[TriLUG] TriJUG board meeting notes

Pete at Soper.US Pete at Soper.US
Wed Nov 11 16:47:05 EST 2009


*The TriJUG board had a meeting Monday evening. Here are some notes in plain
text interleaved with an agenda outline in bold.*
-------
*Triangle Java Users Group
November 9, 2009 board meeting 9pm

*Attendees: Manon Laws, Dennis Laws, Lee Haslup, Pete Soper

   The meeting started at 9pm and it immediately became clear that Manon was
too ill to participate. Pete volunteered to make web site changes as needed
and Manon left the meeting.
*
Agenda:
  0) TriJUG Elections

* We discussed the elections for the 2010 board and agreed we should proceed
with them at Monday night's meeting while holding the nomination open until
the last moment. Lee explained how the election process has adapted to the
very light and informal participation over the years. Pete will call Chris
Brown to confirm whether Chris wants to continue on the board, either
assuming specific responsibilities or as a Member At Large. We agreed that
having some members at large would allow for more folks to participate who
might be put off by the notion that they had to take on a lot of
responsibility.*

  1) Old business
      Myriad subjects, but I think two items we could touch on
constructively are:
        a) How to deal with a last-minute emergency to do with the
trijug.org web site

*There are at least two flavors of "emergency": needing to update the web
site and needing to get Lunarpages to restart the appserver or otherwise get
the site's infrastructure running after an outage. The essential details for
the former problem were shared and a "cheat sheet" will be made and shared
with board members at the 11/16 meeting to make this easier. A bit of
additional information is needed for contacting and authenticating with
Lunarpages for system restarts, such as when the appserver runs out of
memory due to memory leaks over days or weeks*.

        b) What's new with the TriJUG membership cards?

*There has been ongoing discussion of a very simple membership card along
the lines of the Chinese restaurant cards that provide incentives as well as
making member processes more convenient. The idea of using a simple office
supply store stamp that automatically generates unique ID numbers was
discussed. Lee found one on the 'Net that is very inexpensive.* *We seem to
be converging on a trivial solution involving the micro-perf business card
stock that can be printed with the TriJUG logo, a UID scheme for minting a
card, and a restaurant-style stamp for per-attendance, per-renewal events.*

  2) New Business
      a) This month's meeting must use a different meeting room that is in a
different Nortel building.

*We went over action items to deal with the fact that Nortel had to preempt
us from using the usual room in the usual Nortel buidling we've been using
forever. Thanks to Jeff Barschaw for the timely notice about this, and for
making a very nice simple Google map to help steer folks to the right place
on Monday. Here are some action items we agreed are needed:

  1) Include Harold Meder explicitly with this month's meeting notice in the
hopes that Harold can help get the word out.
  2) Arrange for a sign on the Gateway (yellow wall building) door and/or
with the security desk there to guide folks to the actual meeting place
across the road. (Email about this sent to Jeff B, will follow up)
  3) Make sure the pizza vendor knows about the change, both with the usual
email order and as part of the telephone confirmation on Monday afternoon.
  4) Updates to the TriJUG web site (making sure it's clear the change is
just for this month), and to the reminder email sent to the list.
  5) Note to Joe Fobert to make sure the speaker from Spring knows about the
change of location.


*       b) Giveaway every month. Some weeks back Dennis Laws argued for the
value of there being some kind of raffle at every TriJUG meeting.

*There was general agreement about why this is a good idea, and that it
doesn't have to be extravagant. We agreed that at least one cool
Java-related book should be raffled off at the end of a meeting if the
presenter or sponsor doesn't provide an alternative. There was mention of
the amazing raffles in the past, such as the load of shirts and gadgets and
books Sun Microsystems has donated, as well as local organizations donaing
registration fees for major technical conferences. We agreed it would be a
good idea to solicit suggestions for books with an eye toward getting them
from local bookstores and/or online.

The meeting ended at just before 10pm.

Additions/corrections to Pete at Soper dot US



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