October 2008 Board Meeting Minutes

Present: STeve, aruba, unicorn, tsty, mary, remmers, denise, and by
conference call: cross and cmcgee

Meeting called to order at 7:25 pm.

FINANCE REPORT: August and September -income   $13.00
                                                                  -outgo
                                       
                                    $110.00
                                    
                        Current balance is approximately $6,100

Question came up if all board members are paid up in membership dues... 
        Three are paid up, 3 are not.  Bylaws state that the treasurer
        will
need to email   board/members; those that aren t paid up need to be by
the  new business  of
        the next meeting. If not paid up, board will make a decision in
        what to do.

BUSINESS

Phone line usage/costs:  Question about how many phone lines should we
have at this    time since there is only a small percentage that
actually use these lines. 
        1/3 of our monthly costs are for the phone lines but only about
        0.5
percentage of
        users are actually using the 2 lines.
        Is this a non-issue right now since money is not a big issue
        right now;
part of our     mission is to provide public support.

Mission: What IS our mission at this point and if/when would we want to
address any     changes to the mission? 

We talked a bit about the stability of the system. At one point a few
weeks ago when the      system was down, other provide.net users were
also offline at the same time.

Dan installed a program that at least for the time being, newusers would
be limited on   what and how much they can access at one time. 
Discussion included: 
        -Is this something we want to do for the long term?
        -Do newusers know what the limitations are? 
        -How and who will do the moderating/validating?
        -How do we let the newusers know how to get the restrictions
        lifted?

Along a similar theme:
        -Most/All other systems have policies about not letting problem
        users
stay. How       are they going about this?
        -What are some of the other web-bsed things that we might want
        for Grex? -What do people come to Grex for? 
                -BBS?
                -other shell useage?    
                -computer hardware?
        -Marketing-->What do people want, can we survey people, would
        they
         want to share this information? See what commands are used most
         often?

Three levels of users discussed last year
        -we should review this item for further discussion. 
        -[Again] How and at what point will discipline be implemented? 
        -Setting standards
        -How to make policy 
        -Automate a log system to see what things [new]users do...?     

We should meet again within a few weeks to further review and discuss
these various   issues  .
Next meeting will be held at my house in Ypsi on Sunday, November 16th
at 7pm.
  

50 responses total.

good report ... next meetingt conflicts w/60 mins ... tape time.

btw, since the    resh   shell has been started .. ther ahve been 463
newusers ... 

Just as a reminder, the next board meeting is scheduled for this Sunday
evening at 7 pm at my place in Ypsi...  I know the agenda hasn't been
posted but then, I haven't heard of any cancellations for the meeting,
either.

What I want to know is how many 'resh' newusers have been 'validated', if any.

Surprisingly few have requested it, actually; a good number of those that have
were validated early on, but truth be told, I've been incredibly busy the last
week and a half to two weeks and there's a backlog right now.

This evening's BoD meeting will be postponed due to flu among board
members. The future meeting date will be posted as soon as we know when
that will be.

hmmm, good that i checkded .. might hae gottne flu .. no,wiat,got the shot.

any new sked in mind?

Nope, not yet.

might be intersting to try to get a meeting in before the electoins
adn./or christmas...

january is seep[ing into history .. hwo about a february new-board meeting?
  

We probably should have a meeting sometime in the near future.  

who calls a meeting, prexy?

Yes, I believe so.

earth to prexy? come in please. among other things i'm trying to spend real
dollars (not credit) on grex - i promised!

maybe   15 mar09 .... after 1800 hrs?   where?

Hmm, I think today could be short notice for some people!?  How about
planning on another Sunday evening sometime soon?

We've been trying for months now!

Well, today isn't a good day for me. I'm going to be spending at least
part of the day with my dad and some of my family It's the first
anniversary of when my mom died and I know my dad had a hard time during
the holidays with my mom gone... My brother's going to be picking me up
soon, so it's kind of late for me to change plans.

*sigh* I understand if you have other commitments.

