Item 28. Minutes from the Grex Board of Directors Meeting, 4/1/93 Valerie Mates (popcorn) Sun, Apr 4, 1993 (10:45). 238 lines, 4 responses. Minutes from the Grex Board of Directors' Meeting, Thursday 4/1/93 Present (for at least part of the meeting) were: aa8ij, chelsea, danr, mdw, mju, morel, pegasus (both Pattie and I-think-it's Ron), popcorn, remmers, srw, steve, and tsty. Before the meeting began, Zingermans asked us to move downstairs because some other group had reserved the upstairs for a meeting. As an apology, for kicking us out of the upstairs, they found Grex a group of tables together in the downstairs and they gave us two free pots of tea and an absolute sea of chocolates to munch on. We were quite appreciative of how they handled the problem. Mary Remmers volunteered to write a letter of appreciation to Zingermans for how nicely Boona handled the situation. Sacrificial Gavel-Banging - remmers ------------------------------------ Although the meeting didn't have a quorum when it started, the consensus was to go ahead and start anyway and cover whatever business didn't require the directors to vote on anything. John opened the meeting with the sacrificial banging of the gavel. Treasurer's Report - danr -------------------------- Grex did well in March. Donations covered bills, plus Grex had income from the JCC sale. Also, Jemmie Wang (login ID rogue, who was selling computers at the JCC sale), as promised, sent Grex a percentage of those sales where the person mentioned Grex during the purchase. Grex also had income from the fund raising drive for new phone lines: all but $70 of the pledges has arrived. Grex has about $650 in the bank. Also, "renewal season" is coming soon -- lots of year-long members expire in May and June, so Grex can expect good income to help with the usually-lean summer months. New members are joining at a good clip, too; Grex has been getting one or two new $60 members every month. This is a great time to plan directions for Grex's growth. Planning Committee - danr ------------------------- Discussion in the planning item is going well. Dan plans to have the discussion there continue to get ideas are out in the open, then have the committee meet face-to-face once the basics have been discussed on-line. The committee will be 6 or 7 people. Danr will send mail to the committee members so they know they're on the committee. . Chair's Report - remmers ------------------------- John sent a letter to Ann Glendon at the NEW center to thank them for having considered Grex. Some group mailed John a survey of community access networks. He will reply to it and have Grex get compiled in to the results. Technical Committee - steve --------------------------- There's not much new news. Grex is now at 5 megs of memory. The parity errors that have been crashing the system lately may be due to notorious Sun 2 positioning problems, where if you swap two of the boards from the back of the computer, the problem goes away. Steve plans to swap the first and second meg to see if that helps with the parity problems. Also, Grex has a spare one-meg board that can be swapped in if there's a problem with one of the ones Grex is using now. There's a computer, called the NOS (network operating systems) box, where the high-speed modem delivers news and mail to and from Grex. Russ Woodroofe suggested having this computer do double-duty as a maintenance line to Grex's console. Steve looked at the source code for the NOS box and he knows where to make the necessary changes. He's waiting for some free time. Once Steve and Marcus get together to make the changes, this should go quickly. They expect to be able to do this in a few weeks. Klaus Wolter gave (lent? I didn't catch which) Grex a 160 meg EDSI disk about a week and a half ago. Steve will dig up a controller for this to test with. The disk should be great for Gaggle, the test machine to see if Grex can one day migrate to a 486. Someone at my (Valerie's) office lent Grex a SCSI drive. Marc tested it on Gaggle; he and Steve hope to test it on Grex in the next few days. The idea is to figure out whether or not Grex can work with this type of drive. Someone at my (Valerie's) office donated a true blue IBM XT for the JCC sale. It's got not one but *two* keyboards, plus a hard drive of unknown size, two 5 1/4 inch floppies, an internal Hayes-compatible modem, and a CGA card (but no monitor). The technical committee is going to see what from it can be used for the NOS box or for Gaggle. I'll drop it off at Communication Electronics. At the JCC sale, someone handed Grex a Silicon Graphics machine (retail price is about $25,000 to $30,000 dollars, I'm told) with shot disk drives and asked Grex to sell it for about $300 and keep $100 and give $200 to him. It sold very quickly. There may be more stuff where that came from, to sell on consignment. New Phone Line - remmers and danr --------------------------------- Grex is now $20 away from having the whole phone-line fund paid. (Someone donated $50 between the treasurer's report, above, and the time the board got to talking about the phone line fund. That's why Grex was $70 away then and $20 away here.) Grex can make up the $20 difference from its bank account. There was some discussion about whether to add the new phone line now or wait to move Grex to a new building and pay an extra $42 to have the phone line turned on again; the board decided to go ahead and turn on the new phone line right away, since that's what people were donating money to do. Several people have suggested that Grex might want to move to M-Net's old space. M-Net is moving to the NEW center and leaving behind a space that already has wiring for 16 phone lines, located about 300 feet from where Steve and Marcus work, and M-Net's rent is $25 a month. The space would be very difficult to rent to anything other than a computer; it's not considered human-habitable. Ann Arbor requires a certain window-to-floorspace ratio for humans to live in a place; there are probably oodles of basements