Minutes of a Meeting of the Board of Directors of the National Capital FreeNet held on June 15, 1999 at 7:00 p.m. at the RMOC - Honeywell Room 111 Lisgar St. PRESENT: Jeff Bossert Treasurer au025 JB Sandy Campbell dt820 SC Jessica Cohen Secretary aa724 JC Miranda Gray ak717 MG Natalie Munro 2nd Vice - President aa966 NM Dave Sutherland President aa001 DS Jim Wright ah311 JWr REGRETS: Pippa Lawson au775 PL Michael Mason 1st Vice - President an956 MM Andrew Nellis bs904 AN Jean Wilmot aa145 JWi STAFF PRESENT: Christopher Cope Executive Director bz787 Sheila Alder Administrative Coordinator bw306 Andre Dalle System Administrator al178 GUESTS: Mark Mielke al278 MINUTE TAKER: Joan Robertson cw055 1. INTRODUCTIONS The meeting was called to order at 7:05 p.m. with Dave Sutherland as the Chair and Jessica Cohen as the Secretary. 2. APPROVAL OF THE MINUTES MOVED by Jeff Bossert, SECONDED by Natalie Munro that the minutes of the previous meeting be approved. MOTION CARRIED. IN FAVOUR: JB SC JC MG DS JWr ABSTAINED: NM 3. REVIEW OF THE AGENDA Item 4a) Review of Committees (Miranda Gray) was added. Item 6b) Strategy Proposal (Jeff Bossert) was added. Item 6c) New Funding Opportunity (Jeff Bossert) was added. Item 6d) Email for students (Christopher Cope) was added. Item 6e) Procedure for In Camera minutes (Miranda Gray) was added. 4. OLD BUSINESS 4a) Review of Committees (Miranda Gray) Miranda reminded us of the need to review our committees. She suggested that we either review 1 a month, or review them all at once at the August meeting. There was some discussion on whether all the committees need reviewing, and whether teams and task forces should also be reviewed. Miranda will prepare an inventory of NCF's current committees and teams to be tabled at the July meeting. Committees needing a further look will be hilighted for a more detailed discussion at the August Board meeting. 5. REPORTS 5a) Treasurer's Report (Jeff Bossert) Jeff distributed copies of the May 99 financial statements and went over them. Donations from new registrations and renewals are down from budget. Expenses are in line with budget. End of month cash position is better than budgeted, predominately due to VolNet and Urban Cap Contracts. Cash position (taking VolNet and Urban Cap out of account) is a little low, but not very in the last 2 months. 5b) Executive Director's Report (Chris Cope) Chris briefly updated some points from the Ed report: -VolNet: 2 agencies have been approved (NCF-VCOC is one) , and ready to move to stage 2. -Technical committee will be meeting next Thursday at Ian's. -An AS 5200 terminal donated from Cisco arrived today, needs digital connections, should be up and running in a few weeks. Flyers: Chris was asked for an update on the flyers. The software for computer stores (win98 auto-install) is now working. Dave has volunteered to distribute the flyers and software to downtown computer stores. A brochure that can be taken to the libraries , based on the flyer is being worked on. Webmail: Andre is installing Netscape, webmail should be operational to test next week. Membership: Jeff expressed concern with membership numbers. Jessica also expressed concern with membership numbers and asked whether getting out brochures and flyers should be higher on the priority list? Chris answered that most of the work on these is done, it is just a matter of having volunteers approach computer stores and asking them to install our software and offer our flyers. Sandy suggested that we do some cold canvassing of each store, and that we prepare a brochure/letter on what we are trying to do for store owner/manager information. It was observed that phoning computer stores has worked quite well; our list of interested computer stores came from Andrew Nellis cold- calling computer stores. Back on more general membership issues , Jeff felt we need to increase promotion (flyers will help). He suggested that we also should be running ads (such as the one in Monitor) in other newspapers, such as Today's Senior and Today's Parent, which Miranda suggested as targets last month. He also suggested that it might be worthwhile to pay for ads if we need to. Bus ads might also be a potential , much of the adspace on OC-Transpo busses is not currently being used. A brainstorming session to discuss membership building initiatives is already on the agenda for July, this will be discussed further then. Modems: Modem availability and reliability important for attracting and keeping new members. It was acknowledged that staff is working hard to solve this problem. One of the problems that several Board members had noticed on the 520-1135 line is not so much busy signals as that the line rings without answering (making it difficult to autodial). Dave said this should not be happening if the hunt group is setup properly; if a modem doesn't answer , the connection should go on to the next modem, it should never just time-out ringing. He suggested that we talk to bell to make sure the hunt group is programmed properly, Chris will look into this. 6. NEW BUSINESS 6a) Removing Dead Newsgroups (Natalie Munro) Natalie explained that there are many dead newsgroups on NCF, and we need a quick fix to deal with them. Miranda observed that we also should fix our expiry date policy; currently any newsgroup with less than 100 posts has articles kept for 1 year, (otherwise all articles are kept for 1 month before they expire). Natalie would like to remove the groups that haven't seen a single post in the past 6 months. Jessica suggested that we designate Natalie to look at this, pick out the dead groups, and authorise her to ask Paul to remove them. Sheila asked that the IP ones be left alone, Natalie agreed that the for now she would leave the IP ones that still have active menu maintainers. NCF administrative groups (board groups,committee groups, admin groups etc) will be left alone. 