Item 27. Minutes from the 6/10/92 Board of Directors Meeting (very long) Valerie Mates (popcorn) Thu, Jun 11, 1992 (00:18). 361 lines, 7 responses. Grex Meeting Minutes June 10, 1992 7:30 pm at Zingermans Attending for all or part of the meeting, in approximate order of appearance: Mary Remmers (chelsea), John Remmers (remmers), Valerie Mates (popcorn), Rob Henderson (robh), Mike Smerza (morel), Mike Mcnally (mcnally), Tom Doehne (arthur), Leslie Smith (arabella), Marc Unangst (mju) and Steve Andre (steve). Minutes are formatted pretty much stream-of-consciousness style, a complete transcript of what was said, in the order in which it was said. This will be quite long. I'll post, in another item, a summary of who is working on what. Throughout these minutes, the word "we" means "everybody on Grex", including you, whoever you are, reading these meeting minutes. John banged his gavel (an ashtray on the table we were sitting at) to bring the meeting to order. Agenda: 1. Report from the Chair. 2. Hardware expansion. 3. Finances and fundraising. 4. Agora reogranization and pronunciation. 5. 501(c)3 status. 6. Annual Report 1. Report from the chair. (John Remmers is the chairperson). The bank account is now at Comerica. Dan Romanchik, the treasurer (who was not able to be at this evening's meeting) and John Remmers are the signers on the account. Comerica is more convienient for them. Keats (Daniel Napolitano) volunteered to replace Larry Kestenbaum as fair witness of the Agora conference. Larry resigned a while back. There's a JCC (Jewish Community Center?) computer sale on June 28. Should we participate in it? John picked up an application to be in the sale. The deadline to sign up for a table is June 25, so we've got some time to think about this. Ann Arbor Computer (where Valerie works) is giving away some computer junk they don't want anymore. John, Steve, and Valerie met there yesterday and looked at what looks sellable at the JCC sale and what looks useless. We took a humongous 4800 baud modem, several printing calculators, an ADM 31 (!!!) terminal which probably works, and some other miscellaneous stuff. AAC is giving away another round of stuff sometime soon. If it's before the JCC sale, we'll see what's useful to sell. There's a chance we could get a rack mount from an ancient Nixdorf computer that AAC is getting rid of. The rack mount would be very useful for Grex: the fire marshall told Ken that if someone stuck their tongue (!!!) into Grex they could get electrocuted. We should try to find a rack mount for Grex so we don't cause trouble for Ken. Steve wasn't yet at the meeting, but he'd talked to John about the state of the hardware. Grex has been up for 28 days without any down time. Yay!! This is probably because of the power conditioner. Steve will install another 80 meg hard drive some time next week. What about the suggestion to save money by getting a nice computer? Actually, the main power cost is for the disks, not for Grex itself; it's more worth while to think about replacing the disks rather than trying to replace the whole machine right now. We will need new power consumption numbers when we add the new disks, so we know what to pay Ken for monthly power costs. Find a way to fix the space crunch on /h1b? Both /usr and bbs are there, I think. It'd be great to free up some space there. Once we add the new disk, will we be ready to officially announce Usenet news to the public? Marc thinks not, because the dynamic newsfeed is unstable. Marc will fix that (it'll take a week or so), plus we should think about getting faster modems before making Usenet official. Decent fast modems are running about $300 to $400 now. Would a fast modem be too fast to hook directly to the Sun? We won't know for sure until we try it, but we'd probably want to hook the modem through an old PC to pass character-by-character info along to Grex as packet-by-packet input. This would mean still more hardware and more electricity: more money. Would a direct connection at 3 or 5 in the morning be OK? People certainly do log in at that hour, though not as much as in the evenings. Dunno. Grex can get some Eagle 380 meg disks! Grex's power consumption per megabyte would go down, even though the Eagles are serious power hogs, because the disks are much bigger than the 80 meg Fujitsus we're using now. We don't actually have the Eagles yet, but Steve knows where they are living. They're very cheap (free?), but not definitely in working order. We'd test them on Marcus's Sun, acorus, first, before putting them on-line on Grex. Is acorus up? It crashed, last summer, testing out some equipment for Grex. We think it's back up. Grex replaced the equipment that got blown out last summer, so Marcus has the tools he needs to bring it back up if it's not already back. Marcus is very busy with his job lately. Steve got hold of an 80 meg hard drive recently. We'll need to take Grex down for about 10 hours to do a surface analysis of the disk. When is a good time to do this? Because we can only get into CE during the daytime, the test will need to be during the