Attending: scott, dang, aruba, janc, valerie, mta, irvingp, jennifer, arthurp, nette, scg, jabed, wolfg676, non-Grexer Joe. Helvetica: The meeting was gavelled to order by Valerie @ 7:45pm Chicago: Election of 1998 officers: Both Janc and Scott reluctantly volunteered to be President, while Dang and Scott volunteered (again reluctantly) to be Secretary. A secret ballot resulted in the following appointments: President: Jan Wolter Treasurer: Mark Conger Secretary: Scott Helmke Times New Roman: Treasurer's Report: Grex did OK last month, except for lost money from all the phone issues. Looks like we are stuck with our higher-than-expected ISDN rates, no help from the Michigan Public Service Commission. Higher costs for Centrex, etc. We might save some money by moving the ISDN lines out of our Centrex. (Need to see what change would cost, what we might save. Valerie will pursue this.) Aruba is a little worried about our finances and is planing to do some kind of year-end report. January so far has been a bad month (we are going to lose about $200). Bank balance $2900 (plus T-shirt stock). There will be a "Plan the Budget" meeting on February 8, 2:30 pm (Jan & Valerie's place). Arial: Publicity committee: All screens except the "splash" screen ready to go on CTN (cable TV). Misti may improvise something, some others at meeting expressed interest on the splash screen (Valerie). Observer article? (Valerie). Still a possibility. Jan: when upgrades done, do a big press release to local press. Courier: Technical committee: The dialin modems were moved to terminal server, but still have some lag issues. Marcus had fixed telnetd to allow local telnet w/o waiting in queue. New disk purchased, plan to install on Grex to replace /a (which may have problems). There was a plan to install this weekend (this means downtime). Old disk will be checked & moved to new system. A phone line was dead, was fixed by Ameritech. Valerie has installed new Pine program on 670, with modifications to reduce excess mail to the authors from new users. Other work includes installing latest patches and software packages (Jan), still need to find a coupie small patches. STeve Andre' has not yet completed the security sweep. We have a volunteer to write small programs (anjul), long time user. Zapf Dingbats: Long distance (LD) carrier. We are charged $.30 per line for no LD carrier. We have asked for quotes from ATT and Working Assets. Some concern about political leanings of one LD carrier (WA), but since nearly all businesses do some lobbying, it shouldn't be an issue with respect to 501(c)3. MOTION (janc, 2nd by mta) authorize Valerie to pick a LD carrier for Grex (7-0-0). Scg suggested a few other carriers. Trebuchet MS: New partyadms: current partyadms have nearly abandoned the job. The last time we needed partyadm, staff (or partyadm) decided who to use. There are a number of volunteers. Staff will discuss internally. Comic Sans MS: New business: We may need a new meeting place. Our contact at ITI has apparently been laid off. We may still get access through Jared. Dang may be able to get UM meeting space. Janc will enter an item in Coop. Mark has organized all his Grex papers! Century Schoolbook: New President Janc gavels the close of the meeting.8 responses total.
Thanks, Scott!
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Congrats (and condolences) to the new officers!
No 501(c)3 problems if you purchase goods and services on the open market even from extremely political vendors.
As long as you are paying something like fair market price for those goods and services. You can't buy pencils for $500 a piece from the Committee to Elect Lithuanian Dwarves.
Of course, you can choose to *not* by your pencils from a company with whose politics you disagree - but you can't encourage other people to do likewise without jeopardizing your tax exempt status. The real jeopardy arises when you try to influence legislation, but you are free to provide information. That is how all of the very politically oriented "think tanks" stay tax exempt - they just provide selective information.
I'm afraid our deficit for January is going to be closer to $600 than $200. I forgot to count the extra expenses we had (like the disk drive, and the ethernet hub, and the renewal of our domain name, etc.)
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