Minutes from the Grex Board of Directors meeting, September 23, 1998

Sep 25 23:10 UTC 1998

Grex board meeting 9/23/98 
In attendance: robh (Rob Henderson), jdeigert (Jim Deigert), keesan, 
(Sindi Keesan), janc (Jan Wolter, President), valerie (Valerie Mates, 
board), dang (Dan Gryniewicz, board), arthurp (Charles , staff), 
roadtrip (KK), scg (Steve Gibbard, board), mta (Misti Tucker, board), 
drew (Andrew Lanagan), ken (Ken Ascher), scott (Scott Helmke, 
Secretary), aruba (Mark Conger, Treasurer)

603 Initial gavel pounding at 7:45 pm  

605 Publicity committee:
misti posted info about nonprofit media relations seminar in Detroit, 
would cost $50/person.  Misti would like to go, Aruba interested also.  
Misti suggests that attendees ought to pay 1/2 of ticket.  Another idea 
would be to spend the money on books that can be passed around.  (no 
Board action on seminar).  Jdeigert is working on supplying local 
seniors w/ Grex access computers, would like help training people.  
Misti, Valerie, Aruba volunteer to help.
Valerie reports our Arborweb ad has gotten some hits, some new users.  
Valerie has been putting up flyers.  Also printed up some dialin stats, 
no recent changes.

607 Monthly Treasurer's report
aruba reports August took in $658, spent $591, some income from auction. 
 3 new members, 102, 97 paid up.  Auction has taken in ~$1100.  (I was 
supposed to get a more complete sheet from aruba after the meeting, but 
apparently I didn't -scott)
Rent increase to $63 (+$3), lower electric cost after measuring power 
consumption.  Phone rates went up slightly this month due to Fed line 
charges- no phone company action yet on tax exemption, and retroactive 
status still uncertain.
Visit to Accounting Aid Society not done yet, aruba and janc interested.

609 Technical Committee report
Scott reports backup tape problem, backup not done this month.  
Different tapes or clean heads on tape drive?
Valerie put a wrapper around passwd program giving useful advice.  FAQ 
being updated.
Large amounts of vandal activity wasting staff time.  Some odd hole in 
tel may be being exploited to do minor vandalism.  Valerie sent mail to 
disk hogs.  Drew reports a problem w/ mail size limit.  Valerie also 
added FAQ pointer to newuser program.

611 The Big Finance Report (aruba)
Long term trends, income vs. expenses.  Aruba put in data back to 1993 
(data to follow?)

Cutting costs discussion:
We may be able to save on bank fees (about $5/month).
Cutting phone lines: need to determine criteria for how many phone lines 
we really need (how often busy, etc).  Ken suggests Ameritech can do a 
"blockage study" of busy attempts.  
Do we want to cut any lines now?  Some discussion of stats, policy for 
number of lines to be built up in Coop. Deferred for online discussion.
IC-Net link: is it still worth the money (~$40/mo)?  Scg suggests that 
this line (which we've discussed putting mail on) is unsuited to be a 
mail link.  It would be hard to reestablish this kind of link at such a 
good price, though.  We really couldn't use this as main link anymore.  
Janc moves that Grex drop the IC-Net phone lines.  Seconded by Scott.  
5-0-1 (mta absent, scg abstained).  The motion is passed, Valerie, scg, 
and aruba will implement. 
Jdeigert asks about M-net style member-only access to resources like 
dialins.
 Ken also says that A2 news and other media should carry ads for free, 
since we are nonprofit.  We would need to send some ad layouts (Valerie 
volunteered to look into this).

613 Accepting Credit Cards:
We are still gathering info (some discussion in Coop of specific deals).
Danr's (Dan Romanchik, membership chair) deal would be $75 to start, 
plus a monthly fee of $35, Dan has offered to let us use his software, 
saving ~$200.  Will this get us enough additional users?  It would be 
easier for users in other countries to send money.  How do we handle 
chargebacks?  May be a little tricky.  Deferred.

613a Board Elections: 
We need to start setting up nominating process.  The bylaws don't say 
when to open nominations, traditionally has been 3 weeks before voting 
opens.  General agreement to open 3 weeks before voting.  Janc moves 
that remmers (John Remmers, staff) be appointed Election Czar for the 
1999-2000 Board member election. Scg seconds.  Board votes 6-0-0, the 
motion is passed.