daytime. Does someone need to be there for the whole 10 hours? Would we be better off if we got a newer Sun? Newer Suns are probably still expensive. Agenda item 2: Grex finances and fundraising. John says Dan says Grex's bank balance is $251.05. Grex owes 767.51 to Ken. So that leaves $500 unaccounted for. Ken doesn't seem too worried about the money, but we'd like to come up with a payment plan. One person owes Grex $111. Another person at the meeting will pay $100 for a membership. What do the bylaws say about people who are elected to the board of directors whose memberships lapse? Is it OK for non-members to stay on the board? We've got one or two now. What about staff types who do a *lot* of work for the system (such as maintaining the Usenet feed) but aren't currently paid up as members? Moot questions: everybody in these categories wrote checks or intends to send in money very soon now. Should we increase the annual membership fee? Nobody seemed to think this was a very good idea. M-Net charges $60/year for their lower class of membership; more for their higher class. We probably shouldn't charge more than M-Net does. Rather than increasing prices, let's push membership. No, wait, pushing membership may turn some people off. Let's *entice* people to become members instead. What about other fundraising? Misti is doing publicity. Mcnally will write automatic membership maintenance routines that will automatically send one-month and one-week warnings to expiring members and bump accounts back to non-member status when the time comes. Are there a lot of accounts expiring soon? A bunch expired in May but haven't been bumped back yet. Need to do something about sending warning messages and bumping people back 'til mcnally's programs are written. Lots of members are expiring in July, when Grex's one-year anniversary comes around. Remember that if you don't want to pay $60 for a year's membership you can also pay $6 a month. Shall we do the JCC sale? Can we make back the $30 it costs to have a table? Dunno. Morel can donate some stuff to sell. WE CAN GIVE OUT GREX FLYERS AT THE SALE! This is a great way to advertise! Good audience! It's $20 per additional table, but we don't expect to need a second table. M-Net will probably be at the JCC sale too. Hi M-Net!! What about a table at the Art Fair? It's probably too late to sign up. Also, you probably need 501(c)3 non-profit status to be able to get a booth at the art fair. Anyway, art fair people are probably the wrong crowd to ask to dial in to a computer system. But they do have lots of money. JCC sale? Let's do it! Let's do an equipment drive and see if we can drum up enough equipment to make the sale worthwile. How often are these JCC sales? They seem to be roughly quarterly. We can give out flyers even if we don't have a table. Lots of people from the meeting are busy on the day of the JCC sale but can help with the advance preparations. We'll need to find volunteers to staff the Grex table. Let's enter a JCC item. Valerie will enter the item. The item will ask for 1) volunteers to staff the table, and 2) hardware to donate to Grex to sell. Do equipment donations for the JCC sale count toward membership? No. But if a person sells a computer thing and gives the proceeds to Grex for membership, they'd become a member. Why don't they get membership if we sell their stuff? Not fair? How do you determine fair market value for donations? Should we give away membership for people who staff the table? People who are members are likely to be more involved with the system: how about giving a month's membership to people who aren't already members if they staff the table and/or donate some hardware to sell? Would it work to let people sell their own stuff at Grex's table in exchange for half the money they get for it? This gets people into the JCC sale without paying the $30 fee. Of course, direct donations are better. Should we put a money limit on people selling stuff at the Grex table? Will the JCC mind? Come to think of it, why would anybody want to do this? Either a person will sell stuff without Grex's help and get to keep the whole proceeds from the sale, or they're probably good hearted enough to give the entire piece of hardware to Grex to sell. Scratch that idea. Idea: print out sample gems of Grex discussions to show to people at the JCC sale, to entice them to check out Grex. We can vote on which selections to bring. Volume of responses in the conferences seems low. It's low on M-Net too right now, and also on Confer at the U of M. This is probably because it's summertime. This is a regular seasonal thing. Also, Grex people seem to be spending more of their on-line time on Usenet and less in the conferences. And the problems with tty01 didn't help any. Yay and thanks to Marc for fixing it!! When's a good time for the 10 hours of downtime to bring the new disk on-line? Anytime is OK. Grex can be unattended for the 10 hours. Steve can show up at CE at 6 am, let the test run 'til 4 pm. It's better to run the 10 hour test now and find problems with the disk right away, rather than gradually