janc
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Minutes of the April 27 1999 Grex Board of Directors Meeting
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Apr 28 05:21 UTC 1999 |
Cyberspace Communications
April 1999 - Board of Director's Meeting
Minutes
Presiding: John Remmers (remmers)
Secretary: Jan Wolter (janc)
Other Board Members:
Mark Conger (aruba)
Dan Gryniewicz (dang)
Scott Helmke (scott)
Members of the Public:
Steve Gibbard (scg)
Janette Herstein (nette)
Andrew Lanagan (drew)
Jennifer Kriegel (jiffer)
Arlo Mates (arlo)
Valerie Mates (valerie)
Charles Mitchell (arthurp)
Mary Remmers (mary)
AGENDA ITEM 231: Gavel Banging
- John Remmers banged the gavel in an authoritative manner, calling the
meeting to order at 6:40pm.
AGENDA ITEM 23: Chairman's Report
- John Remmers reported that he had added "Chairman's Report" as a
standard recurring agenda items.
- John Remmers reported that he had nothing else to report.
AGENDA ITEM 606: Treasurer's Report
- Mark Conger presented the monthly treasurer's report for March. The
full report is available on-line in coop item 88.
* March left us slightly in the black
Total Income: $660.60
Total Expenses: $516.56
New Members: 2
* We received a $140 donation from a former Grexer.
- Mark Conger presented a preliminary report for April. So far, April
looks good:
Income to Date: $763.00
Expenses to Date: $481.27
- Mark Conger presented the current status of the auction:
* More items have been paid for and delivered
Open Items 8
Closed, Unpaid Items 14 $99.00
Paid, Undelivered Items 12 $357.00
Delivered Items 215 $1376.76
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249 $1846.76
* The leading "deadbeat" paid up. There are still a few more to
chase down.
- Mark Conger says Scott Helmke made a new measurement of Grex's power
usage, raising it to 9.2 amps. This will correspond to about a $7
rate increase for us. Scott Helmke says this number is actually a bit
high, since it includes the two monitors, which are usually off. He
will correct for this.
- Mark Conger reports that Ameritech has accepted his application for
exemption from paying state excise taxes, based on our 501(c)3 status.
* The exemption from federal phone excise taxes was denied. Mark
Conger and John Remmers have independently looked into the rules
for this, and both agree with Ameritech - we probably don't qualify.
* Ameritech is refunding us $594.48 in state taxes paid since
December 1996. Mark Conger thinks the total for that period should
be about $85 more, and that we should also be reimbursed for the
period from October 1996 through December 1996. Since we were
paying taxes on large installation charges during that period, this
would bring us about another $300. He is pursuing various Ameritech
people on this point, but has not yet succeeded in catching any.
- Mark Conger received that prospectus for the PAX World Fund that Cindi
Keesan has been suggesting we invest in. It looks good, but some of the
wording suggests that it might be for individual investors only. He needs
to call.
AGENDA ITEM 15764: Publicity Committee Report
- Misti Tucker, the Publicity Czar, was not present.
AGENDA ITEM 409872: Technical Committee Report
- Scott Helmke reported that STeve Andre had installed a new disk.
The space was mainly used to increase the size of the mail partition
a lot, and make some more user space available.
- Scott Helmke has received an electric meter from Jim Deigert (jdeigert),
and will be looking into hooking it up so that we can use it to make more
accurate readings of our electric usage. Richard Green (rtg) has also
offered an electric meter.
- Scott Helmke some backups.
- Scott Helmke says there are still vandals on Grex. The board recoiled
in universal lack of amazement.
- Scott Helmke has set up two IBM-PC running Kermit as new consoles for
Grex, replacing the Macintosh SE Jan Wolter's had loaned. One is in
use on Grex, the other is available for other systems we might bring up,
and as a spare.
- Jan Wolter installed yet another new version of Backtalk. HTML responses
have been enabled in a few conferences.
- Jeff Kaplan (kaplan) has a line on some more 4/690 systems that Grex can
have if they can get them home from New York. Staff has not decided if
it is worth the trouble.
- Scott Helmke thinks it might be possible to bring 220 volt electric
service into the pumpkin. This would enable us to use the 4/690
chassis components that we have for drive bays and VME card cages.
