Item 88. Minutes from the 1/12/93 Grex Board of Directors Meeting Valerie Mates (popcorn) Wed, Jan 13, 1993 (01:16). 243 lines, 30 responses. Minutes from the (attempted) Grex Board of Directors' Meeting, January 12, 1993, Zingerman's, 7:30 pm. Present (for at least some part of the evening) were: chelsea, danr, davel, mju (by ham radio), pegasus (Patty and Bill Snyder-Rayl), popcorn, power, remmers, robh, steve, sweeny, and tsty. The weather was pretty awful. Only four people on the board of directors were present in the flesh (danr, popcorn, remmers, and steve), and it takes five to have a quorum, so this technically wasn't a board of directors meeting, though we did at one point call up mju on the ham radio to make an official motion about using the mail name cyberspace.org. Mostly we did the same stuff we would do at any other board meeting. In these minutes I'll mostly call people by their login IDs and not by their names, to differentiate between people with the same name. Remmers passed out an agenda as follows: 1. Call to order 2. Report from the chair * NEW Center update * JCC Sale 3. Treasurer's report 4. Technical committee report 5. Other committee reports 6. Election of officers for 1993 7. Staff line 8. Trademark issues 9. Conference space management 10. New business 1. Call to order - remmers --------------------------- John banged the gavel to call the meeting to order. 2. Report from the chair - remmers ---------------------------------- NEW Center ----------- John got a letter from the NEW center saying that the building is not complete yet, but about 1/2 the space is done and about 1/2 the tenants are chosen. Grex isn't in the group that was chosen so far (neither is M-Net) but Grex will be surveyed and talked to some more in January and Grex still stands a chance of getting in. They would like more information such as official Grex brochures. Official brochures? Grex doesn't currently have any, though Grex does have some fantastic flyers that Misti made up. We'll pass along some more info to the NEW center. And pegasus may be able to print up a flyer or two on short notice. Maybe the publicity committee can handle the brochure-writing. Misti?? JCC Sale -------- The next JCC sale is on March 28. (A "JCC Sale" is a big hardware swap where Grex and M-Net usually buy tables and sell donated computer hardware and software to raise money for operating the system.) Grex is interested in being in it. It's $30 for a table. Grex may set up other equipment, plus if Grex can find a volunteer (power??) to set up disks of cool shareware we may sell shareware disks. 3. Treasurer's Report - danr ---------------------------- Old balance was $156.97. Grex got $96 in donations this month. Dan made a totally cool looking chart of when to expect future income. June is by far the month when the most memberships are expected to come due. If Grex can make it to June, Grex should be all set for quite a while beyond. 4. Technical Committee Report ----------------------------- skipped due to lack of technical committee personel (who later showed up, so this report is included later in the meeting) 5. Other Committees ------------------- Publicity committee: reported by danr and power. The TV spot worked. Power isn't sure he appreciates being called "disinterested", but Grex has new users who saw the spot on community TV, so the ad worked! Cool! Chelsea suggested advertising in the Prodigy forum where you can place free bbs ads. She has advertised us there and we've gotten new users from the ad. Mary will post info about posting these ads to Prodigy so other people can post them too. 6. Election of 1993 Officers ---------------------------- skipped due to lack of quorum New Business ------------ Chelsea talked about how Grex's conference creation policy was originally set up to give people easy access to creating conferences to try them out and see if the conferences fly. The original idea of the founders was to create these conferences and put each conference to a vote at the end of 3 months to see whether to keep it or not. Somehow nobody ever got around to doing the voting and conference deletion. There are now conferences sitting out there taking up disk space when nobody even really remembers the conference exists. I requested not deleting conferences on the say-so of the fair witness alone, in case other users do want to keep the conference. Pegasus and chelsea will work together to make up a list of the fairly quiet conferences and send mail to the fair witnesses to see how they feel about keeping or nuking the conferences. Technical Committee Report - steve ---------------------------------- Disk Gathering: --------------- Grex needs to pick up some "child's coffin sized" disks from Arbortext. Steve and power will get hold of a van and work together on this. There may be more disks available: someone called up Steve asking if he wants old hardware. NOS box: -------- (Grex's news and mail feeds currently take forever to arrive. Grex has a 9600 baud modem to use to receive mail and news, but the 9600 baud modem slows down the rest of Grex something awful. The "NOS box" is an attempt to get high-speed data into Grex without drowning the rest of Grex. It's a PC that converts character-by-character data into packets to pass into Grex. Marc and Steve have made several attempts to get this thing going; usually it works OK for a while and then the software gets "stuck" for no clear reason. Marc is working on debugging this.) Marc located a program called PC Route that may be more reliable than KA9Q for Grex's purposes, since KA9Q does a lot more than just what Grex needs. Marc tested this