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Grex > Coop11 > #113: Minutes of July 1999 Grex Board of Director's Meeting | |
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janc
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Minutes of July 1999 Grex Board of Director's Meeting
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Jul 28 03:48 UTC 1999 |
Cyberspace Communications
July 1999 - Board of Director's Meeting
Minutes
Presiding: John Remmers (remmers)
Recording: Jan Wolter (janc)
Other Board Members:
Mark Conger (aruba)
Dan Gryniewicz (dang)
Scott Helmke (scott)
Steve Andre (steve)
Misti Tucker (mta)
Members of the Public:
Mary Remmers (mary)
Jim Deigert (jdeigert)
Cindi Keesan (keesan)
Greg Fleming (flem)
AGENDA ITEM 1: Gavel Banging
- At 7:10pm John Remmers called the meeting to order.
AGENDA ITEM 2: Chairman's Report
- John Remmers reported that he has nothing to report.
AGENDA ITEM 3: Treasurer's Report
- Mark Conger presented the monthly treasurer's report for June. The
full report is available on-line in coop item 110.
* June was our seventh consecutive month in the black (though
this is still partly due to the phone tax refund).
Total Income: $668.00
Total Expenses: $128.84
New Members: 2
* We currently have 92 members, 82 of which are fully paid up. This
is lower than it has been for a while.
* Our bank balance is at $5340.29, which may be the highest it has
ever been.
- Mark Conger presented a preliminary report for July. Looks to be
profitable, but only because of the phone tax rebate. July will be
the last month of reduced phone bills.
Income to Date: $379.00
Expenses: $216.07
AGENDA ITEM 4: Publicity Committee Report
- Misti Tucker, the Publicity Czar, reported nothing to report.
AGENDA ITEM 5: Technical Committee Report
- STeve Andre reported on the death of the /a drive. Luckily, Scott
Helmke was able to complete a backup before it completely gave up the
ghost, so no data was lost. The old drive was replaced with one
donated by Fame. The restore ran into problems due to inadequacies
in the restore program. Marcus Watts did some reprogramming to enable
the restore to be completed.
- Fame donated seven new disk drives and assorted drive enclosures to
Cyberspace Communications. This means we now have 16 spare 2 gig disk
drives, and plenty of professional quality drive enclosures to put them
in. Staff intends to put more on line soon.
- Paul Southworth donated various stuff, including a spare tape drive of
the same sort we are currently using, and various PC components,
including 486 processors and motherboards.
- Scott Helmke says the power meter is still too peculiar to use. He will
be taking another power measurement soon.
AGENDA ITEM 6: ACLU Suit
- A hearing was held in which the ACLU asked for a temporary injunction.
If granted this would prevent Michigan's new Internet Censorship Act
(Michigan Public Act 33 of 1999) from going into effect on the scheduled
date of August 1, 1999. Jan Wolter was called as a witness. John
Remmers, Steve Gibbard, Mark Conger, and STeve Andre attended. It
appears to have gone extremely well, and everyone is confident that
the injunction will be granted. The ruling will be announced before
August 1.
- There still needs to be a trial to determine the constitutionality of
the law. This is likely to happen 6 to 9 months from now.
- Although we think it almost a certainty that the injunction will
be granted, the board felt it would be prudent to have a plan of
action in place in case it was not. Figuring out whether Grex can
continue to operate in any way under this law is going to be extremely
difficult and will probably require getting legal advice on a number
of points. We don't want to go to the trouble of formulating this
plan unless we need it. Mary Remmers proposed that if this law
comes into force, Grex should temporarily shut down while a policy
is worked out. This lead to the following motion by Jan Wolter:
In the event that Michigan Public Act 33 of 1999 goes into effect,
all public access to Grex shall be suspended, with the exception
of an informational web page, pending the formulation of new policies.
Seconded by Dan Gryniewicz.
Passed 7-0-0.
Again, we do not think there is any large chance of this happening, and
we think that it may be possible to bring at least a few services
(like Email) back on line pretty soon.
