony Express Workshop Recap

• Discussed how they went;

  • Hardware Strategy

    • Ongoing project was allocated $500 budget by the board for development of experimental nodes including rich services like

      • IIAB

      • BBS

      • MUDs

      • Local LLMs

      • etc

  • New Partnerships

    • Amateur Radio Clubs → Repeater sites

  • Opsec

    • Best practices for security

    • Understanding limitations of encryption

• Discussed future plans

  • Ownership, Organization, and Governance Workshops

  • Land Trust Workshops

Cyberpony Express Disatches/Podcast

• First four workshops are now live on YouTube;

  • https://www.youtube.com/@HighDesertInstitute

Discuss new website

• Anyone can submit a change for any page.

• Planning to move all the other partner websites over to this model so anyone can edit any of those websites

• Anyone in “the org” which we haven’t really defined yet can approve these updates.

Financial Report

• Approximate balance of accounts, including pending transactions and estimates of pending fees.

  • General Unrestricted Funds

    • Balance is $759.52

    • Most of the donations to this account have come from people choosing to optionally donate while subscribing to the HDI substack. Thank you!

  • Cyberpony Express Funds

    • Received $10,721 in donations so far.

    • $6,656 in new donations since last meeting.

    • Fiscal sponsorship will take 7%.

    • Interchange is around 3%.

    • Gross is around $9,648.90.

      • Most of this is not yet realized because of how long GoFundMe takes to disburse the money.

    • Allocations so far;

      • $307 for ten nodes to give away to people who came to the first Cyberpony Express workshop.

      • $189.64 for T-Decks for Joe and Julia to work on understanding and explaining the system.

      • $500 for cyberpony express hardware development

      • $1948.43 for a large batch of nodes to give away to whoever wants to host one, prioritizing intentional communities, community gardens, etc.

    • Net is about $7,203.83

    • Minus allocations is about $6,703.83.

  • Land Acquisition Funds

    • Received $1,897 in donations so far.

    • $25 in new donations since last meeting.

      • (We haven’t been pushing this at all since then.)

    • Fiscal sponsorship will take 7%.

    • Interchange is around 3%.

    • Balance is about $1707.30

Board Votes

• Board voted to allow CJ/Multiverse to allocate the remaining radios we have purchased to the people who have applied to recieve one.

• Board voted to buy a T-Deck for Tree so that Tree and Julia can demonstrate them to intentional communities as they travel and produce their own Cyberpony Express content.