discovering problems later on, once the disk is in use. Could we replace another disk with the new disk and test and run at the same time? Can we test the disk on Acorus? The new disk is "herniatingly heavy" to move; we probably don't want to take it to Marcus's and then move it a second time. Let's test the disk on Grex. Yup, so let's do it in the daytime, with a few days lead time to warn people that Grex will be down for 10 hours. How's next Wednesday? Sounds good, if it's OK with Ken. What about the big Eagle drives? We can pick them up anytime. They're free, but they weigh as much and take up as much space as a small coffin. There's no room in Marcus's basement to try these out on Acorus. Need to make room, then test these disks there, and *then* bring 'em to CE to put onto Grex if the Eagles check out OK. The Eagles are a good choice for where to store Usenet news, since it's better to lose the latest news than to lose a conference or somebody's personal files. The Eagles are 580 watts for 380 megs of disk space. The watts per meg ratio is 2.2 times better than the Fujitsus we have now. The Fujitsus are about the most power-hungry kind of we could find, but they're also super-reliable. If anybody on Grex is getting a new SCSI disk, could Grex borrow it to test with? There are questions about whether or not SCSI disks run on old Suns like Grex. The test won't hurt the SCSI drive. New SCSI disks draw 12 watts of power instead of what we've got now. That would pay for itself in about 15 months. More SMD drives are OK too if they're free. What we've got now is like making installment payments on a SCSI drive, but we don't end up with a drive, just a lot of used up electricity. Big newer SMD drives would also help save power. Does Grex have a logo? Does Misti have time to do a Grex flyer? What about the Grex logo that Brian Dunkle made? Dunno. Should we have a logo contest? Skip that -- just let's do a flyer! What about the idea of giving out membership in return for staffing the JCC booth? Would the JCC mind if we split the booth with someone? They probably won't mind: they just sell tables and hot dogs. If we do that, we should just do it, not ask permission. Yeah, but why do it. Need to note to Dan that Grex needs to track donations for tax purposes. Consensus is to particpate in the JCC sale. Donations aren't good for membership. I'll enter an item about the JCC sale and also asking for someone to make a Grex flyer. Need a volunteer to fill out the application to be in the JCC sale. John will do that. Who runs the JCC? The JCC. Let's set up a debt repayment schedule. Who do we owe money to besides Ken? Me, but I don't want my money back. How much does Grex owe me, anyway? It was someplace between $150 and $300ish, but we're not sure, but I don't want it back so it doesn't entirely matter anyway. Let's make plans to pay Ken at least enough to cover Grex's monthly expenses, which is about $170 per month. Let's aim for $200 a month to Ken 'til we're even. Steve just ran across the sample items he wrote for agora. He'll post them soon. What about 501(c)3 status? Tom posted an item about what to do. People suddenly started frenetically writing checks for Grex membership. This totaled $110. Back to 501(c)3 status: We need to apply with the IRS. The form may be difficult to fill out. I brought the form to the meeting: Mary started looking over it. Shall we have a 501(c)3 party, to fill out the form? Need a volunteer to do the 501(c)3 thing. Tom points out that Grex has a membership in the Accounting Aid Society. We can contact them if we have questions about 501(c)3 status or if we want them to proofread our application form before we send it in. Also, we should probably ask the AAS to look over our bylaws to be sure they look like good, legal 501(c)3 bylaws. Grex needs 501(c)3 status to get mudos paid back for all the calls it makes to Grex. Marc spends sometimes around $40/month for mudos's calls. Last month it was $120. Mudos makes about 1400 calls per month beyond the 400 free calls the phone company grants you. Charges are per-call, not per-minute of connect time, so it might come out cheaper for Grex to buy mudos a second phone line that stays connected to Grex continuously, rather than connecting and disconnecting. Fewer calls equals less money. This month's mudos phone bill was especially high because Merit was having problems where it would crash every hour or so, making mudos need to call there more often. Netmeg had trouble reaching mudos because mudos spent so much time on the phone with Grex sending Grex's newsfeed. Mary will look over the 501(c)3 application. She's not committing to doing anything with it at this point. She's looking over it. Agenda item 3: Agora Reorganization. (Smile -- you're well past the half-way point in reading through these minutes!!) Steve will post his introductory items in the co-op conference, for discussion and modification. What about the agora fair witness? Keats volunteered for the job. Larry stepped down. How do we choose a new agora fw? How long is the agora fw's term of office? 