AGENDA ITEM 7: Credit Card Info
- Mark Conger has received the applications materials for setting up
a web credit card account for Grex. There are some oddities though:
* They increased our expected monthly charges to $4500, which is
way more than we are likely to charge in any month. We don't know
if this is a problem. Dan Gryniewicz has calls in to find out
about this.
* In addition to paying money to the bank, we also have to pay money
to the company that does the charges over the web. That company
wants a credit card number that they can charge our fees to.
Cyberspace Communications doesn't currently have one. Mark will
check to see if we can get one from our bank.
- There is a minimum monthly fee to be paid to the bank. Because of this,
we'd probably need to gain about 7 new members for this to be a break-
even deal for us. We aren't all that confident that it is going to
work that well, but we still want to try it.
AGENDA ITEM 8: Future Planning Meeting.
- John Remmers has been sending Email around to try to find a date for
the future planning meeting. Currently looks like it might be early
in September.
AGENDA ITEM 9: New Business
- Mark Conger has written a membership FAQ. This is at
http://www.cyberspace.org/memfaq.html
- There was some discussion of what constitutes valid ID for members.
There is an old policy saying that it should give name and at least one
other piece of identifying information. This policy seemed to be OK
with everyone, and it was felt that the bank account number on a check
or a credit card number would count as identifying information.
AGENDA ITEM 10: Gavel Cessation
- John Remmers adjorned the meeting at 8:21pm
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| 45 responses total. |
jep
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response 1 of 45:
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Jul 28 14:39 UTC 1999 |
I'm shocked that Grex is going to shut down if the ACLU's lawsuit
doesn't produce immediate enough results. It seems there are steps that
could be taken short of that, such as removing obscene material posted
on-line.
If it shuts down, I don't see how it could ever come to be started up
again. There would be no way to have the users communicate to come up
with ideas on what to do next.
The Board made a flamboyant decision, not a responsible one.
Now, how about some suggestions as to how to save Grex from this lunacy.
The decision has been made. If it comes to be implemented, there is a
need for a plan to recover from it. It would have been better to make
that plan first, but it's too late for that.
1) Collect alternative e-mail addresses so people can get together
2) There is a Grex conference on M-Net, just as there is an M-Net
conference here. M-Net hasn't panicked yet, and so I presume it will
still operate after August 1. The fws are steve, remmers and popcorn.
The conference is in need of an item #1, so if one of you could start it
*now*, maybe someone can move the relevant discussion over there, thus
preserving it for the Grex shut-down.
3) Maybe there's another on-line meeting forum, such as Chinet, or
armidalesoftware.com, where people could collect, in case M-Net shuts
down, too.
4) An announcement of a meeting somewhere on August 1, so people can
come and commiserate, volunteer to replace the Board, etc. in case Grex
is shut down.
5) We have 3 days to discuss other possible plans. Obviously if there
was any sense that Grex might really shut down on July 31, this could
have begun by now. There was no serious discussion, so now the rest of
us have been forced by the Grex Board to be in panic mode, too.
Sorry, folks, for my apparent disrespect, but this was not well handled.
At all.
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scott
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response 2 of 45:
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Jul 28 15:19 UTC 1999 |
The shutdown proposed is only TEMPORARY, until board can decide what to turn
back on. One option would be to censor conf. items as needed, etc.
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pfv
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response 3 of 45:
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Jul 28 15:47 UTC 1999 |
Conferences, email, attachments, party..
hehehe - the fun never ends ;->
Let's license the users & tatoo id's on 'em ;-) Ideas (and
pictures) are as dangerous as immobile cars and guns ;->
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cb311
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response 4 of 45:
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Jul 28 15:54 UTC 1999 |
Censorship is evil. I can't believe the position of the board sometimes.
Do you really think this bill will hold water? Look at the telecommunications
decency act and what happened there. Do you really think this bill if turned
into law would be enforcable?
I am not worried in the least. This bill will get shot down like all other
similar ones and we can all go on with our wonderful free lives.
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pfv
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response 5 of 45:
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Jul 28 15:55 UTC 1999 |
Stop bursting my ballon, goddamnit..
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clees
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response 6 of 45:
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Jul 28 15:59 UTC 1999 |
Maybe it would be possible to bypass the l+aw by requiring membership, and
thus creating a 'private society/club'. This at least should keep out a lot
of people. I don0t know how things work in the States, though, but that's more
or less the many laws are bypassed in the Netherlands.
At least it should keep out a lot of people that merely want to take free
profit from the services of grex.
If everybody else is as hooked on grex as I am, there should be a hige
response to it, and so keep the mandatory fees low.
Yet, as far as I can recall the declaration of principles stated by Grex, this
contradicts with the very foundation of Grex. But, maybe it could be an option
if things turn out for the worst.
Rick
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jep
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response 7 of 45:
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Jul 28 16:10 UTC 1999 |
re #2: I could see that the shutdown is intended to be temporary. What
I don't see is how restarting the system would be done, how the users
could be involved or know about it, or the procedure for making any
decisions at all after the shutdown.
I also don't see why there was no real advance discussion of this
radical step. If it was being considered by Board members in advance,
it should have been discussed on-line. If it wasn't -- which is the way
it seems to me -- then the Board made a hasty, wild leap.
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dpc
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response 8 of 45:
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Jul 28 16:11 UTC 1999 |
See now Item 114, in which I have made a motion to rescind the
resolution the Board adopted.
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cb311
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response 9 of 45:
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Jul 28 16:20 UTC 1999 |
Lets just make grex a haven for pornography as a means to raise a lot of
money.
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ryan
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response 10 of 45:
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Jul 28 16:24 UTC 1999 |
This response has been erased.
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scg
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response 11 of 45:
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Jul 28 21:59 UTC 1999 |
There doesn't appear to be much of a serious possibility that the injunction
will be denied. The judge has made it clear that he will issue his ruling
on the preliminary injunction before August 1st. However, if upheld, this
law is pretty clear in that it would subject the board and staff to a
tremendous amount of liability (including jail time) if Grex were to continue
operating. I wasn't at the meeting, but I'm assuming that this was probably
an outgrowth of a "what if" discussion, in which it was probably deemed
pointless to try to figure out how to comply with such a hard to comply with
law, given that the chances of our having to comply with it are almost none.
I'm sure that if the board's worst fears are realized and this law does go
into effect, they will try to get Grex up in some sort of workable condition
as soon as possible. One possibility would be to bring Grex up with only one
conference item, just for discussing what to do. Such a thing would be
monitorable pretty easily. Monitoring all the conferences would be much
harder.
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cmcgee
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response 12 of 45:
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Jul 28 23:11 UTC 1999 |
Someone help me here. Is it just the conference postings staff would be
liable for? Is email content at issue? If email isn't at issue, could it
be kept running?
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ryan
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response 13 of 45:
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Jul 29 01:24 UTC 1999 |
This response has been erased.
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tpryan
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response 14 of 45:
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Jul 29 23:05 UTC 1999 |
I thought the idea was that for the staff/volunteers Grex has, it
cannot monitor postings or private directories, nor does it want to.
Kinda like providing the forum for Free Speech, even though you might not
like some of what you hear or see.
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janc
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response 15 of 45:
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Jul 30 02:36 UTC 1999 |
I'm not sure why this motion came to a shock to anyone. We've been
telling people for months that if this law came into force it would shut
us down. That's why we are in the lawsuit. What? Didn't you believe
it?
As it happens, the injunction was granted. This motion could still take
effect if we ultimately lose the lawsuit though.
Yes, it would be hard to start Grex back up. But the inability of
people to discuss what to do about it is the least of the problems. I
don't know anyway Grex can be run in compliance with this act.
We could probably bring up some moderated forums to discuss things. We
might be able to give at least some of our users access to their email.
We'd have to consult with an attorney. It would take time to figure
these things out. If the ruling had gone the other way, we would have
had three days - not enough time.
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jep
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response 16 of 45:
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Jul 30 14:30 UTC 1999 |
Why shouldn't people be shocked? The Board never thought of it at all,
until Monday. It didn't bother to notify anyone until 4 days before the
shutdown would take effect, and the notification was only in passing, in
the Board meeting minutes.
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steve
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response 17 of 45:
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Jul 30 14:43 UTC 1999 |
Ah John, as soon as I heard about this law going into effect it occured to
me that we might have to shut it down. I never pooled people back then about
what they saw as possibilities for the future, but I can't imagine that others
didn't have that thought too, given our open nature and the idiotic and
paranoid nature of this law.
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jep
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response 18 of 45:
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Jul 30 14:57 UTC 1999 |
Why the surprise motion, then? Why not discuss it in advance, with the
participation of everyone?
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steve
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response 19 of 45:
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Jul 30 15:29 UTC 1999 |
Thats the best point I think you've made so far, John. I agree that it
would have been best to talk of this first, in coop. So why didn't we? I
suppose you could call it oversight of a collective sort, for both the board
and the users.
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janc
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response 20 of 45:
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Jul 30 15:39 UTC 1999 |
Because we were too busy fighting the law to lay out policy to cover us
in the unlikely event that we lost the case. Between writing
declarations and press releases, arguing the case on line, and preparing
and giving testimony, the board has been doing a lot. It's only after
our part of the fight was more or less over that we got around to
wasting some time thinking about the what we should do if we lost. I
call this "wasting time" because (1) it was and is extremely unlikely,
and (2) if it does happen, our goose is basically cooked and there isn't
much to do.
Ideally we would have discussed this long in advance, but we didn't and
we were down to the wire so we made a decision - if things go against
us, we'll suspend things while we think about what to do. Frankly, I
think spending energy on such a discussion instead of fighting the bill
would not have been very constructive.
We were concerned that some people would overreact. If we wrote a
policy telling what we would do if Grex was hit by lightning, we'd
probably have people running around in circles saying "Help! Help! Grex
is going to be hit by lightning! How will I read my Email?"
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mdw
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response 21 of 45:
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Jul 30 22:32 UTC 1999 |
This law, in essence, makes it impossible to operate a system like grex.
The teeth in this law would make each board member personally and
criminally liable for the actions of each and every grex user. I think
the board had both an abstract ("it's against the law") and a concrete
("my ass is on the line") reason for deciding to shut grex down - I do
not see any other responsible or rational decision they could have made.
It also appears *extremely* unlikely that this case will ever come to
happen, so I think it's also perfectly reasonable for the board to
decide "we won't decide what to do until we have to". We could also be
making contigency plans in case the martians invade earth, or in case
Y2K results in the nation-wide permament failure of the phone system, as
these plans have approximately the same chance of happening.
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tsty
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response 22 of 45:
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Aug 1 17:42 UTC 1999 |
..wha? come on! go sit in the back of the bus, "it's the law."
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dang
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response 23 of 45:
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Aug 3 21:02 UTC 1999 |
What's wrong with abstractly supporting "the law"? I abstractly support
"the law" because I realize what a horrible place to live this world
would be without it. I also support challanging laws. We even have a
legal way of doing it. I fully support that legal way
of challanging the law. Except in extreme circumstances, I don't
usually support illegally challanging the law. It's a very useful
institution, and I would miss it if it weren't there.
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scg
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response 24 of 45:
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Aug 4 18:58 UTC 1999 |
A biography I was reading of Thurgood Marshall contained a point about
Marshall's feelings towards Martin Luther King that is probably relevant to
this discussion. Marshall apparrently really resented King, largely because
he felt that King wasn't doing all that much and was getting a lot of credit
that should have been Marshall's, but also because he strongly disagreed with
King's civil disobedience approach. Marshall largely based his approach to
the Civil Rights movement on the principle that racial discrimination was
illegal in the US, and that the courts just needed to make the state and
Federal governments follow the law. At that point, he believed that breaking
the law while demanding that the laws be enforced was hypocritical.
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