Item 50. Minutes from the 10/13/92 Grex Board of Directors meeting Valerie Mates (popcorn) Tue, Oct 13, 1992 (22:55). 166 lines, 5 responses. Minutes from the 10/13/92 Board of Directors Meeting, Zingerman's, 7:30. Present: arabella, chelsea, danr, davel, mdw, morel, mju, popcorn, power, remmers, steve. Agenda: 1. Initial pounding of the gavel. 2. Report on JCC sale. 3. Treasurer's report - Grex finances. 4. Hardware upgrading - getting more disk on line. 5. Further consideration of 501(c)3 6. December Board elections. 7. New business. 8. Ceremonial packing of the gavel. 1. Initial pounding of the gavel -------------------------------- The gavel wasn't at the meeting, so we started with a ceremonial throat clearing and coffee mug banging. 2. Report on JCC sale --------------------- (Background: A "JCC sale" is a computer swap. It takes place at Washtenaw Community College. This is the second one Grex has participated in. The idea is that Grex collects donations of people's extra hardware and software, buys a table at the sale, and sells the hardware and software for money that goes toward operating Grex. Equally importantly, we also give out Grex flyers to try to entice new people to log on to the system.) I gave a report on the JCC sale. The sale went OK. We made $92 after paying the $30 for the table. John Remmers, Marc Unangst, and I staffed the table. Mary Remmers made an excellent banner, which we hung on the table. My office looks ready to get rid of another wave of decrepit hardware that we can sell at the next JCC sale. There's an ancient HP machine, including paper tape reader, and probably miscellaneous other stuff. I'll try to get someone who knows what it's worth to come look at it and figure out if it's worth carting away. 3. Treasurer's Report - Grex finances ------------------------------------- Dan Romanchik gave the treasurer's report. Please see the treasurer's report item (in this conference) for exact numbers and more details, but here's what I scrawled down at the meeting: At the end of September there was $61.80 in the bank, not including the JCC sale. Now we've got $145 and Ken is paid up. We need $162 by the end of the month to pay the bills, so we need $20 more for this month. Ken isn't happy with the way we've been paying him. We need to do better. We found eight volunteers to chip in $16 apiece (we need two more $16 volunteers) to create a $162 cushion so we can prepay Ken a month's worth of bills so he doesn't have to float us money each month until we pay him. Lots of new members are signing up. We seem to be finally reaching "critical mass" -- the point where Grex has enough members to be a stable and ongoing community. We talked about several ways to encourage more users to contribute. Memberships start and end on at the beginning or the 15th of the month. 4. Hardware upgrading - getting more disk on line ------------------------------------------------- Steve Andre reported on hardware. Steve is going to definitely really truly put the new disk on-line tomorrow. The system will be down for part of the day while Steve does some tests and formatting on the disk. The new disk won't raise the cost of Grex's electricity because it is already running. We talked about how to allocate space on the new disk. The consensus is that rather than creating and later needing to change partitions on the disk, we'll leave it as one big partition and use symbolic links to point other things to parts of the disk, as needed. Marc Unangst tested the new 9600 baud modem on Grex and it was too fast to work with Grex. The modem works at home at Marc's. Marc has most of the pieces needed to build a terminal server for Grex. The terminal server would be sort of an interpreter between the modem and Grex, combining characters from the modem into packets of information to pass to Grex. The missing piece is a transciever. Does anybody have a spare one Grex could have? New ones run about $100 to $150; Grex would be perfectly content with even a really old one. ("My ethernet transciever is so old...," said danr.) [How do you spell "transciever", anyway? -vm] We'll use an Eagle for news initially, until we know the disk is stable. That way if we lose the disk, we lose news that would have expired soon anyway, rather than losing people's personal files or conference files. Once we know the disk is running OK, we may move nearly everything else onto it and turn off the old disks to save electricity and money. Marc pointed out that news runs faster if the history files and the article files are on different disks. We think Mike McNally said he can test out disks on his Sun 2 if we can find a Xylogics card to use for this. Someone offered Grex a Sun 3. Sun 3s are limited for serial ports and for disk space, so we wouldn't want to replace the Sun 2 that Grex runs on with the Sun 3. However, Sun 3s have great CPU speed, which is what news hogs, so this machine could eventually become our news machine and free up the Sun 2 for other functions. John Remmers will contact our possible Sun 3 donor. 5. Further consideration of 501(c)3 ----------------------------------- (Background: 501(c)3 is a classification of tax exempt status which lets businesses donate things to Grex and take the donations as tax writeoffs. We've been talking about it forever and ever, but nobody is really sure that a) we can qualify for this status, and b) we'd get enough donations to make getting 501(c)3 status worth while. Getting 501(c)3 status involves filling out a lot of horriffically long forms, persistance with government bureaucrats, and paying $175 to $375 in fees. If we got it, we could possibly get amazing hardware and software donations from businesses.) After some consideration, John Remmers thinks we can qualify as an educational and/or literary organization. Steve volunteers to be on a committee that handles 501(c)3 forms together. While Steve was out of the room, the rest of us voted that Steve is in charge of creating this committee. (Are you reading this, Steve?) We might be able to get Tom Doehne to help. He's been interested in 501(c)3 status for ages. John Remmers will contact Tom. 6. December Board elections --------------------------- Current terms end at the end of December of this year and next year, with 3 expiring this year and 4 next year. We need nominees for the 3 open slots. (When are the debates?) The nominating process ends on November 15, so hurry and nominate your favorite candidates now! Voting is December 1 to 15. John Remmers will enter an item in the co-op conference to discuss this, and he'll enter a pointer to that item in the agora announcements item and/or in the message of the day (the text that's displayed every time you log in). Leslie Smith will enter an "Other Conferences on Grex" item in Agora. 7. New business --------------- Next meeting is tentatively set for Tuesday November 17 at 7:30 at Zingerman's, pending Mike McNally's approval. (Mike is on the board but he couldn't make it to this evening's meeting. That's why he gets to approve or disapprove of the meeting date.) Steve needs a volunteer to help sort "hundreds of pounds" of Sun OS 3.2 and 3.5 documentation taking up space in his house. There are 4 or 5 sets of documentation. Marc volunteered. Steve and Marc will do this on Monday or Tuesday of next week. Is membership information on-line? Login IDs of members are listed in the file /etc/group, and you can see the list by typing "members" at any Unix prompt (or "!members" at any Picospan prompt). Terms of membership aren't on-line anywhere. We're not sure whether or not people's membership information should be kept private; the folks present leaned toward keeping the information private. What's the scoop on creating utility programs that automatically maintain the membership lists? Several people have volunteered to do it. Currently there are few enough members that it's not too difficult to do it all by hand. One day we would like to automate it. How many characters (or members) can go on a line in /etc/group, the file that lists all members of all "groups" on the system? Marcus Watts will check into this at work. 8. Ceremonial packing of the gavel ---------------------------------- Since the gavel wasn't at the meeting, we motioned to adjourn and John performed a ceremonial banging of a coffee mug.