Item 59. Minutes of the June 8 Board of Directors Meeting John H. Remmers (remmers) Fri, Jun 11, 1993 (12:50). 132 lines, 5 responses. Board members attending: Valerie Mates (popcorn) [chair], Dan Romanchik (danr) [treasurer], John Remmers (remmers) [secretary], STeve Andre (steve), Meg Geddes (meg), Mike Smerza (morel), Marc Unangst (mju). Others attending: Misti Anslin (mta), Greg Cronau (gregc), Rob Henderson (robh), Bill Rayl (snark), Mary Remmers (chelsea), Pattie Snyder-Rayl (pegasus), TS Taylor (tsty), Marcus Watts (mdw). The chair called the meeting to order by ceremonial gavel-banging at 7:30 p.m. Treasurer's report (danr): Dan showed a multi-media bar chart displaying projected month-by-month income for the remainder of the year. A $300 shortfall is expected unless we get some new members and/or do well at the JCC sales. Publicity committee (mta): STeve reported that he and Misti are working on a brochure called "Take Me to Your Modem" to publicize Grex and explain the basics of using Picospan and other Grex facilities. A first version was passed around for inspection. Grex has an entry in the "BBS Ads" section of the current Michigan Computer User magazine. The next cable TV spot for Grex is scheduled for taping on June 30. Laurel Schippers has decided against doing it and will be replaced by STeve. Another run of brochures and flyers needs to be done for the JCC sale. There was discussion of distributing them at the Art Fair also. Flyer parties (in which people go around posting Grex fliers in various public places) were held in April and May. Misti is doing a "tracking project" of the period April 1992 to June 1993 to see if there is a correlation between publicity drives and growth patterns as shown by newuser logins. Technical committee (steve, mju, mdw, tsty): One of the three Eagle disk drives donated by Arbortext appears to be defective. We are currently running two of the Eagles. There is currently plenty of disk space, so this is not a serious problem at this time. Grex's operating system has been upgraded to SunOS 3.5. It appears that a result of this is fewer errors on the Usenet News disk. There are prospects for donations of various pieces of Sun equipment. We may be able to get a Sun 3/50, which is about four times faster than the Sun 2 currently in use and uses about 1/5 the electrical power -- this would resulting in a savings of $300/year in electic bills. The savings would thus recoup the cost of a large SCSI drive in approximately 20 months. The PC Router configuration has been changed to use standard IP addressing. The smail mail-delivery software has been reconfigured to queue messages, to reduce the load on system resources. Local mail traffic should no longer cause noticable slowdowns, but mail messages might take as long as 5 minutes to deliver. The OS upgrade was facilitated by tapes donated by the Industrial Technology Institute (ITI). In this connection, it was mentioned that the UM Grad Library is a bountiful source of almost-new tapes. TS has loaned an Ambassador terminal for use as the Grex console, and is working on making mounting brackets for the disk drive donated by Dave Parks. JCC Sale (remmers): Grex has as usual rented a table at the June 27 JCC Colossal Computer Sale; an on-line announcement has been entered requesting donations. Efforts to secure a phone line for purposes of demonstrating Grex at the sale have so far been unsuccessful -- JCC representatives have indicated that is contrary to current policy. Marc Unangst's departure: Marc Unangst (mju) will be leaving in the fall to attend Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. This has various implications for Grex, since he is a Board member, Technical Committee member, and the supplier of Grex's news feed. There are several possibilities for the news feed. Meg, Greg C., or Mike Bernson may be able to supply it, or Grex may be able to obtain it from U of M directly. There was discussion of the merits and demerits of these alternatives. Meg suggested, and by concensus it was agreed, that a subcommittee be formed to come up with an action plan and present it at the July Board meeting. [The secretary is not sure just who ended up on the subcommittee, or who is going to organize it -- mju, steve, meg, tsty, gregc, mdw, danr all volunteered to at least be on the associated mailing list, according to my notes. Can someone clarify?] Marc's Board term will have over a year to run at the time of his departure. The procedure specified in the bylaws for electing a replacement will be followed. Marc expects to be able to continue to call Grex and function as a staff member, albeit at a reduced level, while attending college. New business: TS raised the possibility of a Grex tie-in to consulting work that Grex people might do. The consensus was that any such connections should be at a purely informal level. Marc reported that ITI would like testemonials regarding the donations it has made. Valerie did a table dance to display the new Grex t-shirts. It was agreed to make the remaining t-shirts available at a price of $10 each at the JCC sale, and to accept orders for additional ones. Misti has been doing some mailing of brochures to newusers on an experimental basis. $30 was authorized to cover postage for additional mailings. For the production of new brochures and fliers, Misti will get quotes and report back. On Meg's suggestion, it was agreed to invite Misti to submit a 3- to 6-month publicity budget to cover ongoing expenses. There was somewhat lengthy discussion of the issues raised by the controversy over advertisements in Agora and Dan Napolitano's resignation as fairwitness of that conference. It was agreed to solicit user input on these issues via an on-line discussion item. Greg Cronau was made a staff member by a vote of 6 yes, 0 no, and 1 abstention. The gavel banged in adjournment at around 9:30 p.m. Respectfully submitted, John Remmers, secretary