On the other hand, maybe the other board members who *are* available should
try and do SOMETHING today just go get us all on the same page and schedule
a real meeting.

That'd be fine, getting some others together today, if possible. If that
ends up happening, post something--so if I'm home and available, I might
be able to attend.

we'd (royally speaking) like to have ans many sattendees as possoible, of
course, and/but also we need a location. 
  
last time the emeeting was at pet/smoke free denises' home. 
  
my place is neither (unfortunatly). maybe .. just an idea ... a pot luck to
go along with/before the board meeting? 
  
i cna;t volunteer anyone's place but i can voolunteer the potluck idea.

A potluck could work if people are interested; if nothing else, people
can feel free to bring snacks to share.

I skimmed through the various items here and in the staff conf. a little
while ago but now I forget which item had some other possible dates for
discussion [was next Saturday one of the days asked about?]... If we
could get a couple possible dates, I can double check with my housemate
to make sure he won't be needing the table space. Weekends
[Friday-Sunday] would be best, generally speaking.

We may want to discuss some of this in mail for people that aren't
active in these conferences [I'm not sure how often aruba and STeve are
here]. If/when we do use mail, just for the record, I don't use grex
mail due to the hundreds/thousands of spam messages...

resp:23 I can't do next Saturday; I've got friends visiting from out of
state.

I haven't seen either steve or aruba online in a long time.  I was hoping we
could get them to come arond a bit more, but perhaps not.  Email would be the
best way to get a hold of them; the 'board-talk' mailing list (which is
restricted to posting from board members) would be the best way to get a hold
of most people, and *should* have addresses that people actually read, not
Grex.

seems that both sat/sun is not a go ... mayhaps a mon/tues?

Mon. evenings don't work for me. And if we want to have the meeting here
at my place, weeknights may be tougher to arrange. Though we definitely
can have the meetings elsewhere.

eery one is welcme at a board  meetingg ... wouldn't ahve to clear out
the place, actually.

This item is an indicator of grex's demise 

there is a move afoot for   sunday   5 april ... ocnsiderations?

I'll be out of the country.

due to other considerations ... mayube 19 aprinl works?  ALL are welcome.

I think I can probably swing that....

That could probably work for me...

looks like 19 aproil is gonna work for /gasp  everyone! OMG! 

and ................... fwiw ......................

response 22 of 35:      Mark Unseen   Mar 15 12:57 EDT 2009

we'd (royally speaking) like to have ans many sattendees as possoible, of
course, and/but also we need a location. 
  
last time the emeeting was at pet/smoke free denises' home. 
  
my place is neither (unfortunatly). maybe .. just an idea ... a pot luck to
go along with/before the board meeting? 
  
i cna;t volunteer anyone's place but i can voolunteer the potluck idea.

I should be seeing my housemate sometime in the next day or two; I'll
clear the date with him.  Assuming we want to do it here again and
people don't mind driving out here in the boondocks. I can attend any
other place that's cat- and smoke-free. Sorry to be so picky but I get
asthma attacks if I'm around either for any length of the time.

If people want to help bring food, that's fine with me. What do the rest
of you think of doing a potluck? Or snacks and drinks? Or didn't the
board used to meet at Zingerman's and use their room upstairs or
something? Just another idea...

The way it worked in the past is I'd call Zing's and ask if we could 
reserve the kid's room.  If available, it was ours.  They did this as a 
courtesy for non-profit organizations in need of meeting space.  Of 
course, it was a good thing that most would also eat or drink something 
while there.  Huge sacrifice, that. ;-)

I'm not sure how that would work with our remote board members.  We'd 
have wi-fi but not a land line phone connection with speakerphone as we 
have in a home environment.  A couple of times we used skype via laptop 
to connect board members for home-based meetings but there seemed to be 
some nasty audio feedback unless one end used headphones. We also had 
quite a few dropped calls. Bottom line, it worked, but barely, but that 
was when skype was bleeding edge. I know there are video party chat 
entities out there.  Anyone know of one that might work for a Grex board 
meeting?

iChat AV?

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