(49) #59 Valerie Mates (popcorn) Fri, Apr 3, 1992 (00:24). 149 lines. Meeting Notes: (150 lines long) -------------- Board Meeting 1: 4/2/92 In attendance: arabella, arthur, danr, griz, ken, mcnally, mdw, morel, remmers, popcorn, and steve. Terms of office: arabella, mcnally, and morel are in office 'til 12/92. Steve, remmers, danr, and popcorn are in office 'til 12/93. Grex was down. Steve and Marcus were installing new disk controllers when Ken had to leave. Lotsa dust in the machine, from construction. The fire marshall looked at Grex and said Ack! Steve will enter an item with details. Money: If we gross less than $5000 in a year, we don't need to pay taxes. Cool! If we get 501(c)3 status, we'll never need to pay taxes. 501(c)3 status may be retroactive, and donations are retroactively tax exempt. I called the IRS today to see if Grex needs to pay tax. Probably not. They'll send me a mess of forms to read over and decide from. Elections: chair = remmers, treasurer = danr, secretary = me (which is why I'm posting the meeting notes). Also, Tom Doehne is appointed bookkeeper. Should we use Robert's Rules at meetings? Probably not. Choose Staff: Who is the current staff? mdw, steve, mju, remmers, popcorn, arthur, ken, maybe others. All those people have root; are they all staff? Where's bhoward? Isn't he staff? Nope. He moved to NYC or Europe or someplace. Should we assign specific responsibilities to specific staff members? To some degree, but we should leave multiple people in charge of most things, for redundancy and continuity and the idea of having apprentices so the original people can go away without harming the system. Should we move the system to someplace where there's 24 hour access? Should we have official "greeters" to welcome new users to Grex and help old users with questions and problems? Mcnally volunteers to be one, but don't ever call him by the name "ombudsman". Maybe put the names of the greeters (or whatever we end up calling them) in the Agora banner, so people know who to ask for help. We'll decide this later, so all users can be in on the decision and can volunteer to be greeters. What are staff duties? Make mcnally a root to help with greeter stuff. Roots are all staff. Staff members aren't necessarily all roots. Tom asked to not be staff anymore. I think. (Tom?) Remmers wants an apprentice cfadm. Do we need a useradm? Look at the messages about deleting files in the login banner message. Build a "reaper" program? Write it? No need to. Jan wrote cfadm tools; we'll just need to copy them to Grex and tweak 'em. Voteadm: Vote on it in the co-op conference. Need a trustworthy person with some Unix ability. What's the scoop on the staff conference? Should we scrap it? Everything should be discussed in the open. Staff are good about posting stuff that should be in the co-op conference in the right place, not in the staff conf. Currently the staff conf contains a log of what the different roots did (eg "I fixed poppins's account so she can read her mail"); stuff in there is either sensitive or boring system related stuff. Most people don't know there's a staff conference; that's good, it means issues are being discussed in public, as they ought to be, and not behind closed doors. Should the board be allowed into the staff conference? Yup, since the staff reports to the board. No talking about board stuff in the staff conference: use the coop conference instead. Money: bigger disks ==> more news ==> more income. Recent new users have been spending a lot of time on Grex reading Usenet news. This should hopefully help lots to get new users into the system. Gotta encourage people more to become members. Lots of people mean to contribute but never get around to it. Does membership information belong in the motd file? [That's the file of information that gets displayed every time you log in.] Hm. Steve is working on some new items for a new Agora conference for after it's re-started. New users need more of an explanation of what's going on. Steve's items are sort of a "roadmap" into Grex. One of these items will discuss how to become a member. Ken says groups with 501(c)3 status can get booths at the art fair for $10. This could be a good way to reach a lot of potential new users. Gotta appoint a publicity chairperson. The membership will choose someone for this. Danr volunteers to organize it. Is Grex listed in Pubnix? Grex is in Horst Mann. Gotta get more people involved. If Misti wants help with the Grex cookbook, the publicity committee can help. July is coming: lots of founders threw in enough money for more than a year's membership last July, but a lot of them want their membership to only count for one year. We should see some decent income in July. Does Grex send warning messages to tell people their membership is about to expire? Yup. I've been sending one-month and one-week warnings, sometimes more, depending on the user. Let's automate this! Mcnally volunteers to write a program to automatically track membership stuff. Since danr is treasurer, they'll work together to figure out how to do this. If someone contributes, say, $10, does this count for one month's membership, or for one month and 20 days? Hm. To be decided later. Should the membership list be publically readable? Special Funds: ideas: a line conditioner fund, a disaster fund. To be discussed and voted on in the co-op conference. Contributions to special funds probably shouldn't count toward memberships. How many users do we have? There are about 131 people who've logged in more than once per 25 days. Hm. What counts as an active user? How big is the password file? We need to gently prod users to contribute, without being pushy about it. Encourage monthly memberships: if you don't want to join up for the long haul, join for just a month at a time! A non-hysterical monthly posting of financial information is useful. I've posted all of Grex's finances, up until February or so. People don't remember seeing it, but it's in the coop conference somewhere. I'll locate it and point people to it. Posting in spreadsheet format would be useful. New Services, Expansion: Internet!!! Several possibilities and contacts. Merit is working on getting into the schools, K-12. So is EMU. Grex can help get young people onto Merit. That'll help Grex with 501(c)3 status, it'll be neat, and it'll be great for the kids. What impact would usage by kids have on the rest of Grex? Would we need to restrict some of the conferences (such as the sex conference)? Restrict the accounts of classes of kids? Hm... We should talk about this in coop. M-Net made about $550 at the JCC sale. Is Grex going to do JCC sales? We should give out Grex flyers there! Why sell only used computer junk? Is there interest in holding a Grex rummage sale? Hardware: 2 Fujitsu Eagles coming soon. 3 more may be available cheap. Stabilize an Eagle on Acorus (mdw's computer), then move it to Grex and put news on it. If we lose it, it's no disaster, since news is transient anyway. Then we'd just put news back on the smaller disk. Eventually, if both Eagles are reliable, both would go on-line on Grex. Eagles have better power consumption. Sun 3's are getting cheaper. You can get a cool system for about $2000. Conference Creation Policy: This seems OK as is. Originally, the plan was to vote on conferences after 3 months. The vote was intended to weed out dead conferences and confs with fws who are too territorial. [I didn't remember this]. Do dead conferences scare off new users? Sometimes. Activity is busier lately; this is cool. Weed out dead items? The size of Agora is scaring people away. Quarterly restarts? Seasonal conferences? People are attached to Agora since it goes all the way back to the beginning of Grex. It's hard to delete it. Let's archive it off line and restart it. Change newuser to default to vt100 terminal type? Termcaps intimdate new users. Continue this discussion on-line. Does the co-op conference need to be trimmed? Discuss it in co-op. Agora Re-start: Let's not unilaterally decide this policy for all time, here at the board meeting. Let's restart Agora this once, then have the membership decide about restarting Agora in the future. Steve will post his intro items here in coop, for discussion. Soon after, we'll re-start Agora with Steve's new items in place. Vote on agora restarts. Gotta talk first to the fair witnesses to figure out what they want to do. Next meeting: To be scheduled via e-mail. ----------