Item 28. Minutes from the Grex Board of Directors meeting, September 23, 1998 Scott Helmke (scott) Fri, Sep 25, 1998 (19:10). 94 lines, 12 responses. Grex board meeting 9/23/98 In attendance: robh (Rob Henderson), jdeigert (Jim Deigert), keesan, (Sindi Keesan), janc (Jan Wolter, President), valerie (Valerie Mates, board), dang (Dan Gryniewicz, board), arthurp (Charles , staff), roadtrip (KK), scg (Steve Gibbard, board), mta (Misti Tucker, board), drew (Andrew Lanagan), ken (Ken Ascher), scott (Scott Helmke, Secretary), aruba (Mark Conger, Treasurer) 603 Initial gavel pounding at 7:45 pm 605 Publicity committee: misti posted info about nonprofit media relations seminar in Detroit, would cost $50/person. Misti would like to go, Aruba interested also. Misti suggests that attendees ought to pay 1/2 of ticket. Another idea would be to spend the money on books that can be passed around. (no Board action on seminar). Jdeigert is working on supplying local seniors w/ Grex access computers, would like help training people. Misti, Valerie, Aruba volunteer to help. Valerie reports our Arborweb ad has gotten some hits, some new users. Valerie has been putting up flyers. Also printed up some dialin stats, no recent changes. 607 Monthly Treasurer's report aruba reports August took in $658, spent $591, some income from auction. 3 new members, 102, 97 paid up. Auction has taken in ~$1100. (I was supposed to get a more complete sheet from aruba after the meeting, but apparently I didn't -scott) Rent increase to $63 (+$3), lower electric cost after measuring power consumption. Phone rates went up slightly this month due to Fed line charges- no phone company action yet on tax exemption, and retroactive status still uncertain. Visit to Accounting Aid Society not done yet, aruba and janc interested. 609 Technical Committee report Scott reports backup tape problem, backup not done this month. Different tapes or clean heads on tape drive? Valerie put a wrapper around passwd program giving useful advice. FAQ being updated. Large amounts of vandal activity wasting staff time. Some odd hole in tel may be being exploited to do minor vandalism. Valerie sent mail to disk hogs. Drew reports a problem w/ mail size limit. Valerie also added FAQ pointer to newuser program. 611 The Big Finance Report (aruba) Long term trends, income vs. expenses. Aruba put in data back to 1993 (data to follow?) Cutting costs discussion: We may be able to save on bank fees (about $5/month). Cutting phone lines: need to determine criteria for how many phone lines we really need (how often busy, etc). Ken suggests Ameritech can do a "blockage study" of busy attempts. Do we want to cut any lines now? Some discussion of stats, policy for number of lines to be built up in Coop. Deferred for online discussion. IC-Net link: is it still worth the money (~$40/mo)? Scg suggests that this line (which we've discussed putting mail on) is unsuited to be a mail link. It would be hard to reestablish this kind of link at such a good price, though. We really couldn't use this as main link anymore. Janc moves that Grex drop the IC-Net phone lines. Seconded by Scott. 5-0-1 (mta absent, scg abstained). The motion is passed, Valerie, scg, and aruba will implement. Jdeigert asks about M-net style member-only access to resources like dialins. Ken also says that A2 news and other media should carry ads for free, since we are nonprofit. We would need to send some ad layouts (Valerie volunteered to look into this). 613 Accepting Credit Cards: We are still gathering info (some discussion in Coop of specific deals). Danr's (Dan Romanchik, membership chair) deal would be $75 to start, plus a monthly fee of $35, Dan has offered to let us use his software, saving ~$200. Will this get us enough additional users? It would be easier for users in other countries to send money. How do we handle chargebacks? May be a little tricky. Deferred. 613a Board Elections: We need to start setting up nominating process. The bylaws don't say when to open nominations, traditionally has been 3 weeks before voting opens. General agreement to open 3 weeks before voting. Janc moves that remmers (John Remmers, staff) be appointed Election Czar for the 1999-2000 Board member election. Scg seconds. Board votes 6-0-0, the motion is passed. 617 New business Grex walk lunch coordinator has disappeared from Grex, we are now looking for a replacement (not a Board issue). Aruba has a copy of Ameritech customer record, passed it around the meeting. Aruba got a request to open a member w/ a check w/ an old address. Would that be OK? General agreement that it would be. 2120 Final gavel pounding: 10:11 pm Minutes submitted by Scott Helmke, Secretary (scott). 12 responses total. ---------- (28) #1 John H. Remmers (remmers) Fri, Sep 25, 1998 (19:49). 8 lines. Thanks for making me Election Czar. That's what I've always been, but now it's official. :) But are you sure you didn't intend for the nomination period itself be three weeks long? The bylaws specifies a two week hiatus between the close of nominations and the start of voting. If the nominations open three weeks before voting begins like the motion says, that allows only one week for nominations. ---------- (28) #2 Marcus Watts (mdw) Fri, Sep 25, 1998 (19:58). 3 lines. It might be worth looking into what sort of deal Great Lakes Bank can offer for banking for grex. They may have some sort of low fee small business banking account that would be useful. ---------- (28) #3 Mary Remmers (mary) Fri, Sep 25, 1998 (20:11). 4 lines. There really should be ample time for someone to survey candidates on selected issues, for the candidates to answer, and for the responses to be posted in Agora before voting begins. ---------- (28) #4 Steve Gibbard (scg) Fri, Sep 25, 1998 (23:53). 