Item 91. Minutes of the April 27 1999 Grex Board of Directors Meeting Jan Wolter (janc) Wed, Apr 28, 1999 (01:21). 238 lines, 2 responses. 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 --- -------- 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. 2 responses total. ---------- (91) #1 STeve Andre' (steve) Wed, Apr 28, 1999 (11:31). 3 lines. I apologize to all for missing this meeting. Things were particularly bad at work, virus wise. I managed to completely miss this one. I hope that this will not happen again. ---------- (91) #2 Big Snauf (lilmo) Fri, Apr 30, 1999 (17:42). 5 lines. Minor quibbles: Under attendance, absent/tardy board members should be listed Under the Tech committee, one datum says "Scott Helmke some backups."