Agenda: Grex Board of Directors Meeting, Tuesday, September 26th, 2006
1. Arrivals 7:30p
2. Opening Gavel Tap 8:00p
3. Treasurer's Report
4. Staff Report
5. Root-granting policy and staff initiatives
6. Old Business
7. Schedule Next Meeting
8. New Business
9. Closing Gavel Tap
The board meeting will be held at 8:00 p.m., at the home of John and Mary
Remmers, 19 Westbury Court, Ann Arbor.
66 responses total.
Item 5 is for discussion of when it's OK for staff to grant privilieges to someone, and in general how we can avoid miscommunication in the future.
the opposite, that is, the summary revoking of staff privileges should be discussed, too.
I agree, that should be a part of the discussion.
I should mention - since it hasn't been emphasized lately - that board meetings are open to the public.
Yes, I'd further make it a goal to come up with a suitable policy. How do members of the public attend the board meeting if they aren't near Ann Arbor?
That's not the board's concern. It's no different for any other company.
Staff revoking other staff members' privileges is not the board's concern? Then why is it the board's concern if a staff member gives another staff member staff privileges?
I think that Eric's response is to the second question in #5, not the first.
I think you must be right, Glenda. To clarify: I think the board should come up with a suitable policy for staff members revoking the privileges of other staff members. I was just curious on a personal note how one attends a board meeting if one is not local to the area, and was not suggesting that the board form a policy for such things. Clearly, that is beyond the scope of the board's responsibilities.
Building on Dan's suggestion in #9, I think the BoD should consider appointing a person to be in charge of staff activities. This would be in the form of a corporate officer (say like a CIO or CTO) who would report directly to the board. The board would vest supervisory authority in this person including the authority to add and remove people from staff, approve system changes, etc. Staff members added by this administrator could be given limited administrative access to the system using sudo, with full access to the root password still requiring BoD approval.
The only ways to attend board meetings, that I know of, are to appear in person at the meeting site and to call in. The latter option is limited to the number of available dial-in lines (and speaker-equipped telephones).
FWIW: A Three-Way Call can now be placed, for a per-call charge, even
from a line that does not have 3 way calling as a regular feature, This
should add at least one extra person worth of capacity to each phone line
available at the meeting site.
For long distance charges, the current low bid seems to be calling
cards sold at Dollar Tree (tm), 35 minutes worth of long distance for,
of course, a dollar; though two to four such cards will probably be
necessary to cover a meeting, with necessity of redialing for each card.
This should make attendance of a meeting remote possible for < $10,
probably much less than the cost of traveling to the meeting site.
Also, some cell phone plans may be of help. (I *think* that 3-way
is an included feature of most.) Sprint, for example, has an airtime
free after 7PM plan; and I've been hearing commercials lately for a
Talk-All-You-Want for $40/month service.
Or you could book a telephone conferencing system for board meetings. Some are free without 800 numbers IIRC.
At the very least, why doesn't the Board see to it that meetings are recorded and then published on the Internet?
I think the minutes are published on the internet.
re #10 We did that on M-Net. We created a "sys admin" and that person is currently Rex Roof. The buck stops with him when staff gets questionable. He is also the one that answers for any weirdness. I'm actually suprised that sort of title hasn't been extended to STeve since he obviously operates under such an assumption.
Well, whether it exists informally or not at all, I think formal unity of command is a good thing and would prevent problems like this.
I think addressing it formally would be a way to inform people that want to volunteer for staff that they have to seek approval of the guy behind the curtain before they attempt something silly like logic. Nobody is going to come right out and say that there are going to be bruised egos if you attempt to fix anything so it should be formally noted at least.
Re. 15: Yes, but no matter how good a secretary Grex has, minutes can't be as good as audio recordings, which is what I'm suggesting.
re 19: Sounds like an issue to be taken up by a BoD candidate.
re #20 I agree. Hope we have a good volunteer to be on BoD.
I'm going to see if I can't record the meeting. I'm not sure how I'll take it off the device, so I'll have to figure that out before I can put it somewhere for people to get to it.
You could use a laptop and Total Recorder to put it right on mp3.
re 19 But then we'd have to guess the person who's snoring during the meeting :(
How does M-Net go about selecting this sysadmin above all sysadmins? How are the personality conflicts that seem inevitable to arise between that person and others handled? What if that person just says, "no" to anything that anyone else proposes? Like I said, you're giving one person an awful lot of power without a lot of checks and balances. Having someone responsible for the system is one thing. Having them responsible for and have authority over the rest of the staff is quite another. Regarding #22; If you have an iPod, you could get an iMic and plug it in to take a recording. I wanted to try and call into the meeting, but now it looks like tomorrow night isn't going to be so hot. :-(
The sysadmin is basically an appointed position by the prez. If the membership has a beef with the choice or conduct of said sysadmin then they can issue a request with alternative choices. If they still are unhappy, they can ask the membership to issue a vote of no-confidence against the president that made the appointment and ask him to step-down. I would say that Grex should do that but once again, there are toes and egos that might be bruised so I'd be almost completely blown away by such an act of mature accountability.
