response 1 of 14:

Dec 27 16:22 UTC 1994

I hope people will direct their questions to this area so the concise 
section doesn't get too cluttered. 

response 3 of 14:

Dec 28 15:08 UTC 1994

OH, and shouldn't the terminal server and increased local dial-in facilities
be HIGH priorities??

response 5 of 14:

Dec 28 16:47 UTC 1994

As I have said elsewhere, I am against expansion of non-member services.  We
need incentives for membership.  I am very concerned that Usenet news is
still not back on line for Grex.  I believe that the problem is disc space.
If people who are "using" Grex for free mailings and not even contributing
to the bbs discussions are tying up disc space while we can't run trn our-
selves, something is wrong.

response 7 of 14:

Dec 29 01:23 UTC 1994

   Forunately, getting the disk is the easy part.  Once we solve our
current problem, getting more disk is cheaper than ever before, as
its always been.  There are some 1.1G HP disks that we can get for about
$480.  What Marc talks about is dead right for news--I think that getting
news back up here is going to take more than just getting the disk hack
here.  If you think the link is slow now, wait 'till news starts invading...

response 9 of 14:

Dec 29 04:27 UTC 1994

Thanks guys.  I guess that underscores my point, that Grex needs more 
members.  I wish more people would run for office that, instead of wanting
to throw out more freebies, want to increase the incentives for users to 
become members.  I'd do it, but I have health problems.

response 11 of 14:

Dec 29 05:52 UTC 1994

How difficult do you think it would be to convince a potential feeder to
feed us news if we pay for the phone line at each end? The costs would
be as follows:
Startup costs: $80 Ameritech installation charges (approx)
              $480 For a real Usenet Disk
              $420 For two modei (I don't really know what the cost is,
                                  I saw V.34 modei for $209 apiece, mailorder,
                                  but we may want to spend more)
Regular expenses:
               $40/month for two phone lines
Also, it would be excellent (IMO) if we could turn a separate unix box
into a news server to handle all the processing and avoid slowing Grex.
I'm envisioning a near-continuous uucp link.
--
I'd also like to see us improve local access by increasing the line count
and speed, but we need to see how we stand after the modem pool is expanded
as a result of the move to the dungeon, before planning further.

I think these are good ways to spend some of our revenue, but I'm certainly
interested in ways to accomplish the same with less cost.

response 13 of 14:

Jan 16 04:11 UTC 1995

I realize it's a bit late to post positions here, given that the election
has already started, but here goes...
        The biggest debate we've had on Grex recently has involved the
removal of quarums for elections.  This just passed, with a very big
majority, which I think is mostly a good thing.  I'm not convinced that
what just got passed was the best possible proposal, and I'm certainly
willing to look at other options for dealing with the quarum problem, but
that's something that will have to go to the voters and board members'
opinions on that aren't any more relevant than anybody else's opinion. 
More importantly, the elimination of quarums poses the risk that people
won't have quite as much of an incentive to publicize votes.  The Board
should develop a procedure for announcing votes to make sure that no
member (or at least as close as we can get to that) ends up unable to vote
because they don't know about the vote.
        As the quarum issue fades away, Internet access will probably go
back to being a hot topic.  As I said in the last version of this item, I
fully support opening up everything the members voted a few months ago to
open up, and will support opening up more if we ever have enough bandwidth
to permit it.  That said, reducing our current net lag problem should
probably be a higher priority than increasing Internet access.  It may be
a long time before we can afford enough bandwidth to open up telnet and
FTP to everybody, and it may even never happen, but if we do get enough
bandwidth things should be opened up.
        One thing Grex can probably do better than it did is to plan for
growth.  A lot of our users are new enough that they won't remember this,
but last summer there was a big problem when, as Grex grew faster than
anybody expected, disk space became very tight.  It was not at all
uncommon for the disk to be so full that it wasn't even possible to post a
response in a conference, even though all but a few of the users had
removed unneeded files and had only the bare minimum of files in their
directories.  A fund raiser was held and the users came through with the
money for a bigger disk, but it would have been a lot better if that had
been done before the problem became quite so acute.
        That said, nobody really had much of a way to predict growth. 
Grex was new to the Internet at that point, and with access to Grex not
only no longer limited to six dialin lines in Ann Arbor, but also
advertized on menu systems all over the Net, Grex's growth surprized just
about everybody.
        Now, however, we have enough experience to be able to predict
growth.  Growth seems to be levelling off a bit now, but if it starts
going fast again, as it may do during the summer as people start having
more free time, Grex needs to be prepared to deal with it.
        This is but a small summary of a few of my opinions.  I hope this
item isn't the only place people look to find out about my opinions, or
the opinions of any of the other candidates.  All the candidates have been
active participants in the Coop conference, and you can probably get a
much better idea of our views by looking at some of the other discussions
here.