In early December, two members of the Madison Hours Board met with the Director of the Dane County Timebank, a staff member and a Board member to discuss ways that our organizations can work together. We talked about goals in terms of providing better economic options for community members, synergies that can be developed between our organizations and the possibility of formally joining forces.

We have 2 volunteer opportunities coming up. Please use the Contact form if you are able to help with either or both. Each pays 1 Madison Hour (paper or electronic) per hour worked.

---
1. Help prepare oven roasted potatoes for La Fete Du Marquette. We do this instead of our July pancake breakfast and receive a donation from the Fete for our efforts.

There are 2 shifts available. This job takes place at Nature's Bakery, 1019 Williamson St.

Thanks to all the members that have emailed me about site errors over the last week or so.

In order to correct the problem we have ask our webhost to move our site to one of their shiny new servers. This will happen soon and then I will be troubleshooting any issues that may come up in the move. I'm also going to be upgrading some of the modules that are used on the site so expect some outages over the next day or so.

Again, thanks for the emails. Very helpful!

We had more interest from members than usual regarding the open Board seats but only two members nominated themselves - both of whom currently serve on the Board.

So, at our Board meeting this evening we decided to cancel the election and we appointed Rob McClure and Jon Hain to 1 year terms. We will keep the Candidate Statement links on members' profile pages and encourage everyone to consider stepping up to the plate and nominating yourself to help govern Madison's local currency system. The Board will review any nominations and hopes to appoint 2 more Directors by this summer.

The Board meets monthly and directors typically volunteer 1 - 4 hours per month. We have a 5 person board. Currently, there are 3 seats open for 2 year terms.

Madison Hours Cooperative makes loans available from a revolving fund for our members to use for a wide variety of projects.

These loans are interest-free. We created this fund in order to fulfill our mission to help create and support a community-based ceconomic system. By loaning Hours into circulation we increase the number circulating which helps employ our community members and brings new members into the Hours system.

Loan requests will be evaluated on the following:

* How does this impact the local economy?
* Does it help promote local self-reliance?

I made a number of changes to the member accounting area that will make it easier to see your on-line transactions. Logged in members can just click "Accounting" from their profile page to see their current balance, credit limits and some graphs that show historic usage. To make these graphs look pretty you've got to contact some people and get trading! We have lots of great listings right now so there is no excuse to not be using local currency.

Other, minor, changes were made throughout the site with an eye towards ease of use.

The outage *should* be brief.

We will be off-line for a short time to add better tracking of our visitors, referrers and search terms. We will also be making changes to how our urls are structured which will make "nicer" urls for search engines and for sharing with friends.

We will make a backup immediately after going off-line so any changes made this evening to your account will be preserved.

On November thirteenth 2009 Wisconsin Student Public Interest Research Group and Big Red Go Green invite you to march with fellow students and citizens in support of green solutions. 3 - 5 pm.

This march is intended to raise awareness about the Climate Summit in December in Copenhagen, The American Clean Energy and Security Act, and climate change.

We were having a couple issues with our website that should be resolved now.

1. Members were receiving spam email from the Contact form
2. The website was often unavailable, resulting in a blank screen or a 404 error.

Both of these issues should now be fixed. Please contact us if you experience these or other problems.