This would have to be cleared with the landlords, which might not be
easy to negotiate. (Most of the discussion of this item actually
occurred under other agenda items, but the secretary chooses to exercise
prosaic license.)
- After the meeting, the secretary overheard someone say that Dorian Kim
(dorian) may be moving to California sometime in the next year. If so,
Grex may have to look around for another net connection.
AGENDA ITEM 15777: Credit Card Info
- Dan Gryniewicz, gave a report on a number of different credit card
options. A few points that came up:
* Lots of different companies are offering lots of different plans.
Some companies vanish quickly. The obviously reputable ones seem
to be expensive. Many of them have fee structures that are complex
and not well described.
* Many of these companies will provide secure server pages to take
credit card numbers. This would save us the trouble and expense
of running our own secure server. In those arrangements, they would
send us the order, but not the credit card number. They would bill
the card and pay us by bank draft, usually after some delay. The
disadvantage of such an arrangement is that renewing members would
have to resubmit their credit card numbers for each renewal. We
couldn't set up a plan where we automatically renew them, because
we wouldn't have the credit card numbers.
* Naturally, all of these plans would cost us some money, but some seem
pretty reasonable, and it seems possible that they might be profitable
for us, bringing in enough additional members to cover the costs.
- The sense of the board was that more on-line discussion is needed. Dan
Gryniewicz will be entering an item.
AGENDA ITEM 619: Inventory of our stuff
- Mark Conger is working on applying for a license to solicit for
contributions in the State of Michigan. Filling this out requires
a copy of the Federal Form 990 (an informational tax return that must
be filed by tax-exempt corporations with incomes over $25,000 to report
on the income they aren't paying taxes on). We normally don't file this,
because we don't earn over $25,000.
- This form requires us to report our assets, with estimated values. We
don't actually have any kind of complete list of our significant assets.
We need to take inventory.
- Jan Wolter reluctantly agreed to go with Mark Conger to the pumpkin on
Saturday, May 1 at 1:30pm to take inventory of the equipment there. Any
other staff members eager to join are welcome.
- Once we have formed a list, staff will try to estimate values. This is
generally difficult because none of this is mass-market equipment and
values are hard to determine.
AGENDA ITEM 16102: Future Planning
- Last month we talked about having a "Plan the Budget Meeting". This
didn't materialize because of a lack of any ideas posted on-line.
- We aren't seeing any immediate growth related problems, except that the
telnet queues are getting long.
- There was some feeling that Grex needs a longer range plan before we
can do any sensible shorter range planning. Long range issues include:
* Do we stick with a single server, or go toward distributed servers?
Staying with a single server has the problem that we'd have to
transition away from SunOS to some other operating system (Linux or
Solaris or something), because there aren't many SunOS machines that
are faster than our current one. Going to distributed servers
may require various new software like Kerberos, AFS, client/server
versions of Picospan, Backtalk, and party, and so forth. Either
way, there is a lot of software development needed, and it will
likely take more than a year to get done, so we need an advance plan.
* Do we want to try change our emphasis? A suggestion was made to
split Grex into two systems, a conferencing/party system, and an
E-mail. Each would have separate telnet queues. Conferencing
would perhaps be available from the E-mail system, but E-mail would
not be available from the conferencing system. This would limit
the growth of the E-mail service, without impinging on the growth
of the growth of the on-line community. Is this a good idea?
* Do we want Grex to continue to grow at all? If not, how do we
stop it from growing?
- Jan Wolter will enter an item in coop for on-line discussion of these
subjects.
- A face-to-face "Plan the Future" meeting has been tentative scheduled for
Sunday May 23 at the home of Mark Conger. This meeting is open to the
public.
- The goal of the on-line discussion and of the face-to-face meeting will
be to produce (one or more) proposed plans for Grex's development. The
board was inclined to think that these should be put to a membership vote.
AGENDA ITEM 418660: New Business
- John Remmers suggested that we review the meeting time. Tuesdays were
partly chosen for his convenience, but his schedule is more flexible now.
Scott Helmke doesn't like Tuesdays much. Board will discuss meeting
times in E-mail.
AGENDA ITEM 374720: Gavel Cessation
- John Remmers banged the meeting to a resounding close at 8:14pm.
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