Item 31. Minutes from the 5/10/94 Board of Directors Meeting Valerie Mates (popcorn) Tue, May 10, 1994 (23:46). 125 lines, 6 responses. Minutes from the Grex Board of Directors Meeting May 10, 1994 Present at the meeting: carl, chip, corey, danr* (treasurer), kaplan, mdw, meg*, morel*, mta, pegasus, popcorn, rcurl*, robh, snark, srw* (chair), and steve*. * board member Steve Weiss called the meeting to order by banging the gavel at 7:30 pm. 1. Treasurer's Report (danr) - We skipped this because Dan wasn't there yet. The status of the treasury is available in the Agora conference. 2. 501(c)3 Committee Report (rcurl) - Rane is still gathering information. Jason242 pointed Rane to dorsai.dorsai.org, which is a system something like Grex and possibly a source of information. 3. Computer Rehabilitation Committee Report (rcurl) - No news. 4. Publicity Committee Report (mta) - There have been lots of requests for the Take Me To Your Modem brochure. Steve points out that publicity for Grex is now self-generating: Grex keeps turning up in lists of net resources, guides to the net (including one in Poland), etc. 5. Hypertext Committee Report (srw) - Steve (Weiss) wrote an description of Grex that is posted on the World Wide Web. Lynx will be available as a newuser shell soon. Carl is redoing part of the Grex guide. Any user can publish their own hypertext documents ("home page") on Grex. HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is straightforward to learn, and html files don't take up much space. 6. Internet Access Policy Noncommittee Report (srw) - "The committee that meets 24 hours a day, 1 person at a time" is, of course, in session. So far a lot of opinions have been stated, and kentn has been tracking a "top 10 goals" list. They will be working on putting together some kind of organized policy. 7. Technical Committee Report (steve) - SCSI disk 0 (the bootable root disk) may possibly be dying: there were several "excessive soft errors" messages in the error log. The disk has made funny noises for months but in the last few days it seems to have started going steadily downhill. Possibly reformatting and/or cleaning it may help. The old boot Eagle from the Sun 2 is on-line, many thanks to gregc. Once people get all the data they want off it, it will become a News disk. It won't be used for users' home directories because it's not a terribly stable disk, and it would be better to lose a bunch of news than a bunch of people's files. Also, once Grex's news is carried locally we can turn off the porn type newsgroups; aside from these newsgroups being full of copyright violations, files from these groups are famous for hogging up disk space in users' home directories. Getting rid of these groups could help with the disk space problem in /home. The PC Route box doesn't get along well with the Sun 3. The net speed could be doubled by making changes to it. STeve will enter an item in coop to talk about news. A donated 300 meg scsi disk didn't come up. It's previous owner said it worked OK. It's possible that the problem is easily fixed. 8. Disk Fundraiser and Purchase (all) - Steve (Andre) made a motion, seconded by srw, to spend $300 plus up to $25 shipping to buy a disk controller. Passed 6-0-0. Kaplan suggested changing the disk space message that shows up when people log in to include a pointer to how to find out how to clean up your disk space. Popcorn will do this. Meg proposed and morel seconded: The board will authorize a fundraiser for the purpose of raising $1300 for purchase of a SCSI disk and controller. Passed 6-0-0. Danr and steve and popcorn will deal with the details of the fundraiser. 9. Moving Issues (all) - There was lots of discussion about when the new room in the Dungeon will be ready for Grex to move into it. Steve (Andre) will contact the landlord to find out details. If the new room will be ready before June 15, Grex will wait for the new room, then move. If the new room won't be ready until later, Grex will go ahead and move into the old room, then move again from the old room to the new room when the new room is ready. A. Mailing Address Change (morel) - Meg volunteers to be the official keeper of Grex's mailing address. Srw motioned, steve seconded, that the board designate Meg Geddes, x xxxxxxxxxxx, Ann Arbor, MI 48104, as Grex's registered agent. Some discussion arose about board member terms. Popcorn will enter a co-op item to discuss it. B. Grex Guides (robh) - It would be nice for new users to have a way to issue a "find me a helper" command and get an interactive session with a helpful system-knowledgeable person. Robh volunteers to be one of these people. One possibility is to turn on the feature in Janc's "write" program where you can type "write help" and end up in a write session with any designated helper person who is logged on. Another possibility is to open up a "help" party channel. We'll take this discussion to the co-op conference to work out the technical details of this and of splitting up the root mail aliases to send more newuser questions to people who want to answer them. C. New Meeting Venue (popcorn) - Mixed feelings on this, and we're not sure where else we could sit around and gab for several hours for free. Popcorn will enter a co-op item to discuss this. D. June 26 JCC Sale (remmers) - Remmers wasn't present at the meeting, but Meg proposed and Steve seconded a motion to get one table at the JCC sale. Passed: 5-0-1. E. New Business. Mta thanked popcorn for the Mathom program. Steve (Andre) would like to post a politely worded "plea for equipment" to the Sun-related newsgroups every 6 weeks. The board approves of this. Pattie Rayl pointed out that Grex's ad in Connect's BBS listings is expiring. It costs $12 to renew it for a year. Grex has had 30 or 40 new users from Connect. Rcurl proposed and srw seconded a motion to renew the ad. STeve suggested adding Grex's internet address to the ad. F. Terminating Gavel (srw). The meeting concluded at around 10 pm. Minutes submitted by Valerie Mates, 5/10/94.