617 New business
Grex walk lunch coordinator has disappeared from Grex, we are now 
looking for a replacement (not a Board issue).
Aruba has a copy of Ameritech customer record, passed it around the 
meeting.
Aruba got a request to open a member w/ a check w/ an old address.  
Would that be OK?  General agreement that it would be.

2120 Final gavel pounding: 10:11 pm

Minutes submitted by Scott Helmke, Secretary (scott).

response 2 of 12:

Sep 25 23:58 UTC 1998

It might be worth looking into what sort of deal Great Lakes Bank can
offer for banking for grex.  They may have some sort of low fee small
business banking account that would be useful.

response 4 of 12:

Sep 26 03:53 UTC 1998

(re the ICNet link: while I said that I didn't think the link would be very
suitable for our volume of mail, I did point out that STeve Andre and maybe
others disagree with me strongly on that, and did suggest more public
discussion of the ICNet link issue before voting to cut it.  Other board
members suggested that more discussion was not needed.  That said, I do think
cutting it was the right thing to do, and my abstention was to avoid the
remote possibility of an appearance of a possible conflict of interest.  I
just wanted to clear that up since there's some mail in my mailbox demanding
an explanation).

response 6 of 12:

Sep 27 17:58 UTC 1998

A couple of notes from me:

1. I will try to get the graphs and numbers I presented to Jan so he can
post them somewhere where anyone with a graphical web browser can see
them. The bottom line, though, was this: over the last 12 months, when you
compare our operating expenses to our general fund income, we have
averaged an $80 surplus per month.  That doesn't mean that we have $960
more than when we started, however; in fact we spent about $2200 out of
the general fund over and above our operating expenses.  That money went
mostly to hardware purchases and phone installation charges, as well as
the negative balance in the Grex store and a couple of advertisements. The
net change in the general fund over the last year has been a decrease of
about $1300, from $3850.52 to $2537.18. 

My analysis of the data is this:  while our our expenses have been
increasing more or less steadily since 1993, our income has been fairly
constant since mid 1994.  We garnered a large surplus between then and
now, and have been steadily drawing it down.  Now it's mostly gone, and we
need to either increase our income, decrease our expenses, or resign
ourselves to depending entirely on fundraisers to pay for all our upgrades
(even the mundane ones).  Most of our past fundraisers have fallen short
of paying for what we bought.

Cutting the ICNET link will give us 50% more surplus in our operating
budget (i.e., the margin should increase from $80/month to $120/month.)
We decided to go ahead and cut it based on those numbers and

1) users will notice no difference as a result of it going away,
2) we didn't use it the two times we have temporarily lost our ISDN
   connection,
3) if we ever do lose our ISDN connection permamently there is no way we
   could fall back to it, because our usage has grown too dramatically,
   and
4) scg pointed out that the slow link had a lot of trouble receiving mail
   in the past, and probably won't be suitable for a mail machine in the
   future.

Since "fallback position" and "mail link" have been the two main suggested
uses for the ICNET connection, there didn't seem to be much point to
keeping it.

2. We talked about cutting one or more dialin lines as well.  The
consensus (I believe) of the board was that rather than move to cut
individual lines now we ought to adopt a policy which determines how many
lines we should have at any given time.  The policy should make use of
statistics we gather to determine the appropriate number.  I'll be
entering an item about that soon.

The point being that we don't want to have to spend 6 months wrangling
with this question the next time we think we have too many or too few
lines.  We can simply refer to the statistics and the policy.

3. The election motion we passed didn't specify anything about when
nominations would open, it merely appointed remmers czar, so that he could
decide issues like that.

response 8 of 12:

Sep 29 01:07 UTC 1998

I believe the concern was with the trend in the size of the bank
account/surplus.  Yes, things are fine, now, but if it continuesto go down,
as it has been doing, then there is concern.

response 10 of 12:

Sep 30 17:29 UTC 1998

And it appears that it went down because of bugeted purchases.

response 12 of 12:

Oct 9 02:14 UTC 1998

re someting or other above; yes, we *do* want a large surplus. think
about it for a few more minutes. but not a surplus as a result of
reduced capability or flexibility.