6b) Strategy Proposal & 6c) New Funding Opportunity (Jeff Bossert) Jeff distributed copies of a paper outlining a new strategy proposal and briefly suggesting a new funding opportunity. Jeff gave an overview of the Urban Cap Roll Out Strategy (what it is, what it is trying to accomplish). The UCROS notes that having publicly accessible internet services could be accomplished by having simple "internet terminals" directed at a centralized server. Jeff proposed that the NCF pursue a strategy of positioning itself as the most logical candidate of the local community partners to provide the community- wide server services. Some observations made to support this proposal: - NCF has an advantage over webmail services such as hotmail in that users are validated on NCF ; encourages responsible use (assuming the development of a webmail interface), and this would be a local community oriented service. - terminals in building (i.e. Urban cap terminals, library terminals) could have a standard set of applications - NCF could position itself to encourage browsers pointed to NCF, we can offer thin client, webmail, capitalfind, offer a suite of services - HRDC already providing matching funding for development of thin client service - may be possible to receive funding to development webmail service - we are already doing this to some extent Along the lines of the strategy , Jeff suggested that we apply to the HRDC for funding to establish a web-based e-mail service. We would apply for funding to match recent donations from Rebel.com and Netscape to pay for the staffing required to develop the service. A draft letter of intent has been prepared, and will be emailed around to the Board. The submission of of this letter to HRDC is to be decided on at the next meeting. Miranda asked whether people only connecting to NCF for webmail will feel connected with the community, would people only using webmail actually donate? We'd have to out-advertise the "bigname" free email services, and convince people our service was worth the donation. Particularly those who cannot access NCF at home, she observed that currently library browsers at the OPL often do not visit NCF at all. Jeff replied that NCF offers dial in service, we wouldn't just be offering webmail, we have other NCF services to go along with that. Jessica observed that in fact some people might prefer being able to have webmail locally, as the sites such as yahoo and hotmail, with millions of users also have a limited namespace, and it is difficult to find a name no one has used if you don't want to be something like "jessica4563". There was some discussion on what creates the sense of community on NCF (whether the main people who see themselves part of the NCF community are the people who use newsgroups or chat programs such as chatstreet or IRC). Jessica suggested that we should work more on developing the communication side of things, such as web-based discussion forums. Jeff observed that currently HRDC and Industry Canada have money available and they are looking to fund and develop community networking initiatives, and we should position ourselves to take advantage of this; to develop services useful to the community. Miranda expressed concerns that we letting funding drive our priorities, and observed that funding for these initiatives was startup rather than sustaining. She did not feel that we should be offering services unless we can sustain them. Jeff replied that the webmail was something we were trying to develop anyways, and if funding was available, we should apply for it. Jim asked what the bottom line was for NCF, e.g. the overhead costs of taking on projects, even with staff hired for those projects it takes time for our staff too. Jeff replied that these 'overhead' costs are accounted for in project budget plans. It was observed that if HRDC funds NCF's web-mail development, that existing NCF revenue could be used to fund other projects, that might not otherwise be undertaken. ACTION: Jeff will circulate electronically the draft letter of intent to pursue funding from HRDC for the webmail project. We will vote on submitting the letter of intent at the July Board meeting. In terms of the strategy proposal, Jeff requested that in the long term we think about the roll Urban Cap is playing in community internet development, and how we want to position ourselves. 6d) E-mail for Students (Chris Cope) Chris has met with Ottawa 2000 (chaired by Shirley Westeinde). Ottawa 2000 is excited about giving e-mail accounts to every Ottawa student, they may ask NCF to provide these accounts. Parents and educators are alarmed by unauthenticated global webmail accounts, with very little accountability and high potential for abuse, NCF can provide them with another alternative of authenticated accounts. This will be a big project, may require help in terms of the administrative side of entering these accounts, we would probably have the schools validate the students by proxy, rather than demanding ID from each student. We'd start with offering them email, from the browsers in the schools as then broaden use, after they have gotten their foot in the door, students might also be interested in connecting from home for example. Miranda suggested that we might consider creating another account category, juvenile accounts, for this program, allowing for accounts with restrictions on usage (e.g. only able to send/receive mail from other NCF accounts which would be good for parents and educators who are concerned about the students receiving mail from unauthenticated services, and possibly other restrictions as well. Students would still be able to register for normal NCF accounts (under 18's require parental or guardian signatures to register for account currently). 6e) Procedure for In-Camera Minutes (Miranda Gray) Miranda stated that we need to have a procedure on how we deal with the record of in-camera sessions. Currently we don't have a set procedure, or official minutes from these sessions. Miranda will check Robert's Rules of Order for the recommended procedure, and will bring it to the next Board meeting. 7. ANNOUNCEMENTS a) The NCF Picnic will be held on July 17 (raindate July 24) at Britannia Park. Picnic will start at noon. b) The Harvest Ride will be held on September 12. Many of the sponsors from last year have signed on again. We challenged Dave to challenge the president of CFSC for the Harvest Ride. c) There will be a mini-symposium on June 25th, on the impact of community networks on the community. d) The volunteer pool party will likely be held in early August 8. DATE OF NEXT MEETING July 20, 1999, 7:00 p.m. Olde Forge Community Resource Centre 2730 Carling Ave. 9. ADJOURNMENT Moved by Jessica, SECONDED by Natalie that we adjourn, Motion CARRIED unanimously.