DACS Board of Directors - Wednesday, June 13, 2012

By Bruce Preston

Called to Order:  7:15 PM.
Attending: Richard Corzo, Drew Kwashnak, Lisa Leifels, Jim Scheef, Elizabeth Talian, Annette van Ommeren, Andy Woodruff
Guest: Charlie Bovaird

Minutes of Last Meeting accepted with corrections.

Treasurer’s Report for May 2012

Balance on hand 5/1/12 $5,852.90

INCOME

Dues $282.66
Bank Interest 0.25
Total $282.91

EXPENSES

Resource Center Phone 76.24
Resource Center Security 79.60
Newsletter Printing 85.00
Newsletter Postage 48.75
Renewal Letters Postage 18.72
Total $308.31

Balance on hand 5/31/12 $5,827.50

Membership Report

  April 2012 May 2012 June 2012
Paying members 138 138 131
-with email addresses 130 129 131
new members 2 0 1
       
DACS.DOC printed 100 100 100
DACS.DOC mailed 76 75 74
DACS.DOC mailed-member 56 55 55
DACS.DOC mailed-other 6 6 6
DACS.DOC mailed-free lib 14 14 14
       
General meeting Tablets
State of the Internet Artificial Intelligence
       
seat count 40 45 22
members signed in 32 37 22
visitors signed in 6 8 0

Old Business

  • General meetings
    • July 3: Microsoft Retail Store. Preview: Richard Corzo, Review: Elizabeth
    • 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 Plus.
    • October 2: Dave Marra—Apple’s new desktop operating system, OS X Mountain Lion, which will be available in July.
  • Possible future topics:
    • 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. Drew said he may be available to do this presentation in November or December.
    • 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.
    • Online Learning, focusing on personal enrichment courses rather than academic. An example would be the offerings of Linda.com.  Annette said that Udemy.com has courses on a number of topics.  Harvard and MIT have teamed up to offer free online courses.  Elizabeth will continue to investigate this topic and try to find a speaker by emailing some of these companies directly.
    • 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 was going to investigate a former colleague who runs a private educational program for unemployed/underemployed IT professionals.
    • Gene Barlow is offering a webinar presentation on Acronis products. We’ve had him present in the past, but he no longer makes presentations in person. 
  1. Open positions
  • The membership chairperson/greeter position is still open.
  1. Jim has loaded membership data into Drupal/CiviCRM and has been working on sending group e-mails.  Annette said the emails are ending up in her Spam folder.  Jim offered to do another test using the info@Dacs.org email address.  There is an effort by one of our members, Mike Kaltchnee to send out a survey to the DACS membership to see if there is any interest in joining a hackerspace in Danbury.  Jim said he would be able to send the email out from the membership database.  We would like to find a way to send out the survey so that we can easily find out how many DACS members are interested in joining a Danbury Hackerspace.
  1. Member Mike Kaltschnee is continuing to plan a 'hackerspace' or 'makerspace' for Danbury.  He held a second planning meeting on June 4 in the Resource Center. Andy Woodruff attended the two planning meetings and has offered his thoughts on the possible integration of the hackerspace group into DACS.  Andy suggested that we form a steering committee to gather additional information and make a recommendation to the board.  Richard, Andy, Jim and Drew volunteered to be on the steering committee.
  1. We have 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/ . Most of the board members have logged into the Team site.
  1. Bruce Preston has requested a solution to holding remote SIG meetings like the MS Access SIG. Elizabeth said that Bruce used AnyMeeting for the June meeting.  Richard recommended trying to use Lync at the July Microsoft Access SIG, since it’s free and he thought it could do everything that Bruce needed.  If there are Access SIG members that are not part of the Sharepoint team, they could be emailed a link.  Lync 2010 can be downloaded from the Microsoft.com portal, which can be accessed from the SharePoint team site.

New Business

  • Ahmad is resuming his duties as copy editor after Richard Teasdale filled in last month during his absence. As always, newsletter submissions should go to dacseditor@dacs.org.
  • Richard wanted to see if Patrick could document what is done to publicize the general meetings so that a backup person could step in when necessary. 
  • Richard suggested we explain on our website how the DACS membership charge will show up on a DACS members PayPal account.

The meeting adjourned at 9:15.

 

 


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