Minutes of Genesee Free-Net Board of Directors Meeting August 22, 2002

PRESENT

Les, Georgia, Garry, Vahid, Scott, Jerry, Lynette

OFFICERS' REPORTS:

Board Chair:

No report.

Vice Chair:

No report.

Secretary:

No report.

Treasurer:

Finances were normal for the month. CD rates are crappy, so we allowed the CD to roll over into our interest-bearing checking account. More CD's will come due soon, and Kay will meet with a Citizens Bank affiliate to talk about a Money Market Fund. We'll discuss more at the next meeting.

An expected bill of $34K from Merit has come due and will be paid in the next month.
 

Old Business:

New Plan Implementation:

Progress is being made on the database; it will hopefully be done in 2-3 weeks.

Web Site Committee:

(Les on behalf of Chad)

Chad is still looking into possibilities for user access to CGI scripts. CGIwrap is a possible solution; it's similar to suEXEC.  It runs the CGI program as the user, not the Web server, and checks various permissions to limit the damage a rogue CGI script can do.
 

Office Operations Committee:

Minutes of the latest Office Operations Committee meeting are available.

Technical Committee:

Recent downtime was due to a failure of FALCON's UPS. Jerry raised questions about how this happened, but no additional information was available.

We've seen a 15% decrease in connections, with no increase in errors. This is most likely a seasonal dip.

Wayne will be making the report for the Tech Committee at the annual meeting.

Board members use of GFN email accounts (status)

Scott and Lynette had email addresses missing from the GFN Web page; they passed them along to Vahid for inclusion. Jerry changed his listed email address to a GFN address.

Scott agreed to email Jon McCarron's information from /etc/passwd to Vahid.

New Business:

Annual meeting

Rules were discussed, as was the date of the meeting. The meeting was scheduled for Oct. 24th at 7:00 pm, hopefully at the International Institute. Possibilities of coffee, punch, and
cookies were discussed in earnest.

Training Accounts

There are currently a number of training accounts on the system that are not being used. The Board agreed that these accounts were no longer needed, but weren't really hurting anything either, and that Les should delete them at his leisure.

Resource Center Account

Jerry Preston made a motion to give an additional account to the Resource Center at no charge, which they will mostly use for email. After some discussion of the ongoing good relationship between the GFN and the RC, Kay Schwartz seconded this motion, and it was passed unanimously.

Goals/Time frames review

Committees are making good progress toward their goals. The Web Site committee hasn't had a chance to meet recently, and neither has the Marketing Committee.

Objectives

1. Organize or re-organize committees to meet needs of the organization.

STATUS: Started

2. Implement the new Public Participation Plan no later than April 2002

Most of this work has been completed; we're still waiting for the final completion of the new database.

STATUS: Started

3. Develop list of distinguishing activities between our ISP function and our information function.

There was some discussion of this; it seems that mostly we do ISP work at the board meetings, but that may just be because that's what we have more problems with. There was general agreement that we should do more hosting work, and that we should promote our services, particularly to nonprofits. The possibility of requesting or requiring acknowledgment of GFN on users' Web pages was discussed briefly. We discussed aggressively marketing to nonprofits, and decided to ask the Resource Center if we could write an article for their newsletter, and if we could get a copy of their nonprofit/church mailing list for use in marketing.

STATUS: Not Started

4. Resolve the Montrose modem situation.

STATUS: Finished.

5. Develop a publicity plan and implement it.

Lynette has done some work on an initial publicity article.

STATUS: Started

6. Develop standards of service for dial-in users

We can get many statistics from Merit. In the future, we may be able to use a survey for this. We may also be able to conduct a survey of users who canceled or didn't renew their account.

We discussed the possibility of a setup disk and providing better instructions for new users. Vahid agreed to provide a copy of UM-F's "Blue Disk" to Scott for evaluation.

Georgia mentioned the possibility of promoting accessible Web sites.

Other Business

Scott mentioned he had read Merit's Web site policies, and could find no reason we couldn't host business accounts on the GFN if the Board later decided to do that.

The next meeting was scheduled at the regular time and place, Sept. 26th at 5:15 at the FVCB.