Minutes of a Meeting of the Board of Directors held on July 18, 2000, at 7:00 p.m. at the RMOC - Billings Room 111 Lisgar Street PRESENT: Graeme Beckett President aw958 GB Sandy Campbell dt820 SC Jessica Cohen Secretary-Treasurer aa724 JC Miranda Gray ak717 MG Seline Herz-Fischler 2nd Vice-President as370 SH Mark Mielke al278 MM David Millman aa342 DM REGRETS: Jim Wright ah311 JW STAFF PRESENT: Christopher Cope Executive Director bz787 Sheila C. Alder Administrative Coordinator bw306 Andre Dalle System Administrator al178 GUESTS: Tambrae Knapp aa005 Kim Martin Marissa Bovey bh590 Scott McBride en064 Lyn Shouldice ah940 Roy Hooper ad016 Donna Shaw aq652 Michael Philip Sinclair dz696 Terrie Meehan eb684 MINUTE TAKER: Joan Robertson cw055 1. INTRODUCTIONS The meeting was called to order at 7:05 p.m. with Miranda Gray as Chair and Jessica Cohen as Secretary. 2. APPROVAL OF MINUTES OF JUNE 20, 2000 MOVED by Sandy Campbell, SECONDED by Seline Herz-Fischler that the minutes of the June Board meeting be approved. MOTION CARRIED, all in favour. 3. REVIEW OF AGENDA Item 6. Treasurer's Report was moved to before the 4. Staff Presentation. The Executive Director's Report was added to the agenda, Chris spoke to this right before the 4. Staff Presentation, which was held with both an open and closed discussion session. The Smart Communities Statement of Work was discussed after the closed discussion session. 3a) Treasurer's Report (Jessica Cohen) Jessica distributed copies of and presented the Treasurer's Report. Revenue from donations was higher than budgeted, at $12700 versus a budget of $7800. Total operating revenue included $20000 from the Urban Cap Network project. Operating expenses were close to budget, $29000, versus a budget of $25000. Overall expenses included approx. $16000 from work done by Sandra Huntley on the Urban Cap project. The overall cash position is strong at $128,721 compared to a budgeted amount of $77,130, however this includes $54000 received in May for the Thin Client project, which is categorized as unearned revenue. Minus this amount, the cash balance tracks closely with the expected amount from the budget. 4a) Executive Director's Report (Christopher Cope) Chris distributed copies of a brief ED report (shortened this month to allow for the staff presentation). Chris hilighted the key indicators and the staff priorities, and updated some project statuses: Flyers: William Watt has taken some of these and delivered them to some of the remaining areas. HRDC Webmail: Status updates on webmail will be added to future ED reports, as updates on the project proposal sent to HRDC at the beginning of the year. 4b) Staff Presentation (Christopher Cope) Chris presented a report to the Board, both in written format, and as a presentation, on "Opportunities, Challenges, and a Sustainable Future" Summarizing the presentation: NCF must identify the services the public needs in the new city. In the future, many people will be marginalized in society if they do not have the means or the know-how to access the internet using graphical browsers, not text systems, and NCF's role should be to prepare the public for this. The report documented the changes in NCF with respect to, for example, membership demographics, migration from text to PPP connections, declining percentage of members using email, and declining membership. Also, the recommendations from the online survey of members in February, 2000 were given. Chris believes a problem is declining recruitment, not member- ship. NCF is not the only free ISP. An alarming reason for people leaving NCF is that they do not think is not useful any more because they need access to the internet, and they do not realize that NCF provides full PPP access and graphical internet connections. NCF has an opportunity to teach people about the internet. In the future, there will be many public access sites with the internet available through graphical browsers only. NCF is in a unique position to offer low cost, advertising-free services, such as the Thin Client, Web Mail and Smart Capital projects. If NCF continues to be dependent on donations, new members are essential. NCF should differentiate itself from the ISP's and provide up-to-date services that ISP's do not, such as help desks, teaching internet access and usage, and outreach. Helping those in the community without the means or know-how to get online gives NCF a target population and a niche to fill. Recommendations included emphasizing dial-up internet access, low costs to members, reliable connections, a web-centric environment for doing business with members, and a phase-out of Freeport in the long-term. The next steps would be to take a new look at the autoinstall diskette, the office appearance, the home page and developing a communications strategy. Chris was thanked for the work put into the presentation. A short break was held, at which point the meeting went into an open discussion of the presentation. Some comments from the floor: Lyn was concerned about phasing out Freeport. Chris replied that it would be phased out gradually. It is not a service for the future and that, with proper marketing, people would start switching over to PPP. Roy suggested offering assistance to people to obtain graphical-capable computers, and donating the Freeport text interface to a community group who would be responsible to maintain it. Miranda commented on the distinction between being a pipe versus being a bucket. She observed that while she likes some aspects of being more like a pipe (the teaching aspect) , she doesn't like others (the losing the "old hats" and people moving on aspect) Chris observed that we need to be realistic about the flowthrough, because of the learning aspect this will always be present, and if we build up the community aspect, more people will stay. Tambrae said that the digital divide is very real, and NCF could play a significant role as an enabler and needs to change focus by helping text users into the future. Sheila observed that with more and more non-authenticated free email sites being blocked, NCF offers a permanent email address on a reliable server. Lyn observed that many older members would not want to change from using Freeport. Chris replied that phase-out would be over time, that attrition would provide some solution, as Freeport usage is declining steadily. Members could also be shown benefits of using PPP (such as being able to send photos to their kids by email), perhaps through training sessions or speakers workshops. Miranda stated that she felt the most interesting recommendation from the report was to focus on people management, not technology, and she observed that all the recommendations will take lots of volunteers. We will need to work on volunteer recruitment, and start tracking our volunteer base ("people resource") as some type of key indicator. Jessica stated that she felt it was absolutely necessary that the "Freeport user" stuff, particularly both synchronous (IRC, messaging) and asynchronous (newsgroups) communication be integrated into our website before we start phasing out Freeport. Graeme asked Andre about the amount of time being spent on maintaining Freeport, Andre replied that phasing out Freeport would free up a significant amount of his time for other tasks. Roy, who previously worked as the NCF system administrator, estimated that when it was his job (approx 4 years ago) Freeport took up about 80% of his time. After this discussion, we went on to announcements, before going to a closed session to allow the Board to discuss the presentation, after which, an in-camera session was held on the discussion of Board candidates, after which the Smart Communities Statement of Work was discussed. 4c) Staff Presentation: Closed Discussion Session There was some discussion on what we wanted to do as our next step, whether we wanted to accept all or some of the recommendations, how we wanted to proceed with them, and how we wanted to synthesize them into a workable plan or vision. ACTION: A small group, consisting of Miranda, Mark, and Jessica will write an action plan based on the recommendations, and present it at the August board meeting. 5. Smart Communities Statement of Work Jessica moved that we accept and submit this proposal. Seline seconded. Graeme observed that the SOW mentioned funding for equipment, and asked how far in would we be able to receive the equipment. Chris replied early on, as the early parts of the implementation involve the hardware. We would only buy hardware for SC projects when money targeted for these purchases was received. Sandy stated that while he felt the webmail and extended access project were worthwhile projects, the thin client portion was not something NCF needs to be doing. It is new, untested in Ottawa, and may not end up being of any interest to our members. He suggested that we could renegotiate the project terms to have somebody else run the thin client. David asked what would be our obligation if Sandy was right, and the thin client project fizzled out with nobody being interested in using it. Chris replied that the overall proposal is over 3 years, if we find after the 1st year or the 2nd year that the project is not working, we no longer need to continue running it, and could phase it back out again. Sandy asked Chris what his opinion on the Thin Client project was. Chris replied that he thought it was the best thing since Cleveland developed Freeport. When freenets first began, they were new ideas for things that were not being offered, and nobody knew if they would work or not, until they tried. He stated that it provides a utility that is needed, and that it would be good for the community and for freenet. Sandy asked about the cost breakdown for the 3 projects, and asked whether the thin client portion could be lessened in importance and the webmail and extended access projects raised. Chris replied that the thin client would bring in the largest amount of contributions (software donations from various companies) and that the thin client would help make the other two projects possible, as it would be harder to find our matching contributions for these projects alone. At this point, there being no further points raised in the discussion, Miranda called the vote. MOVED by Jessica Cohen, SECONDED by Seline Herz Fischler that accept this statement of work and submit it to OCRI as our part of the overall Smart Capital Statement of Work. MOTION CARRIED. IN FAVOUR: GB JC MG SH MM DM AGAINST: SC ACTION: Jeff Bossert (project leader for this proposal) will be given the go-ahead to submit the Statement of Work to OCRI for inclusion in the overall Smart Capital Statement of Work. 7. ANNOUNCEMENTS Marissa announced that the picnic is coming up soon, on July 29th. Volunteers are still needed for things such as setup and cleanup crews. 8. DATE OF NEXT MEETING August 15, 2000 at 7 p.m. RMOC - Billings Room 111 Lisgar Street 9. ADJOURNMENT The meeting adjourned at 9 p.m. to an in-camera session to decide on filling the Board vacancies, and then a vision session to discuss the Staff Presentation. (reflected above in the minutes). Staff was invited to remain for the in-camera session. Board Vacancies: Tambrae was given the brief opportunity to introduce herself to the Board. MOVED by Jessica Cohen and SECONDED by Graeme Beckett that Tambrae Knapp be appointed to the Board of Directors, to serve until the 2001 AGM. MOTION CARRIED.