Board of Directors Meeting Minutes
June 9, 2005

Attending:

• Mark Alberstat
• Bob Ashley
• Dale Crory
• Tom Daly
• Ed Dyer
• Bernie Hart
• Marilyn MacDonald
• Bill Matheson
• Tanya Moxley
• Alan Turner
• Marni Tuttle

Regrets:

• John McKay

Introductions for those who missed the May meeting.

Minutes of Previous Meeting

Approval of last month's minutes was deferred as they were not provided to Tanya in time for compilation and circulation. These will be approved online if available prior to the next meeting.

Board Communications

Marilyn circulated a handout with contact information for the current Board.

Members are encouraged to use the mailing list for sharing ideas, questions, etc... It is a closed list to which only the current Board members can and do belong. There is an archive for the Board mailing list. Yo u will be prompted to enter the username and password for your Chebucto account to access this archive.

Other CCN background information can be located in the current and back issues of the Beacon, at http://beacon.chebucto.info/.

There was a question about the possibility of using a discussion forum on a web site for Board interaction, rather than a mailing list. This is for future consideration.

Bob would like to see the names of committee members posted somewhere for information purposes. There may be privacy issues? Unclear.

More follow-up is required with those who indicated an interest in volunteering with us via the survey, Marilyn's letter in the winter, or at the AGM. This will come up again later in the meeting - see Forward Planning.

WiFi Update

John was not present, but Andrew provided some information about the kinds of equipment that are available. Some people are not clear about the end design we are aiming for. Current competition includes the companies that sell access to t he cell phone network for use by PDAs, Blackberries, etc…

The Victoria people are now up & running with wireless.

We could try surveying our current user base to see who would be interested in signing up for a wireless service. Andrew worked out some cost ideas based on current information about equipment, but these depend a lot on the kind of system we want to set up.

Ed noted that the speed in this kind of system is shared by all users on any one receiver, so it might "high" speed or not, depending on what the users are doing.

Marilyn will ask John to provide some more information via the mailing list re: equipment, system design, costs, etc….

Retreat / Forward Planning

Marilyn provided a summary of our Retreat process and some handouts to review Naomi's recommendations and to outline what the CCN executive recommends in terms of immediate action, following our Retreats.

Bernie noted that recommendation one needs to include building relationships with existing organizations for the purposes of recruiting new individual members.

Discussion regarding the mission statement as drafted by Naomi following our Retreat process. Some frustrations about going back and re-hashing it all again. General agreement that while most of us can live with the new wording, there are some concerns about what it would in terms of actions going forward. Bernie proposed that in the next week (by June 16th) each Board member send to the list their thoughts about what the implications are for our organization in terms of actions going forw ard, based on this new mission statement.

Tanya will distribute to the list the reports, etc.. from the retreats for the information of new Board members.

Andrew will send around the current mission statement for comparison purposes.

Alan / Mark moved that recommendation one be undertaken by a sub-group of Marni, Bill, Tanya and Alan. CARRIED. It was noted that the need for volunteer job descriptions is not necessarily a required part of the 'grant application' piece of work, but it is a piece of work that needs doing and will be include in the sub-group's work.

Bernie / Marni moved that recommendation two be undertaken by a sub-group of Bob, Tanya, and Dale. CARRIED. The sub-group will work with items submitted to the mailing list about implications of the new (proposed) mission statement.

Committee Reports

Technical Committee

The Tuesday night outage was a result of a power outage that affected most of the Dalhousie campus and other parts of the city. There was some discussion of UPS power and impacts on long-running machines when the air conditioning in the ro om is affected by the power outage.

Renewal messages and other details are being finalized for the quarterly renewal option, which is now available to members.

Our secure certificate service has been improved and will be rolled out where needed over the next few months.

There has been little progress with the V.92 system.

Ed made a note to make sure that when there is a system outage, the Chebucto voice mail needs to be updated. This is our policy, but sometimes gets forgotten when tech staff are busy fixing the problem.

Finance Committee

Bernie provided a handout of May's finances in a new layout. We were very close to expectations on both revenues and expenses for May. It might be helpful to have a column that shows how we were doing this time last year.

Month-end weekly reports will be delayed a bit now that Andrew is including 'interest' in the statements, which means he has to wait for bank statements to arrive.

We need to be careful with our reserve funds as they dropped significantly last year - even though we knew this was going to happen.

Bernie confirmed that Joanne D. will complete & submit our Revenue Canada reports.

Policy Committee

Committee membership has been 'tidied up' a bit and now stands at 7 or 8; new members are welcome.

They are working on some new agreements.

Bob had some questions about the scope of the work. It is limited to mostly operational work right now, unlike if we were a 'policy' board.

External Committee

Discussions are underway about doing some advertising in "Flying Cow", which is distributed at fast food locations around Nova Scotia. For $650 we can put an ad in one 'zone' for 26 weeks. Marilyn is still looking into it.

Bill suggested that we 'canvass' existing organization accounts to see if they will give us a bit of space in any of their publications.

Questions about making it obligatory for organizations with free space to show on their web site that we host their space. We might need to provide a variety of options for how that could be done.

Internal Committee

Nothing to report.

Other Business

Andrew asked if there was any interest in arranging a 'birthday party' event for our 11th. Bill and Marilyn will work with Andrew on this.

Adjournment

Bill moved that we adjourn at 8:35 PM.

Next Meeting

July 14, 2005. 6:30 PM, Chase Building, Colloquium Room