The problem is that that forces the membership to either (a) understand the technical issues involved, or (b) just go blindly with one side or another. The problem with grex is that it isn't so much a working democracy as it is a popularity contest; I'm wondering if we'd just be formalizing that.
I just think that more and more people fall into this "i am just a volunteer" mentality because of the present way staff is organized. And this is usually helped by instituting order on a professional level so that instead of being "just a volunteer" you become an "unpaid professional". I've volunteered in a lot of organizations, most of which simply did not accept the answer of "look, i'm just a volunteer". I mean, if my CAP commander called for my availability for SAR sorties, what would I say.. "Gee Major, I dont really feel like flying today, uh, besides im justa volunteer"? It'd be the last thing I said. Or when I was on a volunteer fire fighter. Do you think those guys blew off their responsibility? No way. Or when I taught CPR/First Aid/AED for the Red Cross...what if I just said "nah, im just a volunteer, ill just not show up at that class". Yes, you can fire a volunteer, and the Red Cross doesn't have any problem with doing so. Now you might say "Gee Nathan, thats different, we're just an organization on the internet". And I say that is exactly the attitude you should NOT have. Board of Directors, how many times do you sit down and think "what is grex NOT doing to promote free speech and free access on the internet that we COULD be doing right now?" I mean, looking at the BoD minutes...(this is just my opinion, not trying to be offensive)...the BoD spends WAAY too much time micromanaging Grex. I mean, discussion of the PC weasel? You should be discussing GOALS...planning on how you can better accomplish your mission statement. Forming committees for initiatives. Need an initiative?...here is one: What is Grex doing to help promote a neutral internet? I say you people need to THINK BIG. Not about becoming big in size, but rather big in impact. Grex is supposed to be about much more than just running a BBS.
Good points.
re #27 Most places operate that way. I mean..we're talking about gross misconduct for a membership to make motions to remove a sysadmin but at the same time someone with a good reason could probably muster a reaction.
So the recourse to the board is only for removing sysadmins, or for change management issues? Look. Let's be frank. If Steve said that water turned orange when you poured it on a Unix system, 99% of the grex population would believe him. If some of the other staff members said the same thing, no one would believe them. "Because Steve says it's the right thing to do..." is a strong argument for a lot of people, no matter what the thing being considered really is. And of course, at some point, staff needs discretion to be able to do things without endless rounds of public debate: ``Hey, I'm upgrading emacs....'' ``But wait! You can't! What about X, Y, and Z! This is EMACS we're talking about!!'' That's exactly right; it is emacs we're talking about, not the OS or hardware platform or anything else. Should users be able to push things like that to the board level? I'd say no. Should they have recourse against what must be acknowledged as the very, very strong influence of a few of the "traditional" staff members? Yeah, but what does that mean in practice? Marcus Watts was right about something in his posts in item #27 in garage: staff does need to be able to build concensus. I'd rather see that facilitated than a dictatorship emposed.
Listen, I had lunch with Hellman so don't tell me about crypto, okay? (Hellman's mayonaisse that is..)
The thing is, I *really have* had lunch with Whit Diffie.
re #33 (Me, too. Not only that, I was on a speaker panel with him.)
He's a nice guy.
His hair smells like strawberries.
The snozzberries taste like snozzberries!
I realize it's a bit late, but what's the phone number to dial into the board meeting?
Tonight, it's our home phone number. Bruce Howard is on that line for the meeting.
Guess that sort of rules out me calling in. Okay.
We only have the one phone line, and the one full-duplex phone, unfortunately.
Them's the breaks, I suppose.
Too bad you can't skype a conference call
nharmon in resp:28 :: deja vu all over again. I heard that speech -- both parts of it, the "professional" one and "we should be a bigger organization with more impact" one -- on M-net, maybe half a dozen times. Usually it led to grief. What sticks in my mind is a line from the non-profit organization lawyer who M-net consulted once. As it was reported at the time, the line was: "You can't make the membership go somewhere it doesn't want to go."
