DACS Board of Directors Meeting
Wednesday, July 10, 2013

By Bruce Preston

Called to order: 7:10

Attending: Richard Corzo, David Green, Bruce Preston, Lisa Leifels, Andy Woodruff, Bill Saturno, Drew Kwasnak, Annette van Ommeren
Visitor: Charlie Bovaird

Minutes of Last Meeting: Approved

Treasurer’s Report

INCOME

EXPENSES

Membership Stats

Old Business

1. General meetings
• July 2: Bruce Preston - PagePlus X6 Desktop Publishing. Preview: Drew Kwashnak Review: Allan Ostergren. Sean H. filled in for Jim Scheef to do Ask DACS.
• August 6: Office 2013. Carolyn Bighinatti will attend with some speaker from the Microsoft Store. Preview: Richard Corzo Review: Richard Teasdale
• September 3: Ken Graff - digital photo editing, organizing, and sharing online. Preview: Lisa Leifels Review:  (Andy backup)
• November – Mike Kaltschnee –  Danbury Hackerspace.  Preview: Bill Saturno, Review: ________
• Possible future topics:
• 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. We could ask one of the speakers from the Mad Hackers Conference (http://madhackersconference.com/speaker-bios/), such as Bill DeRosa. His bio includes mention of Pinterest, in case we also want that covered.
• 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.
• “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.  Another suggestion made was that each SIG get a 10 minute session, one SIG per meeting.  Perhaps start SIG presentation sessions in October.
• Jim was pursuing a presentation on Electronic Medical Records, etc. with Danbury Hospital.  Since we haven’t gotten a response after several attempts we will drop this. We will continue with “LifeStream” monitoring. Mike Kaltschnee mentioned FitBit (currently available at BestBuy) or other ‘wearable electronics’.  Considering session on wearable technology such as this for the January session.
• Mike Kaltschnee and Jon Gatrell volunteered to do a presentation in September on the Danbury Hackerspace and Innovation Center. There could be a tie-in with the World Maker Faire conference at Javits Center this September and the Danbury HackerSpace opening. However, Mike discovered he will be leaving town the day of the general meeting. He started to ask Sean H. to fill in, but Richard asked Mike to do it a later month.
• 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. It could also include information about the Microsoft Surface Pro (the Intel-based Microsoft tablet that will also run Windows desktop applications in addition to ‘apps’).
• Bruce withdrew the topic of repurposing an old machine (such as an XP era machine since XP support is being sunsetted) as various people have pointed out that it probably doesn’t make sense to reuse really old components as they may be approaching hardware failure.  Instead he will do a Virtual Machine session and show that an XP machine (or earlier) could be built to support legacy applications.
• Do a tour of Windows Live Suite: Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Mail, Writer (blogs) etc.? Ken Graff will probably be mentioning Photo Gallery in his presentation.
• 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.
• Andy suggested a session on creating a web site of various types: blog, brochure, e-commerce site, etc.) – making use of such as products/services as site builder (online or on PC), turn-key sites, etc.   Andy suggested that as a computer group we should do some sort of session that would answer the question: “I think I need a web site, what are my options?”  This might involve a “high level” overview of the various approaches.
2. Open positions
   
   • Bill Saturno is now our APCUG representative.  He has the site credentials and is reviewing the DACS profile.
3. DACS had a booth at the Danbury Mini Maker Faire on June 8. We had 37 visitors leave us their e-mail address. We followed up with a welcome e-mail and a reminder of the July meeting.  The meeting log and the log from the booth will be compared tomorrow to see if we got any July meeting visitors from that list.
4. Sean H. declined our offer to join the DACS board, but we will follow up with him with a mechanism to support and encourage his activities.  A suggestion was made that he be asked to communicate with potential members (i.e. visitors to recent general meeting.)
5. Jim renewed our contact with TechSoup. We ordered the Adobe CS6 Design and Web Premium suite for the co-webmaster.

New Business

1. Paul Chayka of Robotics & Beyond has asked for some DACS member volunteers and some brochures to distribute at their summer camp:
   The Robotics And Beyond summer camps begin on July 15 and continue to August 9, held in the New Milford High School library. We are always looking for experienced adults to stop in for a few hours on any given day, to serve as mentors to students working in areas of programming in various languages, operating systems, various electronics projects and various levels of computer hardware. The mentoring simply consists of talking to students and asking if they have any questions that the mentor might be able to answer.  What would be the best way to extend an invitation to the DACS membership?
   Also, I would like to again make DACS pamphlets available to parents and students during the camps.  If available, these can be dropped off at the camp or mailed to the address below.
   Charlie will hand-deliver brochures, and also send out an invitation to members.

Meeting adjourned at 9:32.