ARDC held a community meeting on Saturday, July 24. Below is a recording of the meeting and a recap. In the recap, times are included in square brackets, so that you can quickly fast forward to a particular topic. For example, discussion of our 2021 grants begin at the [7:00] mark.

A PDF file with the slides presented can be found here.

The July 24, 2021 ARDC Community Meeting introduced new staff members and brought the community up to speed on the grants that we’ve made so far in 2021.

After some housekeeping, new staff members – Grants Manager, Chelsea Parrága, KF0FVJ, and Content Manager, Dan Romanchik, KB6NU – introduced themselves [2:20]. Rosy, KJ7RYV, then mentioned that two other staff members will be starting soon: John Hays, K7VE, who will  join ARDC as Outreach Manager on August 2, 2021, and an Administrative Coordinator assistant will join us shortly after.

Dan, KB6NU, then discussed some of our latest outreach efforts [4:50]. These include:

• participating in the Huntsville Hamfest August 21-22, 2021;
• appearing on the June 28, 2021 Linux in the Ham Shack podcast; and
• creating the new ARDC in the News web page, which tracks where we are out in the world.

Chelsea, KF0FVJ, then took over the meeting to talk about grants [7:00]. In the first half of the year, ARDC made 22 grants for a total of $3.1 million. Of these grants:

• 9 grants (~$2.1 million) have gone to projects supporting amateur radio infrastructure and the growth of amateur radio,
• 8 grants (~$436,000) have gone to education projects, and
• 5 grants  (~$530,000) have gone to technical innovation projects.

After the grants presentation, there was a short Q&A session on grant making [15:20].

Following this, we had a short presentation from Antonios Chariton, SV2OIY, a member of  our Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) [22:30]. In recent months, they have:

• Studied the current usage of the 44Net address space,
• Developed metrics to better formulas plans and measure success,
• Identified major use cases and are developing an IPv4 management proposal, and
• Begun work on a global connectivity strategy.

The final presentation discussed some of the results of the survey we conducted earlier this year [26:40]. The survey queried both 44Net members and the broader amateur radio community about  what they would like to see more of in amateur radio and how to solve the challenges that amateur radio faces. The complete survey results are available by going to bit.ly/ARDCSurvey2.

To finish the meeting, we had a spirited Q&A session covering a variety of topics. [34:00]. To learn about when the next one of these meetings will be, subscribe to our email newsletter.