This isn't M-Net. Even if it was, and there was this much interest, it seems like a basic duty of a director to review short-term and long-term goal formulations as well as deliberating on recruitment ideas. What I probably find the most offensive is when directors make business decisions without being reasonably informed (aka "duty of inquiry".) As a director, one should always be cautious that information provided strictly for the first time at a meeting may not always be accurate. "A director may not close his eyes to what is going on about him in the conduct of the corporate business, and, if he is put on notice by the presence of suspicious circumstances, he may be required to make such 'reasonable inquiry' as an ordinarily prudent person in his position would make under similar circumstances." -Report of the Assembly Select Committee on Revision to the Corporations Code p. 50 (1975).
I dunno. I just feel that Grex has so much more potential. I feel that Grex could do so much more for many more people if it just made that next leap in terms of quality and intensity. So single person can get us there, its going to need to be a team effort. Here is what we need to do: 1. Everyone needs to put more work into the organization. Everyone means everyone, from members on the BoD to conference fairwitnesses. It isn't enough just to attend regular meetings. We need to be creating, experimenting, planning and implementing new ideas, encouraging new members. I know that Grexers tend to be extremely busy people, but just a few more minutes of brainfocus goes a long way. Maybe its just taking 5 minutes to pick up the phone and call the Free Software Foundation, or spending a few minutes in party to meet and greet new users. Every little effort helps. 2. Grex needs to incorporate professional development plans if it ever hopes to recruiting more staff. You simply can't expect knowledgable system administrators to come from nowhere. New staff should be cultivated from the user pool because those people already have the motivation and committment. 3. Grex needs to take advantage of its resources. I never cease to be amazed by the talent we have on here. We have PhDs, professional system administrators, programmers...the list goes on. We're sitting on a goldmine of technical prowess that just isn't being tapped. 4. Grex needs to raise the level of professionalism. This isn't optional in my opinion. And it isn't difficult. Those of us who are IT professionals already do it every day. We simply need to bring the same sense of responsibility to Grex that we bring to our careers. I think if we put our personalities, egos, and personal agendas aside and work on Grex's mission, a lot of other things will fall into place. It is all about "service before self" for our members and for each other.
It is all about "service before self" for our members and for each other. BWAHAHAHAHAH!!
It wasn't meant to be funny, Todd.
I think Todd was expressing skepticism. I think what you're saying is great, Nate, but I'm not sure it will ever happen.
I agree with the principles Nate cites.
Re #46: Right, there are plenty of talented people who log in to Grex. As you say, "We have PhDs, professional system administrators, programmers...the list goes on." As a practical matter, I wonder how much of those talents would actually be available to us, given people's busy lives and time constraints. For example, my impression is that you have some technical skills that would be of value to Grex. Can you estimate how many hours per week you would have available to devote those skills to Grex? How big a personal commitment could you afford?
Doing what, though? I'd volunteer to work on grexsoft again, but when I *was* working on it, no one else was at all interested and after a while it just became a pleasant but ultimately useless time sink for me. Then again, it never made it through the last OpenBSD upgrade. Hmm. Maybe I should volunteer for staff to reinstall it. I wonder how receptive staff and the board would be to such a thing? (That's a real question.) grexdoc could also use some reoganization.
We should build an opensource replica of the grex system.
It's most of the way there, except for a picospan replacement.
Maybe you should think about transcoding Eagle's Nest BBS or something Take your pick of BBS... ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/linux/system/bbs
I've looked at a lot of those; they're basically all pretty poorly implemented. I think that one of the things that made Picospan and YAPP reasonably successful is that, imperfect though they are, they integrate reasonably well into the Unix paradigm. Most of the menu-based BBS systems don't really do that. I think the best thing to do would be define a protocol for how a client/server BBS system would look like; what kind of RPC's (or functional equivalent) would one want? PostItem, PostResponse, etc, and then build a system on top of that. This is essentially what Jan did with backtalk/fronttalk, but he chose to use HTTP as the basic protocol, which eliminates a lot of the state-full-ness of the whole thing and makes some things difficult; hence not all of PicoSpan is in fronttalk (and of course it still has that damn bug where a C-style NUL character ' \ 0 ' terminates an input buffer because it's not properly quoted...).
I'm satisfied using YABB. Its flat file and neat.
Does it have a command line interface?
Currently developing a lynx friendly front end for it.
Hmm. That's not quite the same thing.... (But still a good idea....)
re #60 Thank of the mobile phone possibilities
resp:52 I would be happy to see you on staff
Regarding #61; Good point. Regarding #62; Thanks!
yeah; you were doing good work on GreXsoft, cross.
I would support a new system
Me too.
You have several choices: