| Grex > Coop11 > #14: Minutes from the July 22, 1998 Grex Board Meeting |  |
| Minutes from the July 22, 1998 Grex Board Meeting | 
Jul 23 20:44 UTC 1998 |
Attending: STeve Andre (steve), Valerie Mates (valerie) (board), Jan Wolter (janc) (President), Misti Tucker (mta) (board), Scott Helmke (scott) (Secretary), Dan Gryniewicz (dang) (board), Dan Romanchik (danr), Steve Gibbard (board), Mark Conger (Treasurer), Dave Lovelace (davel) -10,000 Initial Gavel Pounding Meeting was called to order by janc at 7:48 pm -1,700,000 Treasurer's Report (aruba): last month had $1300 income, about $600 expenses, so about $500 ahead (thanks to our anonymous $600 donor). 4 new members. July so far is looking OK. Auction is going on currently, about 50 items so far up for sale, more to enter. Need to recalculate power usage, too. (see note) -12,000,000 Publicity (mta): mta had nothing to report. Valerie delivered a box full of business card sized flyers (400 pages of 10 cards each) for people to pass out. Also, the Observer reporter seems to have disappeared, no idea if the story is going to happen. -26,000,000 Technical Committee: Valerie has gotten msql working reliably, and is working on putting in nuget data. Valerie has also installed ytalk and the mutt mailer. Some discussion of automatic mail to recent users. The Grex console has become unreliable, has been replaced. HVCN is currently down, will probably move Backtalk buttonons onto Grex since they are small. Mdw has Kerberos almost ready. No progress on mail machine. Marcus has added more antispam measures. Recent issue with modems not answering, Scott has worked on this today. Scott has found updated Iolan manuals, is supposed to work on PPP. -38,000,000 501(c)(3) issues (round of applause from all present). We now have 501(c)(3)! The main issues are: 1. Receipts to donors/members 2. Fair value of things sold, memberships, auction items. 3. Donations of equipment, value to donor (not our problem, donor might want to claim a high value but we don't have to give receipts w/ values). Aruba would like to get some help/advice about all of this. We could work w/ Accounting Aid Society for a small amount of money ($25 per year). Aruba moves that Grex authorize up to $50 to join the Accounting Aid Society. dang seconds. Vote is in 7 favor, 0 against, no abstentions. The motion is passed From advice by Ken Ascher (ken), Grex will not have to pay taxes on phone lines (~$30/month). Memberships may be tax deductible, we need to find out. Sales tax is not an issue if we sell less than $5000/yr., but if we do get past that $5000 we are responsible for sales tax for all of it. We would be very unlikely to get to $5000. We don't have to pay sales tax in most cases, but payment must come directly from Cyberspace Communications, rather than having somebody buy things and get reimbursed. We can't get any savings on electricity since we don't have our own meter. -54,000,000 Cost reductions: aruba has been compiling numbers, going back to 1993. Hasn't had time to really summarize yet. Showed a graph of donations and expenses over the last few years, which shows a much narrower gap than there used to be. Conclusion is that we now are breaking even, and are dependent on fundraisers to stay afloat. (~$620/month is expenses). Specific things: 0. 501(c)(3) saves us about $30/mo. 1. Move ISDN lines off of Centrex. Monthly savings, but an installation fee to make the change. W/o Centrex would save about $46/mo. Need to find out what change would cost (over $100/line). Aruba will call Ameritech and ask. 2. Cutting one or more phone lines. Each line would save about $18/mo., and with installation charges a line would need to be cut for at least 3 months to save money. We could also cut the currently unused IC-Net lines, but STeve would like to keep IC-Net lines for mail once we get mail machine running. Much discussion over reasons to not cut lines right now, too much disagreement to take any action at tonight's meeting. 3. Updating our electricity payment to reflect current hardware should save money. Aruba will look for most recent figures, which should still be valid (scott will measure again if the last figures cannot be found). 4. Increase membership? Appoint a new membership chair? Danr volunteers during this discussion. Janc moved that danr be appointed membership chair, scg seconded. 7 in favor, 0 against, no abstentions. 5. Accept credit cards? It's now cheaper, but still expensive. Needs to be a Coop item. -65,000,000 New Business Valerie is looking for somebody to take over the Agora "selections" command. -135,000,000 Final Gavel Pounding Janc closed the meeting at 9:38 pm
| response 1 of 19: |
Jul 23 21:21 UTC 1998 |
Is grex paying for touchtone phone lines? We save about $2/month having pulse phone service, but it may not be available for business lines. Potential savings of another $30/month or so?
| response 2 of 19: |
Jul 24 03:38 UTC 1998 |
We are not paying for touchtone on most of our lines. However I am worried that we might be on the last two we installed in early '96. I asked Ameritech to send me a breakdonw of our monthly charges, so I can check that.
