[Imc] Steering group meeting 5/13/01
jacobs
jacobs at students.uiuc.edu
Sun May 13 23:23:29 UTC 2001
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 weekAd 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 weeks 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 groups 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. EVERYONES CONSCIOUS
EFFORT IS NEEDED! Sascha, Sarah and Pauline have spent an inordinate amount of
time on this and would greatly appreciate everyones 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
(\
{|||8-
(/
**********************************************************
"Librarians, Dusty, possess a vast store of politeness.
These are people who get asked regularly the dumbest
questions on God's green earth. These people tolerate
every kind of crank and eccentric and mouth-breather
there is."
--Garrison Keillor, "Lives of the Cowboys"
**********************************************************
"But to live outside the law you must be honest." R.Zimmerman
**********************************************************
"Reading makes a full man, meditation a profound man, discourse
a clear man."
--Benjamin Franklin
More information about the IMC
mailing list