9 lines. (re the ICNet link: while I said that I didn't think the link would be very suitable for our volume of mail, I did point out that STeve Andre and maybe others disagree with me strongly on that, and did suggest more public discussion of the ICNet link issue before voting to cut it. Other board members suggested that more discussion was not needed. That said, I do think cutting it was the right thing to do, and my abstention was to avoid the remote possibility of an appearance of a possible conflict of interest. I just wanted to clear that up since there's some mail in my mailbox demanding an explanation). ---------- (28) #5 Valerie Mates (valerie) Sun, Sep 27, 1998 (11:59). 15 lines. Some notes: * I'm interested in going to the meeting with the Accounting Aid Society too. * To clarify: I didn't add a pointer from the FAQ to newuser; I changed the login files for new users to tell people to type "faq" to see a list of frequently asked questions. At the time of the board meeting it was too soon to tell if this helped. By now I'm fairly sure this is helping to reduce the number of repetitive questions in staff e-mail. * Mark's report from Ameritech was oodles of pages of small type that simply describes the phone service we have now and what each thing costs. We were vaguely boggled that the poor people at Ameritech have to work with such a monsterously difficult mound of information. * Re 1: That is indeed a typo: The board intended to open nominations 3 weeks before nominations close. ---------- (28) #6 Mark A. Conger (aruba) Sun, Sep 27, 1998 (13:58). 55 lines. A couple of notes from me: 1. I will try to get the graphs and numbers I presented to Jan so he can post them somewhere where anyone with a graphical web browser can see them. The bottom line, though, was this: over the last 12 months, when you compare our operating expenses to our general fund income, we have averaged an $80 surplus per month. That doesn't mean that we have $960 more than when we started, however; in fact we spent about $2200 out of the general fund over and above our operating expenses. That money went mostly to hardware purchases and phone installation charges, as well as the negative balance in the Grex store and a couple of advertisements. The net change in the general fund over the last year has been a decrease of about $1300, from $3850.52 to $2537.18. My analysis of the data is this: while our our expenses have been increasing more or less steadily since 1993, our income has been fairly constant since mid 1994. We garnered a large surplus between then and now, and have been steadily drawing it down. Now it's mostly gone, and we need to either increase our income, decrease our expenses, or resign ourselves to depending entirely on fundraisers to pay for all our upgrades (even the mundane ones). Most of our past fundraisers have fallen short of paying for what we bought. Cutting the ICNET link will give us 50% more surplus in our operating budget (i.e., the margin should increase from $80/month to $120/month.) We decided to go ahead and cut it based on those numbers and 1) users will notice no difference as a result of it going away, 2) we didn't use it the two times we have temporarily lost our ISDN connection, 3) if we ever do lose our ISDN connection permamently there is no way we could fall back to it, because our usage has grown too dramatically, and 4) scg pointed out that the slow link had a lot of trouble receiving mail in the past, and probably won't be suitable for a mail machine in the future. Since "fallback position" and "mail link" have been the two main suggested uses for the ICNET connection, there didn't seem to be much point to keeping it. 2. We talked about cutting one or more dialin lines as well. The consensus (I believe) of the board was that rather than move to cut individual lines now we ought to adopt a policy which determines how many lines we should have at any given time. The policy should make use of statistics we gather to determine the appropriate number. I'll be entering an item about that soon. The point being that we don't want to have to spend 6 months wrangling with this question the next time we think we have too many or too few lines. We can simply refer to the statistics and the policy. 3. The election motion we passed didn't specify anything about when nominations would open, it merely appointed remmers czar, so that he could decide issues like that. ---------- (28) #7 Valerie Mates (valerie) Sun, Sep 27, 1998 (21:58). 10 lines. I view the decrease in the surplus as partly an okay thing. We don't *want* Grex to have a huge surplus; the idea is to have enough for emergencies but not enough to leave users' money languishing in the bank. At the "plan the budget" meetings over the past few years, we've planned a lot of hardware upgrades and intended to spend down some of the surplus to go back to a cushion closer to $2000. At this point Grex is running on much more comfortable hardware, with little need for upgrades in the immediate future, and the bank account is down to about the right size. I wouldn't want to see Grex's bank account become a lot smaller, but I do think it's fine where it is. ---------- (28) #8 Big Snauf (lilmo) Mon, Sep 28, 1998 (21:07). 3 lines. I believe the concern was with the trend in the size of the bank account/surplus. Yes, things are fine, now, but if it continuesto go down, as it has been doing, then there is concern. ---------- (28) #9 Valerie Mates (valerie) Wed, Sep 30, 1998 (11:55). 4 lines. Right. So the question is "Did the bank account go down because of purchases that were planned at the plan-the-budget meetings (which I don't think is a problem), or did it go down because of an ongoing downward trend (which would mean that Grex needs to do some belt-tightening)?" ---------- (28) #10 Daniel Gryniewicz (dang) Wed, Sep 30, 1998 (13:29). 1 line. And it appears that it went down because of bugeted purchases. ---------- (28) #11 Big Snauf (lilmo) Tue, Oct 6, 1998 (22:50). 1 line. Then it becomes a NotBadThing, though certainly not a GoodThing, right? ---------- (28) #12 TS Taylor (tsty) Thu, Oct 8, 1998 (22:14). 3 lines. re someting or other above; yes, we *do* want a large surplus. think about it for a few more minutes. but not a surplus as a result of reduced capability or flexibility.