| response 3 of 19: |
Jul 24 04:03 UTC 1998 |
See item 124 for info about taking our ISDN lines off centrex. I called the Accounting Aid Society today and spoke with a woman named R. Sue Dodea. (Apparently people call her "R. Sue".) She was very nice and will send us a membership packet. The membership fee has gone up since the last time we were a member - it'll be $50, so it's good that we authorized that much at the board meeting. The AAS is a non-profit organization founded by accountants to help other non-profits deal with the various government regulations they are subject to. Once we are a member, we can call them up and ask questions about the rules. They also publish a book called the Michigan Nonprofit Management Manual which has (R. Sue told me) the answer to most of the questions we will run up against. It costs $55 for members or $85 for non-members. She pretty much sold me on it as worth buying, but I will look at what she sends me before asking for any money from the board.
| response 4 of 19: |
Jul 24 05:11 UTC 1998 |
I think we now have touchtone on all the lines, because it's a standard feature of Centrex lines.
| response 5 of 19: |
Jul 24 11:34 UTC 1998 |
Ameritech keeps promising (threatening) that pulse-only as an option will vanish Real Soon Now. It's been at least a decade now since the first time, so I'm not all *that* worried. (Yep, we avoid that particular charge. Used to make attack-dialing Grex very painful, especially those 3 zeroes.)
| response 6 of 19: |
Aug 2 22:03 UTC 1998 |
oldcoop 123 <--> newcoop 14.
| response 7 of 19: |
Aug 3 03:35 UTC 1998 |
Ameritech, some time in the past three years, managed to stop being required to provide party lines. I still have one, and there is no other party on it. So there is some chance they might not be selling new pulse lines, though keeping the old ones. (I doubt that anyone is still selling new phones that work only on pulse lines). I. e., if they stop selling new pulse lines, they would probably continue to support the ones that already exist.
| response 8 of 19: |
Aug 3 05:26 UTC 1998 |
If you're not doing Centrex, you can ask for a pulse only line. They charge so little for tone that I'm not sure why anybody who makes any outgoing calls would bother.
| response 9 of 19: |
Oct 2 17:17 UTC 1998 |
I don't believe that it costs anything for touch tone service on a Centrex line. Thats what I remember ken K at Ameritech telling me when we got the Centrex order put together. It was part of some package that we needed for the lines, so essentially it was free.
| response 10 of 19: |
Oct 2 19:04 UTC 1998 |
Or rather, "unavoidable". :) Yes, I believe STeve is correct. We pay $2.26 per line for "Intercom charges", which I gather allows us to transfer calls easily and do lots of other stuff we're never going to do. But according to the woman who broke down the bill for me, we can't choose not to pay for it.
| response 11 of 19: |
Oct 5 02:12 UTC 1998 |
You've touched another hot button of mine. Ameritech is still selling pulse-only lines, and charging extra for the touch-tone 'service'. The truth is that DTMF tones are easier and quicker to detect, and thus place less load on the switch's CPU resources during call setup. It is therefore cheaper for the phone company if we use tones rather than pulses, but they charge us more! I do know some people who refuse to pay the extra charge, and have hung on to their old rotary phones for all these years. I've had to train them how to get a modern phone, and switch it between pulse and tone modes, so that they can use audio response units.
| response 12 of 19: |
Oct 5 12:04 UTC 1998 |
We refuse to pay the extra charge, but all our phones except one are switchable. Ameritech has several times, over the years, warned us of an imminent mandatory change to tone dial at the higher rate, but never yet followed through. I find it especially repugnant in that no longer having to support pulse dial ought to save them quite a lot of money. (I mean, in addition to what rtgreen said about tone's being cheaper in itself; they could scrap the entire cost of maintaining the ability to interpret pulse.)
| response 13 of 19: |
Oct 6 04:23 UTC 1998 |
I don't think they could scrap maintaing pulse intrepretation all that easily, given that there are still a fair number of people who have rotary phones, and that those people often tend to be those who don't adjust to technological changes easily. Somebody I knew in the Chicago area a few years ago discovered that Ameritech there was providing tone service even on lines where it wasn't being paid for. Presumably that was easier than turning it off.
| response 14 of 19: |
Oct 6 16:39 UTC 1998 |
They don't do that here. We had a pulse line in our last house, but the phone wouldn't work on tone.
| response 15 of 19: |
Oct 7 11:54 UTC 1998 |
Right. They still don't do it here.
| response 16 of 19: |
Oct 7 15:32 UTC 1998 |
Are you guys on non-Ameritech phone systems?
| response 17 of 19: |
Oct 8 05:19 UTC 1998 |
I for many years did not subscribe to tone service, and found that my modem and tone phones worked just fine. About five years ago the phone company called me and told me there had been a mistake on the billing, and I owed them for ten years of tone service, since my line had it and and audit showed that I wasn't being billed for it. I told them that I had never ordered it, and it would be fine with me if they disabled it. We compromised, and they began billing me for it, and I didn't have to pay the retroactive charges, and I didn't have to pay an 'installation fee' for 'enabling' it on my line. It grinds me to pay for something that's a benefit to them, but I didn't want to ruin my credit with a huge bogus retroactive bill dispute. It's a racket!
| response 18 of 19: |
Oct 9 02:10 UTC 1998 |
...or line noise <g>.
| response 19 of 19: |
Oct 19 21:33 UTC 1998 |
No, I was and am on Ameritech phone lines. (I don't live at that house any more, and it has since had tone turned on.)