Have managed to secure the Newark Public Library for our next meeting on May 14th. Pluses: Reachable by most all BayLEAFs without needing a charge (see below), nice large meeting room holding 60 people, large parking lot with isolated area for a LEAF cluster. Minuses: No charging, no in-house food (but we can bring in), few restaurants in close proximity. For this meeting, we need to start at 9:00 AM but must vacate the room (not the parking lot) by 10:30. The good news here is that the library doesn't open until 10 so we'll have the place to ourselves for an hour. I'll have a key to get us in early. Rules of using the library are that we must have the meeting open to the public, but we'll probably be done before anyone non-BayLEAF shows up. And I don't see any harm of people coming up to us in the parking lot asking questions about EV's (the Librarian was sure interested in them).
I'm still working on a guest speaker--have two or three possibilities at the moment. I'd like to cover some other topics as well, such as venue rotation, affiliation with EVA meetings, advocacy activities, general topics by suggestion, etc.
This may not be an ideal location, but at least it will allow us to congregate in a single space and have a focused, all-included discussion. Obviously we are still trying to home in on the ideal setting. Distances from selected cities are:
Mountain View, 21 mi
Redwood City, 15 mi
Foster City, 21 mi
Golden Gate Pk, 39 mi (carpool w/Oakland or Berkeley?)
UC Berkeley, 29 mi
Oakland, 24 mi
S. San Jose, 29 mi
Gilroy, 50 mi (sorry Steve, but we can carpool)
Further suggestions and comments welcomed. Probably a lot of people in the April and May Delivery threads are not familiar with this group yet, so we may want to do some recruiting. Looking forward to seeing everyone in two weeks!