in town that don't meet this requirement. That kind of location would be very cheap for Grex to rent. Grex would be interested in signing a 3 to 5 year lease in the old M-Net space if this works out. However, there is some concern about whether or not M-Net currently has 24 hour access; someone said you can't go in there at 3 in the morning. Still, Grexies would be able to get to the hardware during evenings and weekends, so this would mean more up-time than Grex is seeing now. Another option is a friend of Steve's who might have basement space he could rent to Grex. As Grex moves to more modern hardware, it's already-modest space requirements will shrink. When will Grex move? It will probably be a while yet; folks need to select a new space and make arrangements to move into it. If Grex moves to M-Net's old space, the move would take place in mid-May at the earliest, since M-Net needs to wait for construction on the NEW center to finish. When Grex moves, Jim Reuter can supply a van if the move is on a Saturday. Steve will call Ken about adding the new phone line. Can Grex save money because it doesn't make outgoing calls? Grex already has measured-rate service. Can Grex save money by putting the phone lines into a person's name and getting the non-business line rate? Originally, the founders felt it was a good idea to use the business line rate for two reasons: 1) if Grex already has business-line rates, Grex doesn't need to deal with periodic hassles from the phone company when they decide that Grex *ought* to have business-line rates, and 2) businesses seem to get better service from Bell than residential customers. Also, eventually, when Grex has a lot more lines, Grex may want to have T1 service from the phone company; that's only available at business rates. Still, would it make sense to pay the lower residential rate until forced to pay the higher rate? TS volunteers to let Grex put the phone lines in his name. TS says if a building is zoned for human occupancy, the phone company can't force you to pay business rates. But does Grex really want to take on Ma Bell? Michigan Bell is already noticing the number of busy signals Grex is generating. Grex wants to stay friends with the phone company!!! Grex could get a phone-line rebate when it gets 501(c)3 non-profit status. Line noise problems - Steve called Bell for the fourth time. Bell found an impedence mismatch problem on the phone line on tty03 and fixed it for free. At some point, Bell insisted that all of Grex's lines were certified OK for voice, but Grex was still having noise problems. Steve mentioned the MPSC. One night a few weeks ago at about 4 AM all the phone lines conked out and then came up better. This might have been the phone company fixing something. Internet Access --------------- M-Net's current home is awfully close to the Argus building, which could be very handy for Internet access. The hardware committee is thinking about ways to run an Internet connection across the street. Jon Zeef said that Msen was thinking of offering free Internet connections to M-Net and Grex. Is this an April fool or did he mean it? I'll call Ed Vielmetti to ask for more information. Pegasus made phone calls to find out the price of a direct Internet connection. The person to talk to at Merit is difficult to reach; for $35 a month you can get access to dial *in* to Merit and telnet out; they don't know what it would cost for a genuine Internet connection. ANS could arrange for a 56 kbaud connection for $17,500 a year, plus installation charges. Holonet charges $1000 a month for the same, or $4.95 an hour on a different type of connection. A modem with compression would be cheaper way to get a 56 kilobaud connection. At the price of 2 modems, plus $30 a month for msen at a 2K per second link, this would be much more affordable. A T1 link or an on-site Merit connection would be faster. 501(c)3 Status -------------- (501(c)3 status is a non-profit tax classification that allows people to write off donations to your organization on their taxes. It would be a Very Nice thing for Grex to have, but there's an incredible amount of paperwork to fill out to get there.) Mcnally has the paperwork and is supposed to be working on it. Remmers sent mail asking him to work on it or bring back the application forms. Srw asked what's required to fill out the application; the answer was: "Bulldog persistence and a lot of free time. If you like doing your taxes, you'll love the 501(c)3 forms." Grex definitely still does intend to apply. Gotta find someone to do the work. New Business ------------ Staff and board need to talk about mail aliases for mail that gets sent to the staff and board. They'll do this in an item in the staff conference. Is there a package available to send mail to a group of people and have the message stay current until any one person in the group handles it? Such a package probably exists, but Grex is not currently using one. Monthly Attempted Election of Board Officers -------------------------------------------- Grex finally had a quorum and a non-tie vote for the 1993 board officers. Results are: Chair: Valerie Mates (popcorn) Secretary: John Remmers (remmers) Treasurer: Dan Romanchik (danr) Adjournment and Gavel Banging - remmers --------------------------------------- Remmers banged the gavel and closed the meeting. The Next Meeting ----------------- Starting in May, the board will meet on the second Tuesday of each month. The May meeting will be on 5/11/93 at Zingermans Next Door, upstairs. Now that we know you can reserve the upstairs at Zingermans, I'll make arrangements to do this for future meetings. (Followup: I talked to the Zingermans folks about reserving the upstairs. They generally charge $50 or require a large catering order to reserve the upstairs. However, the way Grex has been meeting in the upstairs without making a reservation is fine with Zingermans, and Grex is welcome to call ahead to find out if someone else has reserved the upstairs for any particular evening.)