DACS Board of Directors Meeting
Wednesday, November 14, 2012

By Bruce Preston

Called to order: 7:20 PM

Attending: Richard Corzo, Annette van Ommeren, Andy Woodruff, Elizabeth Talian, Jim Scheef, Bruce Preston, Lisa Leifels, Richard Teasdale
Guest: Charlie Bovaird

Minutes of Last Meeting: Accepted

Treasurer’s Report for October 2012

INCOME

EXPENSES

Membership Report

Old Business

1. General meetings
   •  November 6: Joe Mazzeo & Dr. James Marcus - Trends in Mobile Apps. Preview: Bruce Preston, Review: Lisa Leifels
   •  December 4: Jay Ferron - Windows 8. Preview: Jim Scheef, Review: Richard Corzo
   •  January 2 (WEDNESDAY): Marc Polansky from McCarthy Observatory - Astronomy and Computers. Venue is to be determined. Preview: Allan Ostergren, Review: Richard Teasdale
    • 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. Preview: Elizabeth Talian, Review: ________
   •  May 7: John Patrick - State of the Internet. Need to review publicity well in advance.
   •  Possible future topics:
      - Presentation on Facebook. Jim has run into a brick wall trying to reach anyone that can represent Facebook, either directly or via user community etc.  Lisa found that an individual in a Hartford business group had presented on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest etc. and will investigate further. 
      - Jeff Robbins - Drupal expert. Jeff is interested in doing a presentation but is not able to commit to a date at this time. Andy will follow up early next year.
      - Twitter? Lisa will look into the topic. Sean mentioned someone he knew, Jennifer M. Scott, who use Twitter heavily for her business (http://www.workforceengine.com/).
      - Bruce could do Desktop Publishing in June or July
      - Jay Ferron said he could do a presentation on Office 2013.
      - Years ago we did “Surfin’ Safari” as a segment about interesting websites.  Perhaps now we could do something similar with mobile devices – smartphone and tablets – what apps are found to be interesting, entertaining, etc.  This could be a ‘forum’ type meeting with multiple presenters for a full session, or it could be a small segment after AskDACS.
2. Open positions
   •  The membership chairperson/greeter position is still open. The greeter has these responsibilities:
     - Sign in members
     - Sign in visitors, ask how they found us
     - Accept dues
     - Distribute raffle tickets
   •  Jim Scheef has composed a draft welcome email to be sent to new members.  He will submit to board for review by email.  Charlie and Jim will meet to work on the database.
   •  We need someone to send out monthly press releases. The press release need not be as detailed as the meeting preview, although it would help if some of the information be made available to our PR person.  Newspaper lead time for events such as ours is considerably longer than the lead time for DACS.doc.  We will shoot for having the information to the media three weeks in advance.  Richard has an email list from Patrick, Drew has a file in the Yahoo! group that has the print addresses we have used in the past.  Richard Teasdale will take the lists and set up the distribution process.
3. In addition our general meeting, we posted our first SIG meeting (Mobile Devices) on Meetup and got one new visitor, new to DACS as well.  We will continue to post more meetings during our six - month signup.  Bruce will compose an announcement for the MS Access SIG virtual meetings.
4. Should we start a “Beginners” SIG?  We concluded that it wasn’t feasible for a SIG, but perhaps it would be a good topic for a ‘workshop’ that we hold from time to time.  Since it isn’t a SIG it would not have the requirement for DACS membership, but rather treat it as a mechanism to generate interest in DACS membership.  Jim volunteered to do a workshop and Charlie volunteered to be an assistant.  Date (and day of week for that matter, including possibly a weekend) to be determined.

New Business

1. Six board members are up for reelection in December. Four plan to run again: Richard Corzo, Dave Green (only committing for one year), Richard Teasdale, and Andy Woodruff. Patrick Libert and Elizabeth Talian are retiring, so we need to find two new candidates. I have contacted one candidate so far, but haven’t heard back.  Due to reduced membership the board is considering lowering the number of board members.  The number of board members is not dictated by the ByLaws.
2. A new contact at the Microsoft Store has invited us back for a Windows 8 workshop or seminar.  We will look at having a workshop to be scheduled in January – any Monday, or  Thursday, Jan 17th appear to be open, Richard will explore dates with Microsoft.  Note that as such it will not be a general meeting.
3. APCUG membership will be renewed.
4. It appears that our ISP service has changed hands and as part of that billing was messed up.  We got a bill for past services in addition to the next 3 months. We will investigate switching our ISP to either cable or whatever variant of DSL might be provided to our facility.
5. It has been determined that the call drop-outs etc. that were happening during Skype conference sessions were due to an automatic volume control setting in some of the computers being used.  Disabling this feature completely eliminated the call drop-outs.

Adjourned: 9:05 PM