popcorn
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Summary of the 3/22/96 medium-range budget planning meeting
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Mar 25 16:59 UTC 1996 |
Notes on the medium-range planning meeting that was held at Jan Wolter's
apartment on March 22, 1996. Present for part or all of the meeting were:
ajax, aruba, janc, mju, popcorn, robh, scott, and srw.
We started with a printout of Co-op item 38, where people discussed ideas
for what Grex's medium-range priorities should be. I made a list of all
the ideas listed there. We went down the list and discussed each idea, to
get an idea of what it would take to implement it, both in terms of staff
time and dollars. Then we discussed how much money Grex has. Finally,
we made a list of all the projects that require money to implement. We
found that there are four of them, and we can go forward with all four,
especially if we hold a fundraiser.
Here's the long list we started with, and notes about each entry:
1. ISDN/higher bandwidth: This is our biggest priority. Last October, at
the previous planning meeting, we decided that we wanted to get a 128K ISDN
connection for Grex. We did some looking around at prices, but most prices
were two to four times what Grex could afford. It's anybody's guess what
kind of deal on ISDN services we could negotiate. Since we don't have an
exact dollar figure, the plan for ISDN is to do research into what it will
cost. Then, when we have an exact figure, we will hold a fundraiser to pay
for a year or two of service.
2. Idle zapper: This is a program that would bump people off Grex when they
are sitting there not doing anything. It won't cost anything, but will take
some staff time to implement. At the meeting, we focused more on things that
require money to be budgeted, and left questions about an idle zapper as
something for staff to deal with. One interesting observation that surfaced
is that 4 or 5 staffers at the meeting said they were manually zapping people
with lots of idle time 1 to 4 times a day. So this is definitely something
that could use automation.
3. Usenet News: We discussed two options for getting Usenet News running.
One would be to fix up the old Sun 3 to be a news machine, probably upgrading
it to a Sun 4 in the process. The other option would be to use an Intel
machine as a news server. We estimated initial costs at $680 for the Sun 4
option, plus $80/month for electricity and phones, or $500 for an Intel
machine, plus $50/month. There's more discussion of this question in item
38, so I won't go on at length about it here. The folks at the meeting were
inclined to go with Intel, both because it will pay for itself in electricity
savings, and because it won't have the cooling problems that we have with
Sun equipment. But the Intel vs. Sun question is yet to be decided.
4. Do something with mail: Either put it on the Sun 3, or use a 386 computer
as a secondary mail site for Grex, so when Grex is down or busy, mail can be
cached on the 386 computer and then passed along to Grex.
The Sun 3 option would be a very non-standard thing to do, and it would be
hard to get it working reliably, so we didn't rush to do that. The 386
option is a definite possibility. We estimated its cost at $20, which is
well within the staff's monthly discretionary budget, so no action is needed.
5. Fix gryps crashes/upgrade gryps to a new version of FreeBSD: Gryps is
Grex's internet router. It crashes a lot, though less often lately. We've
been intending to upgrade it to a new version of FreeBSD "really soon now"
for quite a while. The new FreeBSD may fix the crashing problem. There was
some confusion about whether this project is mdw's or gregc's; the louder
voices seemed to lean toward gregc. In any case, it won't cost anything, so
we can go ahead with this anytime.
6. Upgrade the Sun 3 to a Sun 4: This discussion is included under #3 above.
7. Put Backtalk on Grex. Jan says yup, they plan to do this.
8. Write a cflist builder program. Ryan1 is working on this.
9. Get an Intro conference going. Not everybody was in agreement that this
would be a good thing to do. We did all agree that it would be awfully
difficult to get everybody on-line to come to any kind of decision over this.
We agreed that the best idea might be to have the people who want an intro
conference to create the text of some actual items for such a conference and
see if people would be comfortable with those items. Another possibility
would be to agree to try out an Intro conference for some amount of time,
say 3 months, and then go back to the current system unless people really
liked the intro conference a lot. We didn't make any decisions here; this
is something best decided in the co-op conference.
10. Upgrade Picospan. We weren't sure what we were supposed to upgrade
Picospan to, so we didn't make plans to do this. There's some further
discussion of this elsewhere in the co-op conference now.
11. Upgrade newuser. We also weren't sure what changes were being asked
for here. Both newuser and picospan are getting web versions soon....
12. Move Grex to a new location. This would cost $546 to move the phones,
plus our rent would almost certainly go up. There are other costs of moving,
too, such as the costs of paint and hardware to prepare Grex's new home, and
the cost of renting a van to move the computers. We included this cost in
the calculation for how much money to leave in Grex's rainy day fund, but
we did not make any immediate plans to move.
13. Uninteruptable Power Supply: $60 or so has already been donated for this,
and more has been pledged. A good one would cost about $600. It might make
sense to get a really big one, to leave room for expansion as Grex grows.
Or not, since computer equipment needs less power as it gets newer, so our
power consumption may never be any bigger.
14. New fast modems from the fundraiser. This doesn't cost anything, we just
have to do it! I volunteered to be in charge of pestering STeve, who had
volunteered to get the modems.
15. Start thinking about moving to a machine even faster than the Sun 4.
We tabled this idea until the next medium-range planning meeting, which is
likely to happen next October.
16. Kerberos: This password encryption scheme doesn't cost anything but
staff time. We have 386es sitting around waiting to be put to a use like
this.
17. Hold a fundraiser auction: Robh and I will coordinate this. We've been
wanting to do this for a while, both because it will bring much-needed money
in to Grex, and because it will give non-technical people a way to be
involved, for example by baking a batch of cookies for Grex to auction off.
18. Terminal server: Our current one is flakey, so we don't want to start
using it for everyday use. We talked about getting a new one that is less
flakey. People have seen ones like ours working reliably, and ours has a
good warantee and technical support, so we are going to try to get ours
going first.
19. Emergency fund: We set aside $1300 in case of emergency. This is $546,
the minimum cost of moving Grex to a new location, plus about 2 months of
Grex's current expenses.
20. Use less electricity. We talked about various ways to do this, but
did not make any definite plans for hcanges.
21. Add modems: We will add two new modems. This will cost $280 startup
($100 per modem to buy the modems, plus $40 per line for phone company
charges).
Mark (aruba) reported we have $2800 in Grex's general fund. When you subtract
the $1300 rainy day fund, that leaves $1500 to play with. This is enough for
the two new modems, a UPS, and getting going with Usenet. We'll hold a
fundraiser for ISDN.
Marc (mju) typed Grex's 1995 income and spending into a spreadsheet and
pressed the magic button to make a graph of it. Interestingly, the graph
had 3 giant spikes in it, one for each JCC sale. We hadn't realized how
much of our income came from JCC. Another surprise was that we got $550 in
"other income", most of which is from t-shirt sales. People hadn't realized
the number was so high. We got $6000 from dues and $1100 from JCC sales.
We discussed accepting credit cards as a way for more people, to become
members especially in other countries where US dollars are hard to come by.
In summary, we decided to go forward with spending money on Usenet, a UPS,
and two new dial-in modems. We will have a fundraiser for an ISDN
connection, either as an auction, or in addition to an auction.
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