Minutes of Genesee Free-Net Board of Directors Meeting March 24, 1998

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EXCUSED

Karen Magidsohn

Date:  March 24th, 1998  - Time:  4:30 PM

Location: Visitors and Convention Bureau - Conference Room
Mott Foundation Building, First Floor
Flint, MI

Call meeting to order
 

REVIEW AGENDA

Public Comments:

Approve previous month's minutes: APPROVED with clarification of U of M outreach charges.

OFFICERS' REPORTS

Board Chair

There is a new look for the GFN home page (demo)  www.gfn.org

Report:

There was a problem with Internic over payment of dues by GDFN. GFN is now independent and has paid $100 for 2 years.  There was an alias change to gfn.org from genesee.freenet.org.

Secretary

There was no January meeting. Accepted:Johanna/Preston

Treasurer

Net assets increased to 22,381, a 1/3 increase over last year. Operations budgets  to date 13,000 more than last year. Reported turnover of CD. Accepted:Les/Laura.
 

New Business (1)

Terms of Office: Members volunteered for terms of 1,2, or 3 years as follows:
Potrafka, Whiteside, Brown, LeMieux, McNiff 3 years,
Austin, Goldfarb, Rilett, Shepherd, Viele 2 years.
Peston, Magidshon, Emery, Lofti, Whalen 1 year.
Committees:
The Finance Committee
Jerry Preston - Chair (B)  jpreston@gfn.org
Les LeMieux  (B)  llemieux@gfn.org
Mary Ann Chick Whiteside (B)  mwhitesi@gfn.org

Marketing & Outreach shows.
Garry Viele - Chair (B)  gviele@gfn.org
Rich Emery (B)  remery@gfn.org
Johanna Brown (B)  jbrown@gfn.org
Karen Magidsohn (B) kmagidso@gfn.org
Dave Rilett (B) drilett@gfn.org

Office Operations
Les LeMieux - Board Rep. (B) llemieux@gfn.org
Laura Austin (B) laustin@gfn.org
Sol Johnson (V) sjohnson@gfn.org
Marilyn Sage (V) msage@gfn.org
Nancy Darby (V) ndarby@gfn.org

System Administration
Austin - Chair (B) laustin@gfn.org
Ives Potrafka (B) ipotrafk@gfn.org
Les LeMieux (B) llemieux@gfn.org
Scott Gifford (V)
Scott Swedorski (V)
Wayne Schneider (V)
Ingrid Halling (V)

Training
McNiff - Co-Chair (B) vmcniff@gfn.org
Mark Goldfarb - Co-Chair (B) mgoldfar@gfn.org
Rich Emery (B) remery@gfn.org
Tara Block - Coordinator (V) tblock@gfn.org
Pat Peterson (V) ppeterso@gfn.og
Marilyn Sage (V) msage@gfn.org

Web Site
Mary Ann Chick Whiteside - Chair (B) mwhitesi@gfn.org
Ives Potrafka (B) ipotrafk@gfn.org
Tony Shepherd (B) tshepherd@gfn.org
Vahid Lotfi (B) vlotfi@gfn.org
Johanna Brown (B) jbrown@gfn.org
 

Old Business

Finance Committee:

Grant report from Les LeMieux (written): The US Dept. of Labor grants will go to the states and the GFN will likely not be eligible.  Grants report (LSTA): The partnership with the library was discussed. Refund request: $35 refunds were granted to James Willard and Kimberly Anderson. Accepted: Preston/Willard.

Marketing & Outreach Committee:

An add in college newspapers was suggested as well as with alumni groups.  Science Olympiad - May 3rd 1-5 p.m. at Southwestern Academy called “The Great Space Adventure” Les suggested we build this committee.

Web Committee:

Mark suggested measures to counter AOL. Links are being checked for  correctness. The alphabetical list is almost done. TuCows banner space was discussed.

Gopher discussion:

The gopher is little used. VOCAL EYES screen reader and synthetic speech were discussed. Lynx is being updated.

Office Committee:

Laura charted 300 new accounts (1,300 total).

System Administration

Donation of Computer and upgrade of same (GDL)
Systems Changes: Sendmail was restricted March 4-5. We can now track incoming/outgoing messages. No Token messages are way down.  (Now have 3 tokens and 10 modems, 5 more modems ordered).  The modem pool usage is going up since people log in several times. Saginaw, Midland are now local calls.  Lapeer and Holly pay $105 for GFN memberships. There are 1,300 connections per day. 1,200 PPP, 400-500 to GFN, 250 telnets (80% Falcon). U of M outreach (1.5 months) averages 106 per day averaging 82 minutes (20% more than average GFN user).

The Merit T1 is often overloaded (heavy use). We have switched TuCows order to third. We have doubled memory on Spark 10 server ($664 cost). It is still outdated (needs fix).

Wayne Snyder from Falcon helped set up a Pentium web server (32 meg RAM) that also   handles FTP. It uses Linux and Apache and should improve web access.
Approved: Preston/Lofti.
 

New Business (2)

Discussion on how to make the GFN more useful: Lofti suggested collection of demographics about users.

Adjournment: Meeting Adjourned at 5:45 p.m.

Submitted by: David G. Rilett Marchl 24, 1998