[Imc] Steering group meeting 5/13/01

[jacobs]

Steering group meeting minutes May 13, 2001

Attending: Sascha Meinrath, Paul Riismandel, Ellen Knutson, James Jacobs (note 
taker), Ben Emerick, Mike Lehman, Mike Brunelle, Brian Hagy, Mark Enslin

Meeting called to order at 12:15pm.

I. Group reports

Finance: Sascha reports that finances remain stable at above $1500.00 per 
month.  He will be sending out a reminder to funders to submit May payments.  
The group is considering a new category for funders called “sustainers” which 
would be those folks able to give larger donations.  A minimum dollar figure 
has not been discussed.

Librarians: Ellen reports that the library has received 3 new subscriptions in 
the past week—Ad Busters, Mother Jones, and Covert Action Quarterly.  They are 
in the process of designing an organizational scheme and tracking mechanism 
for the journal collection. Mike has put the current collection in order.

Outreach: Meets next Sunday May 20th at 11AM.

Space: Meets next Wednesday May 16th at 6:30PM.

Tech: Zach configured the router so that more computers can be on the network 
at the same time.  Mike B., Paul R. and others are in the process of getting 
the computers hooked up and operational.

News: New folks are showing up. WEFT shows are being planned.  Contact Mark if 
you have any ideas, new items, etc for the shows. Danielle Chynoweth had 
originally volunteered to be Liaison between WEFT and the IMC News group but, 
after further thought, declined the position.  Another person will be chosen 
for the post.  Paul would like the synopses of the shows in order to post to 
the website as soon as possible.

II. Old Business:

Print Effort:  20 people are showing up regularly, showing that there is much 
interest in an IMC print publication. Those 20 are working on infrastructure 
issues and hope to have a product out by the end of June(!). The regularity of 
publication has not been agreed upon yet. Paul raised the question of whether 
the Print group would become their own working group or continue to be part of 
the news group? He suggested that for funding they should become their own 
group with empowered spoke(s). There was some discussion on how the print 
effort would be funded, whether it would be a financial drain on the IMC, 
where they would get their funding
 Sascha said that the group will most 
likely fund itself but that these and other infrastructure questions are being 
discussed in small groups within the print effort.  He suggested that folks 
should get involved in the effort in order to give input toward answering the 
many questions. 
Personnel Policy: Mike L. is working on it.  He will meet with folks from the 
Coop this week in order to look into how they deal with the issue.  “Doug” has 
not returned to the IMC since last week.  Mike will have a report to the 
steering group for next week’s meeting.

Open Publishing:  There will be an Internet Chat Relay (IRC) meeting with the 
global IMC next Saturday. There are two proposals put forth for all IMCs to 
discuss and decide upon: The first one involves a general definition of “Open 
Publishing” with no description of implementation; the second involves a 
specific implementation of the concepts including policies on filtering, 
deleting, etc.  Sascha put forth that we are already following the concept of 
open publishing so it should be easy for the U-C IMC to agree on the concepts.
 Mike L. suggested that the second proposal would be better since it involves 
specific implementation on open publishing that are clear-cut and workable. 
These are needed to deal with such things as SPAM and to keep the 
content-to-junk ratio high. After more discussion, it was agreed to support 
the first proposal while designing our own implementation policy.  Paul R. 
will post the details of the proposals along with the exact time of the IRC 
meeting.  Anyone interested contact Paul R.

III. New Business:

Tech:  2 issues that need discussion: 1) whether or not to keep computer logs; 
and 2) Equipment priorities.  Everyone agreed that dumping logs was a good 
idea to keep website users’ anonymity intact.  Sascha pointed out that he uses 
logs to put together statistics when writing grants.  The university looks 
closely at hard numbers when deciding on grant moneys. Paul said that general 
stats could be kept in the form of higher domain names (uiuc.edu, .com, .org
) 
without compromising anonymity but that keeping logs raises the prospect of 
having them subpoenaed.  It was decided that computer logs would be dumped 
while retaining stats of higher domain names.  In addition, other options for 
generating stats will be explored.

2) The purchase of a digital camera and a camcorder has been raised. Mark will 
bring it up at the News meeting to decide which is more useful at this stage. 
In addition, it is the tech group’s recommendation to purchase new computers 
to function as file server, audio/visual server, and streaming server.  
Donated computers demand too much time on the part of the tech group to get up 
to speed.  The servers are needed to cut down on the need to rely on Sergey as 
the primary (and only) production computer. Each server would cost in the 
$400-$500 range with open-source software. The tech group will look further 
into prices for the various pieces of equipment.

Space:  Sascha again stressed the need for all of us to clean up after 
ourselves in order to keep the space clean and organized. EVERYONE’S CONSCIOUS 
EFFORT IS NEEDED! Sascha, Sarah and Pauline have spent an inordinate amount of 
time on this and would greatly appreciate everyone’s help in keeping the space 
clean!



IV. Next Agenda:

--Personnel policy (Mike L.)
--Open publishing decisions of the global IMC
--Tech. Purchasing
--New Business: Retail

V. Announcements:

None to report.

Meeting adjourned at 1:15PM.

Respectfully submitted,

James Jacobs

James R. Jacobs 
Graduate Reference Assistant 
Education/Social Science Library
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign                        
Home: 303B1 Paddock Drive  
Savoy, IL 61874           
(217)359-9283
jacobs at uiuc.edu
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