[wplug-members] Draft Minutes for Board Meeting, 3/8/2006

[David Ostroske]

Here are the draft minutes for the March 8th, 2006 WPLUG Board meeting.

Expect more announcements Thursday night, too. There's a lot to be
announced, leading up to the meeting on Saturday.

---
WESTERN PENNSYLVANIA LINUX USERS GROUP
Scheduled Board Meeting, March 8th, 2006, 7:00pm
8220 Wean Hall, Carnegie Mellon University

CALL TO ORDER
The meeting was called to order at 7:27pm.

All 5 Directors were present at the meeting:
* Beth Lynn Eicher, Vice-Chair
* Patrick Wagstrom, Treasurer
* Chris Teodorski, Director-At-Large
* David Ostroske, Secretary
* Bill Moran, Chair

READING AND APPROVAL OF MINUTES
The minutes for the February 15th, 2006 meeting were adopted as
posted. The draft minutes are here:
http://wplug.org/pipermail/wplug-board/2006-March/000654.html

REPORTS OF OFFICERS, BOARDS, AND STANDING COMMITTEES
* Dave (Secretary) (Part I)
Dave reported that we have 64 members. We have three members who have
yet to be registered. Patrick relayed the new members' names to Dave,
and he will email them to notify them of their membership status.

Pertaining to the March membership meeting. Dave will send a draft
agenda to the membership with another meeting announcement. He will
also call on the committees to produce reports for the meeting.

* Beth (Vice-Chair)
Beth reported that the Perl Mongers weekend is scheduled for September
23rd and Ohio LinuxFest for September 30th. She recommended that we
hold the Board nominations meeting on September 16th, 2006. The board
agreed, and also agreed to hold the annual election meeting on October
14th, pending room reservations.

* Patrick (Treasurer)
Patrick and Beth were able to reopen the bank account, and Patrick
reported that WPLUG has $408.72 in the bank.

He reported that the cost of having a P.O. box depends on the post
office used. The Squirrel Hill post office (zip code 15217) offers
mailboxes at a rate of $15 per six months. Patrick will look into
getting a box within the next few months. We will need to determine
who would check the box and how often.

He reported that there are several issues that need to be addressed
before we can settle on having a VoIP phone number and Asterisk
server.

Patrick submitted the paperwork for securing the #wplug channel on
FreeNode. They are slow in getting back. Patrick will keep on top of
this.

* Dave (Secretary) (Part II)
Dave reported that he had not yet posted any activities to
BusinessCalendar.org. He will do so, in order to spread word of the
VMWare talk on April 29th.

He reported that he contacted Vance Kochenderfer to convey the order
to destroy the November 2005 ballots.

* Internet Committee
The Internet Committee is planning to meet after the GUM presentations
on Saturday. Bill will get the meeting started, though he cannot stay
for the entire committee meeting.

Bill will work on the new Penguin this Sunday. He reported that wiki
functionality is a part of OpenACS, but it has not been activated. We
will most likely work with OpenACS before trying anything else.

* Program Committee (Part I)
The issue of membership behavior was deferred until later in the
meeting. Beth presented the receipts for the switches that she had
bought for installfests to Patrick.

* Newsletter Committee
Bill reported that mail to top at wplug.org should be sent to the four
members of the Newsletter Committee. Vance recommended setting up a
news mailing list for dedicated newsletter conversations.

The committee wants to know when the wiki will be set up.

The 15th of each month has been set as the deadline for Open Pitt articles.

Bill is distributing The Open Pitt to two (2) libraries, Vance to one
(1), and Mike to Carnegie Mellon Library.

The committee has established a policy on accepting free books from
publishers for review in The Open Pitt.

We have a backlog of articles for The Open Pitt, so the newsletter may
expand to a four-page format in the near future. The committee also
brainstormed ideas for articles, and they would like to find people to
write them.

* ErieLUG Revival Committee
Beth and Chris could not attend the ErieLUG meeting, but "justbill"
and a new person from Erie (only known definitively as "phreekbird"
right now) did meet, and phreekbird would like to make preliminary
plans for an event on March 19th. Chris suggested taking Erie people
on road trips to the Pittsburgh meetings or similar events, which
would help build ErieLUG and show them how LUGs typically operate.

* Program Committee (Part II)
The Program Committee had requested that the issue of membership
behavior, especially antisocial or malicious behavior, be taken up by
the Board. In recent months, the committee has noted certain types of
irksome behavior, like ringing cell phones, interruptions during
talks, and other distractions. We'll probably always have some
problems, but in the long term, more heinous violations may hinder our
ability to attract good speakers in the future.

Beth thinks that if we started documenting these incidents, we could
curb our repeat offenders and more effectively deal with these
problems. In order to prevent such problems from going on public
record, we agreed that reports of such incidents at WPLUG events and
meetings would be filed with the Secretary in sealed records.

The Board recommended that whenever an issue flares up, that we always
bring in at least two people, preferably friends of the offending
party, to confront the issues. This would help smooth over the
troubles and prevent the offense from being taken personally.

We started a parametrized pre-talk script that can be issued before
each meeting:
-- BEGIN
Pre-Talk Script for WPLUG events (subjects in no particular order)
A) Schedule for the day
B) Cell phones
C) How the speaker would like to handle questions (Allow them during
presentations? Or only take questions at the end?)
D) Private conversations
E) Schedule for the next and future meetings
F) Who are the Host, Co-Host, Pizza Troll, and Board members at the meeting
G) Introduce the speaker
H) Take a break, if applicable, before the talk begins
-- END

Dave will send this list to the Program Committee, via
events at wplug.org, and to Vance, who offered to help with this issue.
He will also let them know that Bill intends to speak about this
matter at the Saturday membership meeting.

NEXT MEETING
Our next meeting will be held on Wednesday, April 12th, 2006 at 7:00pm.

ADJOURNMENT
The meeting was adjourned at 9:12pm.

--
David Ostroske <eksortso at gmail.com>