'Til they get sick of it? 'Till agora gets restarted? 'Till the fw gets impeached or moves away? Should we rotate fws? Ask fws to step down? We should formalize the fw selection procedure because we're having trouble finding a replacement for Larry. We need to publicize that the job is available. How about restarting agora quarterly and rotating fw terms along with the restarts? Will we have too many or too few fw volunteers? Mary suggests: have Katie as the regular fw, someone else (mju?) to handle item expiration and other prune-the-conference operations, and an anonymous fw with a name like "spring" (for the spring agora conference). The fw using the seasonal ID could choose to stay anonymous and keep people guessing all month, or the seasonal fw could announce their identity in public, whichever they're more comfortable with. Someone on staff would know who the seasonal fw is. Need to enter an item to talk about this. What about Keats's offer? How does Katie feel about these options? What about an elected fw? Katie is comfortable with any of the options: keats as co-fw or an elected co-fw. Katie doesn't like doing janitorial stuff like deleting old items, restarting conferences, keeping an eye on the conference size. If we do quarterly restarts, that eliminates all these routine housekeeping considerations. Is a list of fair witness commands available? Yup. You can see a quickie summary of commands by typing "cat /u/popcorn/f-w.cheat.sheet" (it's one screen long). Steve Simmons wrote a great guide to fair witnessing. Remmers has a copy and there's a copy in M-Net's fw conference. How about doing quarterly restarts at the beginning of each new season? That means we'll do an AGORA RESTART ON JUNE 22ND. [Note -- my calendar says Summer starts on June 20 at 8:14 pm pacific daylight time. Shall we do the restart then instead?] The 22nd is 12 days from today. We'll need to have the new items and new fw in place by then. Can we be ready in time? Sure! Let's spend seven days discussing the new agora fw; choose a new fw by consensus. Mary will enter an item to discuss this; the item will be linked between the co-op and agora confs. "Agora Summer" sounds like the name of a tanning salon. :) The old agora conf will hang around for a few days in case people want to link over stuff from there to the new agora conf. Let's definitely keep around the mathom item!! One of these days we need to write the mathom program. Where's janc when you need him? ;) Let's try not to link too much to the new agora conf so it really is a re-start. Starting with a clean slate is cool. Still, if someone wants an item linked over, link it. John will have Agora archives if you need 'em. Steve points out that it's summertime, so we need to point some fans at Grex. Grex is near a wall, which is great for being near power outlets, but lousy for air circulation. Afternoons are hot. Valerie can donate a fan. Also, we definitely need to put Grex in a rack mount. The fire marshall will give Ken a hard time if Grex is still not rack mounted next time he inspects at CE. We might be able to get the free rack mount from Ann Arbor Computer; that would be really cool. Can anybody out there donate a rack mount and/or a fan? We need to stop by U of M property disposition more often, to look for a rack mount. So far they've mostly had ones with pieces missing. Grex needs a complete, enclosed, rack mount. Steve saw one at Dayton for about $90, but that would've been difficult to transport back to ann arbor. An enclosed rack mount would also be healthy for Grex, which is currently very dusty in places where computers shouldn't be dusty. We should clean Grex at some point. Meg pointed out that one Grex user is getting 500K a day from some kind of Apple II mailing list of binaries. Someone needs to talk to this user. Also, we need to enter an item to talk about getting an "exploder" for mailing lists, so the outside world can send one copy of the mailing to the exploder, and the exploder locally distributes the mailing list to the different people on Grex who subscribe. Mcnally can write the exploder; he needs to fix the Sun he has at home and get a phone. Steve will enter an item (and look to see if there already is one) to talk about mail exploders. I'm on a breadmaker mailing list -- would other people be interested in this? What about sensitive mailing lists that people wouldn't want other people to know they're subscribed to? Sort of like the support conf on M-Net. How do we handle that? Gotta think about this. When shall we hold the next meeting? Shall we meet monthly? Yup. People seemed to have enough to work on to not need to meet one month after the last meeting, but meeting monthly does seem like a good idea. People seem to get X amount of work done before a Grex meeting, so, to a point, meeting twice as often should mean we get twice as much work done. The next meeting is tentatively scheduled for July 6 at the Andre''s house. Gotta check this with Dan Romanchik, since he couldn't make it to this meeting, but it looks like nearly everybody else is free on July 6. Meeting adjourned.