DACS Board of Directors - Wednesday, May 9, 2012

By Bruce Preston

Called to Order:  7:15 PM.
Attending: Richard Corzo, Andy Woodruff, Jim Scheef, Bruce Preston, Dave Green, Lisa Leifels, Patrick Libert
Guest: Charlie Bovaird

Minutes of Last Meeting accepted with corrections.

Treasurer’s Report

INCOME

EXPENSES

The annual IRS form 990N was filed.

Membership Report

Old Business

1. General meetings
   • May 1: John Patrick - State of the Internet. Preview: Drew Kwashnak, Review: Andy Woodruff
   • June 5: Patrick Libert - Music Services. (Pandora, Spotify, iTunes Match, Amazon Cloud Player)   Preview: Bruce Preston, Review: Richard Corzo
   • July 3: Facebook - Jim & Chris Guld of Geeks on Tour (if confirmed), otherwise Artificial Intelligence - Bruce Preston.
   • August 7: Robotics and Beyond - Paul Chayka & Mike Morrissey.
   • September 4: Tom Schonder of Google - Google Apps (Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Sites, and Google Docs), Google Voice, and Google+.
2. Possible future topics:
   • Artificial Intelligence - From Alan Turing to Eliza to Watson. Bruce to develop targeting July, or for a future month
   • Apple—OS X Mountain Lion is due “late summer”. Contacted Dave Marra for October or November. Waiting to hear back.
   • Cloud storage services—Dropbox, box.net, Skydrive, Mozy, Carbonite, YouSendIt, etc. Proposed by Drew. This would be a comparison of functionality and platforms supported (i.e. Windows, Mac, Linux, smartphones, etc.). Jim and Richard would help with the smartphone support. Richard set up a thread on the DACS forum. Tabled until we have more time to pull this together.
   • Presentation on Facebook. Jim suggested having someone talk about how to configure the security, privacy issues, what does “Like” accomplish, the difference between a group and a page. We hope Geeks on Tour Jim & Chris will cover this.
   • Online Learning, focusing on personal development/enrichment courses rather than academic. An example would be the offerings of Linda.com. Elizabeth has been investigating.  No report this month.
   • Jeff Robbins—Drupal expert. Andy has contacted him. Jeff is interested in doing a presentation but is not able to commit to a date at this time. Andy will follow up again in August.
   • Bruce is going to investigate a former colleague who runs a private educational program for unemployed/underemployed IT professionals.
3. Open positions
   • The membership chairperson/greeter position is open.
4. Jim started to set up Drupal/CiviCRM for maintaining membership data.  He will continue working on it at the Drupal SIG on 5/10.
5. Member Mike Kaltschnee, with support of board member Rob Limbaugh, has begun planning a 'hackerspace' or 'makerspace' for Danbury. He explained his idea at the May general meeting. A planning meeting for those interested will take place Monday, May 14, in the Resource Center.
6. We started a one-year subscription with Microsoft Office 365. The portal is https://portal.microsoftonline.com and our SharePoint Team site is https://dacs.sharepoint.com/ . There are some structural/organizational concerns that can be changed.  Richard will work with Drew.  We need to confirm that all board members give it a try.  We also need to see if the Lync component can provide virtual meeting capabilities.
7. Bruce Preston has requested a solution to holding remote SIG meetings like the MS Access SIG..  Mikogo offers a 10% discount to 501(c)3 organizations, but the price for our volume is prohibitive.  He is currently using www.anymeeting.com, a free service with advertising that has limited but sufficient capabilities.  It is not yet determined if Microsoft Lync will work.

New Business

1. Ahmad will be away until the 25th of this month. Richard Teasdale has agreed to fill in this month as copy editor. As always, newsletter submissions should go to dacseditor@dacs.org.
2. We approved the new Mobile Devices SIG, initially led by Richard Corzo and Jim Scheef? It will cover smartphones, tablets, and e-readers, and meet the fourth Thursday of the month.
3. We’ll plan on making a DACS poster and pamphlets available at the Robotics and Beyond (http://www.roboticsandbeyond.com) summer camp in July and August.  We will print additional pamphlets if required.

The meeting was adjourned at 8:30PM.