Item 76. Minutes from the 12/8/92 Grex Board Meeting Valerie Mates (popcorn) Thu, Dec 10, 1992 (00:05). 158 lines, 36 responses. Minutes from the Grex Board of Directors' meeting December 8, 1992, Zingerman's, 7:30 pm. Present (for at least part of the meeting) were: arabella, danr, davel, kep, krj, mju, morel, popcorn, power, remmers, steve, and tsty. Before the meeting started I showed everyone the new pink stripe in my hair. Gavel Banging - remmers ----------------------- NEW Center Update - remmers --------------------------- No news. The NEW center folks are behind schedule. M-Net was interviewed for this; we have not yet been contacted. The board is puzzled by this, since the NEW center focuses on startup groups, yet M-Net is 10 years old. We've heard M-Net is lobying the NEW center folks for space. We need to think about how NEW center delays affect Grex's plans to get a sixth phone line. Should we pester the NEW center? No, let's hold off. Maybe we'll print out some great Grex items and add those to our application. Treasurer's Report - danr ------------------------- We're about set for the December bills. There was some discussion of whether the Getting Ahead fund was intended to be held in Grex's bank account or given to Ken as a goodwill gesture. The consensus is to give the Getting Ahead fund to Ken so we're ahead on our bills. Hardware - steve ---------------- Steve and Marc got the fourth disk on line. Arbortext donated us 3 new Eagles. These are 380 megs each, worked when they were last used, weigh in at around 135 pounds each, and are "as big as a child's coffin". We'll need to schlep these around town later this week. Power and Morel volunteered vehicles. A rack mount comes with the disks. Each disk needs about 550 watts. This is more disk space per watt than what we've got now. (Yay!) We would replace /h2 and /h3 with the first disk and use it for the newsfeed. When that disk proves stable, we'd move it over to replace all the other disks and start another Eagle testing to replace that one. We'd keep the third one as a spare for emergencies. Will the new Eagles overload the power conditioner when they need a power spurt as they start up? We definitely need another power conditioner to take over some of the load on the current one. We need to check that Ken's wiring will work OK with Grex's new disks. Grex's equipment may be seeing occasional power spikes now. If we collect up these 3 Eagles and 2 others we've got elsewhere, we will have quite the aerie of Eagles! Marc changed News to run a dynamic expire program. Groups that someone reads are set to expire in 2 days; groups that nobody reads expire in 12 hours. This seems to help a bunch with Grex's disk space. Mail: the NOS (network operating systems) box is up now but not yet very reliable. It works great for a while and then stops communicating for no reason. A power conditioner may help. It's getting 700 character per second throughput. We may upgrade to Taylor UUCP which would greatly increase throughput. We gotta get the NOS box's modem off the trunk hunt: it's nasty to dial into. Do we want a new phone line for it? Covering Grex so the insurance adjusters are happy that nobody can stick their tongue into Grex and get electrocuted: All the different boxes that make up Grex have covers now, but when the covers are on, the cables don't all reach what they need to. Steve has received parts he ordered to make up a new cable. He will install it soon. Publicity --------- Is Misti doing the public access TV thing? Yup, we think so. 501(3)c tax exempt status ------------------------- McNally is working on this. He's not here tonight. Akron BBS suit -------------- Recently someone asked if it was OK for a 13 year old to be reading news on Grex. Staff and the board exchanged mail about this and about a hair-raising lawsuit where a sheriff confiscated a bunch of BBS computer equipment in Akron, claiming that the BBS had pornographic materials available to minors. Actually the sysop on this BBS was particularly careful *not* to put X-rated materials where non-validated people could see it, but sometimes users uploaded X-rated materials to directories other than the X-rated one. The sysop was careful to delete those files whenever he found them. The sheriff had a 15 year old kid press the Return key to download an x-rated file, so they could charge the sysop with supplying pornography to a minor. Later, the sheriff found a fuzzy picture that might possibly have been had underage models in it. The picture had been deleted from the BBS but it had been backed up onto a floppy disk the sysop never looked at, but the sheriff still charged the sysop with posession of child pornography. The case has yet to go to court, so we don't know how many of these charges will stick, but it's certainly causing untold frazzlement to the sysop. (Mike McNally might be able to upload the full text of this from the Risks digest.) So, we talked a lot about how we should prevent minors from seeing things they shouldn't, and how to prevent illicit files from being uploaded. Opinions ranged from "we can't prevent it so we shouldn't even try" to "warn users that parts of net news may be offensive to them, and is it OK to go ahead and display it anyway?" Luckily, Grex doesn't carry any of the binaries or pictures newsgroups, so most the questionable stuff from the net never makes it to our system. However, there are some sex discussion groups that may be pretty hot. We talked a *lot* about what to do. We're really not sure. We'll try to find a lawyer who knows what we ought to do to protect Grex. We will talk about the issue with the public to see what answers people come up with. TS offered to sell phone number blocking devices to anybody who doesn't want their kid dialing in to Grex. Old Business ------------ Danr - We're likely to start doing some fundraising soon; maybe calling companies to ask for money for phone lines. Dan will enter an item about a face-to-face brainstorming session to be held over the holidays. New Business ------------ Should we get a sixth phone line? There are *lots* of arguements for and against it. After (again) much discussion, the board agreed we should get a new line for the NOS box, effectively freeing up half a current phone line. We need to enter a co-op item to talk about Grex's growth plans. Yay that Grex is growing!!!!!!!! Danr will call Ken to ask about turning on a new phone line. When's the next JCC sale? We think probably January. We'll call to ask if we can get on an advance notice mailing list. Danr will make a graph of when different members expire, so we know when to expect income as they renew. This gives us more ability to predict how much money Grex has or will need. Our Sun 2 guzzles power and it's old technology. What's our growth path? There's a machine called "pride" (as in "a pride of lions") on the horizon. It's built from scrounged parts and needs much less power than Grex. We'd need to get a version of Picospan that could run on it, plus some other miscellaneous hardware and two AT keyboards. This could eventually be a very interesting machine. Motion to adjourn ----------------- Remmers banged the gavel, and I made a motion for quieter gavel-banging in the future. Next Meeting ------------ The date of the next meeting will be determined after the elections, so we can be sure the whole board can be there. The cyberspace.org Domain ------------------------- Consensus: Let's do it!!!