Meeting called to order 6:45pm Board member attendees: Kent Nassen Joe Gelinas Ryan Antkowiak Non-board member attendees: Denise Motion to approve prior meeting minutes (From Septemebr 2011???) Minutes Approved Discussion about holding the next board meeting. Meeting in the New Year. Joe has been unable to log in, so Kent agreed to reset Joe's password and send it to him. Joe moved to elect Kent the President. Ryan Seconded. Vote was Unamimous. Joe moved to elect himself as Treasurer. Ryan Seconded. Vote was Unamimous. Joe moved to elect Ryan Secretary. Kent seconded. Vote was Unamimous. Treasurer's report: Kent mentioned he spoke with TS last Wednesday, and several times over the year. We think the "State of MI update forms" have been completed, so Grex is still a corporation in Michigan Grex will lose its 501(c)(3) if we don't do the forms for 3 years in a row. Kent believes that we did them in 2009 and 2011. Kent said that TS has the password for the IRS webpage to do the paperwork for 2012, but he had trouble logging in to it. Kent will give TS a call regarding it. Kent: The bank balance as of Nov 30 2012: $564.53 Kent: Paypal as of December 12 2012: is $874.38 Total: $1438.91 available cash Kent: Recent expenses Keeping the "Grex" $5 (every 5 years) State update forms $20 each (every year) (Three this year, total: $60) Our bank was charging us fees for having a checking account. TS changed it to a "Free Community Group" checking account that doesn't have monthly charges. Domains Expiring: cyberspace.org expires in mid-January (Needs to be renewed by Dec 28). grex.org expires in February. Kent will follow up with TS. Business: How will we run a board election? - Remmers resigned from staff. He wants to do other things in his retirement. Thank you for your years and years of service to Grex. - Discussion about who will run the election software (since Remmers used to do it.) - Joe said that when he gets his account back, he can run the elections. - Joe's board seat is up for election this year. - Joe believes he is voteadm. - Board nominations are handled in Co-Op. An annoucement should be made in Agora that nominations are open. Joe: Motion: Open nominations for the board today. The nominations will close on December 31st. Nominations must be accepted by January 15th, 2013. Voting will start on January 16th 2013, and will run through January 31st, 2013. The new board member will take office February 1st, 2013. The term of the new board member will last through December 31st, 2014. Ryan seconded it. Kent seconded too. Motion passed unanimously. General status: Next Grex? Kent: * Dan Cross talked about donating a rack mount computer to Grex for our use. (last summer) Dan shipped it to Tony P. Dan set it up with FreeBSD. Other staff members have not weighed in on it yet. Joe: Thinks this is a staff issue instead of a board issue. The new computer is quite a bit more powerful than what we have now. (We currently have a quad core desktop that Remmers donated, which has been working quite well.) We had several outages during the year (most less than a half day.) The plan was to put Dan's computer into A2 Hosting. We would have to put an A2 Hosting logo on our web page, and we would have to give a letter to A2 Hosting, informing them of our 501(c)(3) identification number. (This would help prevent accidental power-downs.) The hosting from A2 would be free. The remaining data migration to the new server needs to be: conference data and user files. (This would need to be done at the time when we actually transition over to the new machine.) Dan donated a similar machine to M-Net. * Discussions about having a separate server handle Grex's email and spam filtering. * Discussion about re-doing the website, possibly with CSS and templates. * Kent put a note in the MOTD about users getting access to the full Unix shell. There was an increase in requests for user validations following it. * Kent has been doing user account password resets, fixing email, website updates, etc. Move to Adjourn Seconded. Meeting ended 7:46pm.15 responses total.
Nice minutes - thanks. Moving to the new server with A2 Hosting as colo strikes me as excellent ideas. (Not that Tony hasn't been doing a fine job as interim host.)
I've got access to the Dotster account now to renew the domains. Do we really need to stay with Dotster? Looks like it's about $17/year per domain to stick with them, which is about twice as much as we could be paying for the service. I've used DirectNIC for years at $15, and I know GoDaddy is much cheaper. Not that we have that many expenses, but it seems silly to pay any more than we need to. Neither domain expires before January, but we can pretty easily transfer before they expire.
You'll need to talk to TS about it, I think. He was going to renew them the other day when I talked to him. He was able to get into the Dotster account, too. This has been something the treasurer has done in the past. As to staying with Dotster, what would be the potential problems of transferring to to a new provider? Would there be any delay? And do they allow private registrations (to hide the contact info)?
TS is unresponsive and barely involved. Move to GoDaddy.
Yeah, we can do private registrations with most any provider. GoDaddy seems like the cheapest option, and they're stable.
Yeah, I've been using GoDaddy for my domains for the past several years. I have no problems with them.
The thing we need to watch out for is too many people trying to renew or change things at the same time (or nearly so). I last spoke to TS Dec 21 about this (after talking to him about it Dec 13) and he said he had the bank card for doing the renewal and was able to log in on the Dotster account for Grex. Previously, Mark had this set up to auto-renew using Grex's bank card, which ended when we set up the bank account with a new treasurer. I don't know if he got the actual renewal with Dotster completed, though, as I never heard back. I think saving some money is great, but it would be good to do any changeover in a coordinated fashion. The last time I asked about this, I was told it was a treasurer thing. That said, I don't want to go to the last minute in getting these domains renewed.
Who's currently the treasurer?
Joe Gelinas is the Board Treasurer. TS Taylor is our day-to-day treasurer.
I think jep's question in resp:8 stands. :) I've initiated the transfers to GoDaddy and paid for 2 year registrations for each. The transfers are now in process.
Okay. Can you let TS know so he isn't trying to log into Dotster?
Yeah I'll send him a note. He'll probably notice sometime in February.
He got an e-mail from Dotster saying to click on a link to okay it. I told him to go ahead and do it. But if you can send him a note as well, that should help explain what is going on. Thanks
Yeah, he didn't need to click it because after I realized his email was on it (I had assumed at the time that the email was treasurer@grex.org) I changed it to mine. Anyway, it's all completed now. Domains don't expire until 2015 and they're private.
Thanks, Tony! Hopefully it'll be easier in 2015 when they roll around again.
You have several choices: