DACS Board of Directors Meeting
Wednesday, October 10, 2012

By Bruce Preston

A meeting of your board of Directors was held on October 10, 2012.  The meeting was called to order at 7:15 PM

Attending were Richard Corzo, Dave Green, Elizabeth Talian, Lisa Leifels, Bruce Preston, Jim Scheef, Andy Woodruff, Annette van Ommeren, Drew Kwashnak, Charles Bovaid

The minutes of Last Meeting were accepted as published.

Treasurer’s Report for September 2012

INCOME

EXPENSES

Membership Report

Old Business

1. General meetings

- October 2: Dave Marra—OS X Mountain Lion. Preview: Richard Corzo, Review: Frank Kromer

- November 6: Joe Mazzeo & Dr. James Marcus—Trends in Mobile Apps. Preview: Bruce Preston, Review: (waiting to hear from candidate) – Lisa will be backup

- December 4: Jay Ferron—Windows 8. Preview: Jim Scheef, Review: ________

- Wednesday, January 2: Marc Polansky from McCarthy Observatory—Astronomy and Computers. Venue to be determined. Preview: ________, Review: ________

- (The possible cancellation of the January meeting was greatly exaggerated.)  We are considering holding the meeting at the observatory site as a joint meeting with the astronomy group.

- February 5: Drew Kwashnak—Cloud Storage Services. Preview: ________, Review: ________

- March 5: Toni McKeen—Genealogy. Preview: ________, Review: ________

- April 2: Laura Nute of Lynda.com and Kevin Corcoran of CTDLC.org—Online Learning, Elizabeth will do COURSERA  Preview: Elizabeth Talian, Review: ________

May : John Patrick – need to review publicity well in advance.

- Possible future topics:

• 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. Jim’s search on Facebook to date has not yielded any results whatever, so he plans to broaden his search.  He has nothing to report.
• 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 at a later time as we have a reasonably full line up for the next 6 months.
• Twitter? Lisa will look into topic.
• Bruce could do Desktop Publishing in June or July

2. Open positions

- The membership chairperson/greeter position is still open.  This could be two people to ‘share the load’ (not that the load is heavy!)  The greeter has these responsibilities:

• Sign-in members
• Sign-in visitors, ask how they found us
• Accept dues
• Distribute raffle tickets

- Patrick Libert plans not to run again when his board term ends in December.

3. Lisa reports that Newtown Library does not generally do displays but would distribute our pamphlet.  We discussed the one-page posters that had been distributed until recently.

New Business

1. Richard Teasdale has accepted our offer to become a board member.  He replaces Rob Limbaugh, who has relocated to the West Coast.

2. Annette has signed us up on Meetup.com and started posting the general meetings.  Response has been excellent as we had 8 visitors to our October Apple OS X presentation.  At least 5 of them said they found us on Meetup.  In order to allow others to publicize meetings (General or SIG) Annette found the existence of “co-organizer” and established Richard as one.

3. The Meetup text should somehow state that SIG meetings are for members, but that a prospective member may attend one SIG meeting on a “Try before you buy” basis.

4. Jim will compose a draft “Welcome New Member” e-mail to be sent to new members.  It is to detail membership benefits: newsletter, ability to attend all SIG meetings, etc.  It will be sent as a personal e-mail.

5. SIG leaders will get an e-mail with the name of any new members.  There is a distribution list: sigleaders@dacs.org

6. Should we start a “Beginners” SIG?  We asked by a “newbie” user who thought DACS might be too advanced.  When the general meeting attendees were polled, only two (one of whom is a Mac user) expressed interest.  Possible topics could be: how to use Word, how to use email, how to use Excel, computer security, internet searching, how to upgrade your hardware.

The meeting would most likely be driven by the specific questions of the attendees.  Several board members have volunteered to lead it on a monthly rotating basis, etc.

Discussion took place as to whether it would be appropriate to establish a SIG, or if we need a more “Level-0” introductory course.  It was decided that we will not offer a Level-0 course.  For the ‘newbie’ SIG, we should have a certain pre-requisite level of experience required so that the group is not bogged down with such issues as how to copy a file from a CD to the hard disk etc.

A well-received suggestion was that the leader be rotated.  The board will continue discussion via e-mail.

Adjourned: 9:35 PM