on mudos. Ken ordered a new phone line for the NOS box. It should arrive later in the week. Steve will rearrange the ttys when the new modem arrives; the new modem won't be in the trunk hunt. Phone problems: --------------- The modem on tty03 is OK; Bell is having problems with the line. The line cut in and out while Steve was dialed in on it. He ran some tests on the line and it did some strange stuff. Bell is supposed to be looking into the problems with the line; they're supposed to leave that number "busied out" when they're not actively testing or fixing the line. Several people reported that the line is still ringing open a lot. Hardware Stability ------------------ There's been a spate of disk errors between Christmas and New Year's. This sounds like problems with the electricity; power fluctuations. Grex shares power lines with Ken's florescent lighting and maybe some other appliances. Ken thinks sharing with the lights is not a problem; it's hard to say for sure if this is true or not. Steve is looking for another power conditioner and an AC power monitor. The "bad spot" on the disk turned out to be OK. Steve ran a program that read the spot 190,000 times with no errors. Cyberspace.org -------------- The board (including marc, via radio) voted to go ahead and register the domain name cyberspace.org. There was a slight delay to search for two Internet machines to do MX forwarding to cyberspace.org for us. That's all set now, with 2 machines at the U of M. We talked some about what mailing addresses on Grex will look like after cyberspace.org is official. Staff Line ---------- Steve wrote a new proposal. We need someone to go through the old item about the staff line, collect kentn's questions, and try to answer them all. (I didn't write down a name of a volunteer to do this, so I'll do it). No decisions got made; the staff line idea needs lots more discussion. A lot of ideas got bounced around. See the staff line items for details. Grex had 88 users one day last week! The usage patterns show steady growth. Marcus is having trouble with acorus, his Sun 2 machine he tests Grex equipment on before using it on Grex itself. This is a kink in getting new disks on line. Grex has received some free donated disks that failed on acorus; it's definitely important to test disks before installing them on Grex, since a disk failure would bring all of Grex down. Also, Grex absolutely needs a new power conditioner before adding any new disks. There's a chance Steve can pick up a power conditioner at the Dayton Hamfest this April; that's where Grex's current power conditioner came from. A new power conditioner costs about $300 to $450; buying one of those might be the path of least resistance. Remote Switches ---------------- Steve is looking into remote-controlled power switches for Grex, so the staff could reboot modems or Grex itself by remote control. There are very expensive commercial modems that can do this; Steve is looking into options that are cheaper and more creative. Pegasus (both Pattie and Bill, who share the account) will look into ways to get grants for Grex. Steve has a handle on 4 meg Sun 2 memory cards for $75. More memory should help keep disk swapping down and keep up to 10 or 11 users happily logged in to Grex all at once. There are a couple of Ann Arbor companies that have unused Sun equipment that they need to hang onto until it finishes depreciating, after which they may donate it to Grex. There are many possible upgrades to spend money on. We Grex users, as a group, should pick out priorities among the possibilities. I volunteered to enter an item to discuss what the possible upgrades are, what they'll cost, and which ones to give priority to. Based on what people say in that item, the board will make some decisions at the next meeting. Trademark Issues ---------------- Steve did some reading about trademark law. It seems that our Grex is sufficiently different from that other Grex that there shouldn't be any problem between the two names. Also, I *think* Cyberspace Communication, Inc. (the name Grex is incorporated under) has a "DBA" for the name Grex. (A "DBA" is permission from the state or county or whoever for "doing business [banking, etc] as a business name instead of as your own name.) Danr will check through Grex's records to see if Grex actually has a DBA for the name Grex. If so, the trademark issues should be moot. Since this isn't a pressing issue, it's tabled 'til the next board meeting. New Business ------------ Danr is resurrecting the Grex manual project. It'll be available online, off line, and possibly maybe perhaps as a hypertext stack. Folks at the meeting greeted this announcement with enthusiasm. Steve asked us to think about how we would feel if an organization asked to pay to have a closed conference of their own on Grex. Board feelings are mixed on this topic. We'll talk about it on-line. Grex owns a 68020 upgrade kit for the Sun 2, but installing it would involve some scary-sounding changes to stack handling in the kernal. Since Grex is likely to one day move over to a 386 machine anyway, this may be more time consuming than it is worth. Also, for $20 we could upgrade Grex from 8 to 12 megahertz, but is this worth it? There was some discussion of the merits of sticking with Sun machines versus switching to a 386 or 486 machine. This discussion is tabled for now, to be continued in the "Pride" item in the Co-op conference on Grex. ("Pride" is the name of the 386 machine that Marc and Steve are testing to see if Grex can run happily on an '86 computer.) The meeting adjourned. The next meeting will be some time in February, to be decided....