DACS Board of Directors Meeting
Wednesday, June 12th, 2013

By Bruce Preston

Called to order: 7:10 PM

Attending: Richard Corzo, Richard Teasdale, Andy Woodruff, Dave Green, Bruce Preston, Jim Scheef, Bill Saturno, Annette van Ommeren

Visitors: Charlie Bovaird, Mike Kaltschnee, John Gatrell, Rob Limbaugh

Treasurer’s Report for March 2013

INCOME

EXPENSES

Membership Stats

General meetings

• June 4: Jennifer Scott - Twitter. Preview: Lisa Leifels Review: Andy Woodruff
• July 2: Bruce Preston - PagePlus X6 Desktop Publishing. Preview: Drew Kwashnak Review: Allan Ostergren
• August 6: Office 2013. Carolyn Bighinatti will attend with some speaker from the Microsoft Store. Preview: ________ Review: Richard Teasdale
• September 3: Ken Graff - digital photo editing, organizing, and sharing online.
• Possible future topics:
  • Note: Jim had success with his Windows 8 machine at the June meeting, as it appears the hospital has a new projector. So if a presenter brings a Windows 8 laptop that should work fine.
  • Presentation on Facebook - Jim has worked with another organization (AMC) and they have gotten volunteers to post about 3 times a week. It is a long - shot as a meeting topic, but he hasn’t crossed it off as a possible topic yet.
  • Jeff Robbins (Drupal expert) - Jeff was interested in doing a presentation but is not able to commit to a date at this time. We have decided not to pursue this topic at this time.
  • Demonstrate apps for mobile devices–smartphones and tablets. This could be a meeting with multiple presenters for a full session, or it could be a small segment after Ask DACS. The iBook (Apple iTunes store), “The Telegraph: 500 Must Have Apps” would be a good resource. Since it appears there is a new projector, Richard can try again to demonstrate the News Bento Windows 8 app.
  • “SIG Open House” session where the SIG leaders set up ‘tables’ to discuss their activities. This would be done between the Ask DACS session and the featured presentation. It was suggested that the room across the hall would be a good location for this.
  • Mike Kaltschnee and John Gatrell volunteered to do a presentation in September on the Danbury Hackerspace and Innovation Center. We will investigate a tie-in with the World Maker Faire conference at Javitts this September and the Danbury HackerSpace. This would require slipping Ken Graff to October.  Richard will check with Ken as to his availability.
  • Jim is pursuing a presentation originally termed “Electronic Medical Records” Danbury Hospital is leading edge on integrating systems, EMR is probably not a good term. Jim was referred to the hospital’s CIO. Jim has communicated with the Danbury Hospital’s CIO’s secretary who understands our request and will investigate finding a suitable presenter. Perhaps change the topic to something like “LifeStream” monitoring. Mike Kaltschnee mentioned FitBit (currently available at BestBuy) or other ‘wearable electronics’.
  • Windows 8.1 Blue – will be a free upgrade out later this year. We should have a presentation on the update from the Microsoft Store.
  • Microsoft Surface Pro (the Intel - based Microsoft tablet that also runs Windows desktop applications in addition to ‘apps’). Perhaps this should be included within a Windows 8 presentation as it probably is not enough for a full presentation.
  • Bruce suggested repurposing an old machine (such as an XP era machine since XP support is being sunsetted) to a machine that runs a variant of Linux such as one of the Puppy releases. He had recently converted a very sluggish netbook to one that runs impressively fast. Bruce talked to Dave Mawdsley at the last Linux SIG meeting to see if he would be interested.
  • Something on Pinterest? Bruce has not yet talked to a Ridgefield Librarian who did a brief session on Pinterest – but the general feeling was that it probably isn’t enough to warrant a full presentation. 
  • Animation software – drop from consideration.
  • Do a tour of Windows Live Suite: Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Mail, Writer (blogs) etc. Roll into Ken Graff’s session?
  • Now that the new OS X Mavericks release has been announced to come out in the fall, we should ask Dave Marra to do another presentation as the time draws nearer.
• Open positions
• Need a new ACPUG representative to replace Patrick Libert, primarily to post to the APCUG website, field questions, receive quarterly postings, etc. Bill Saturno volunteered to look into APCUG. Did he succeed in getting a logon?
• To help launch the Innovation Center and Hackerspace, the city of Danbury hosted the Danbury Mad Hacker Social Media Conference and the Danbury Mini Maker Faire on June 8. Mike Kaltschnee invited us to have a booth where we showed Windows 8 and had ready a presentation on malware and a useful utilities list. We had a lot of visitors and had 37 people leave us their e - mail address. We may get more afterward with the http://makerfaire.dacs.org website Andy and Bruce created. Jim complained that there was no navigation or links within the pages, Andy will revise to include links to the 50+ utilities and provide page navigation.
• Do we need to do something to verify that SIG participants are still members? Decided that SIG leaders should get a membership list with expiration date, and privately check membership status. If someone is lapsed then notify membership who will correspond privately. We don’t want to embarrass SIG attendees during a meeting. SIG leaders should remind attendees that SIG attendance is for members in good standing. We should also add that renewal post card should mention that membership is a requirement for SIG participation.

New Business

• Sean Hehderson declined our offer to join the DACS board, but we will follow up with him with a mechanism to support and encourage his activities.
• Do we need to order anything from TechSoup? Our treasurer uses Quicken, not QuickBooks. Quicken is not distributed by TechSoup – but the retail price is well within the discretionary spending amount that the president may authorize. In addition Richard will look into getting the Adobe software needed to support co - webmaster activities.
• We placed examining the 2014 budget at the July BOD meeting.

Adjourned: 9:35