Letter of Intent
This letter serves as my formal notification that I, David Kessinger, am officially submitting my name to run for election to the Board of Directors for the Dallas Makerspace for the year 2017.
Maker Background & Achievements:
- In fourth year of membership, started at Ladybird.
- Chair of Machine Shop: Implemented Team Concept within committee and increased member involvement and responsibility. Teach classes and mentor individuals when asked for help. Regular monthly meetings held on two consecutive days to help achieve member input.
- Finance Committee member, regular attendee of weekly meeting. Informed membership by posting weekly membership trends and projected cash flow from Membership dues and doing QBO inquiries for Chairs and members.
- Co-Chair, recently Vice Chair of Creative Arts. (when co-chairs were allowed). With Nicole, started,implemented, empowered, and funded CA's numerous SIG’s which have been a great success in getting members actively involved in various CA activities.
- PR/Member Assistance: Given tours on Thursdays, now mainly do tours doing day and other evenings for drop-ins; issue and assist members with badge problems.
Goals – Platform Committees
- Empowerment: Committee Chairs are a major component to our success as an all volunteer organization, encourage Chairs to utilize SIGs or teams to increase member involvement and spread management load.
- Develop Chairs: current and future. Help create Chair Handbook/Class: Roles, What you can, can’t, and probably should do; Procurement - using Expensify, collecting material fees using, Quickbooks on Line, submitting funding requests to BoD, need for Committee Reports, updating Wiki, etc.
Financial
- Savings: like retirement should be treated as a planned priority expense. Would propose that 12.5%~ 15% of monthly dues collected go to savings until we acquire additional space. Savings would fluctuate up or down based on current dues income. I believe the need to be more aggressive at actively saving. At current Member Dues equals $84K ~ $105K annually.
- Capital Acquisition: Develop a general plan for next 6 and 12 months based on input of committee goals to give an idea of expenses. It would be a dynamic but tentative road map.
- Position of Treasurer formally made an officer of the Corporation.
Strategic Planning
- Develop stated, defined targets and overall plan/goals for issues like: How big do we want to be? What capabilities do we want that we don’t have or improvements on existing capabilities and facilities. Set up advisory team to do research, poll members, and submit to membership and BoD.
- Immediately form a By-laws review committee. There are things that need to be defined, clarified, or changed. Start immediately so there are 11 months to discuss, debate and develop proposals for the 2018 Annual Meeting. But do it in non-rushed and reasoned manner.
Education & Training
- Training Development: The SIG kickoff meeting a under Classroom committee was held on 4-3-2017 to assist committees in developing their classes, especially for Training Required Equipment. We will be using Moodle as online platform, I fully support this effort.
- Training Required courses online: Having as many or those portions that be online deployed. Much of the backlog and delay new and existing members experience would be reduced. This would allow for better utilization of classrooms for more intermediate or advanced training.
Nominated By: Nicole Franczvai, Ken Purcell, Eric Smith, Luke Olson, Adam Oas, Bill Gee, Stan Simmons, Tom Tansy, Art Givens, Steve Martin, Tim Bene, Zach Metzinger, Britton Burt, Chris Marlow, Lisa Selk, Chris Pattison, Axeonos Robertson, Frank Lima, and Bob Karnaugh.
As part of this Letter of Intent, I also agree to diligently execute the duties and functions as a member of the Board of Directors. Those duties include, but are not limited to:
- Making every effort to attend the annual meeting(s) and regular meetings.
- Perform the duties and responsibilities of Director as outlined in the Dallas Makerspace Bylaws as well as the Dallas Makerspace Rules and Policies.
If elected, I am fully aware and understand the importance of my full participation as a productive and effective leader during my tenure on the Dallas Makerspace Board of Directors, and I agree to the terms and conditions set forth in the Corporate Charter, Bylaws, Rules, and applicable government laws and regulations.
/s/ David Kessinger
