Board meeting, 18 May 2015 at Scott and Irene Raun's. Attending board members: Matt Strait (by phone), Scott Raun, Ann Totusek, Kevin Austin. Lydy unexpectedly not here. == Formalities == Approve minutes of April 19 meeting. -- Approved! Ask for agenda items. == Review of TODO list == * Pay ASCAP. NOT ASSIGNED: someone to see if Carol has paid them. Scott will do this. * Ann to continue working on our documentation about Ken. Ann will send what she has so far to the board. -- Ann says it is pretty solid, needs a final edit on her timeline. Just waiting on having a printer to print it on. Then she'll send it out to the board for review. * Ann also called Dean to remove Ken from natter. Ann to follow up. * Ann will notify Ken, and will save a screen shot of any response from him for our records. -- DONE * Scott will dig up Ken's history to support Ann's documentation. Scott says he is working on it -- it's not going very well because people don't want to think about it. Has nothing to send to Ann at the moment. * Lydy will look into what we can do if we can't find an address for Ken. Do we need to publish a notice in a newspaper to make it official? -- This is not needed since we notified Ken and he acknowledged it. * Scott will tell Dean about Ken. -- DONE * Lydy will get signatures for Ameriprise paperwork. -- We have no knowledge of anything having happened with Ameriprise, since Lydy was working on it. * Lydy will put together the informational packet for new board members. -- Lydy not present * Matt and Lydy will figure out what change they wanted to the harassment policy. -- No progress * Matt and Ann will work on a M51 policies and departments document. -- No progress * Matt and Ann will write a definition for "quartermaster" and send it to board-chat by the next meeting. -- Ann has made a handwritten draft and will transcribe and send it to Matt ASAP. * Matt will work on a bylaw change to find our odd system wherein the membership year ends in the middle of a day (at the start of the voting meeting), but the system for counting meetings towards voting membership runs on calendar days. -- DONE * Scott will continue to follow up with Carol and Patricia about the METHOD Con 2 check. -- Patricia handed a replacement check to Carol on the 2nd or 3rd. Scott will follow up with Carol about it being deposited. Carol confirmed today that it was deposited. * Scott will fiddle with the settings on our new microphone. -- Done. It seems better, yay. (It needed to be told not to work on media presentation at the same time as voice.) * We will all look at DD-B's proposal for a password-protected website. -- Ann opens by declining to participate and saying she will trust people who understand this stuff. Scott: there is a discussion of philosophy of what we want to accomplish, it isn't just tech. Ann: ok. Kevin: DD-B came up with a couple of options: Dropbox, Spideroak, a password-protected files area, or a password-protected wiki. We worry that Dropbox/Spideroak may go out of business. But we were going to keep paper copies, with the electronic repository as a convenience. Kevin thinks that we only need decent security, since these aren't super deep secrets. We seem to come to a consensus on Spideroak. Scott will ask DD-B to go for it! * We will get all of our Ameriprise money into C-shares. NOT ASSIGNED: Is this for Lydy to do? == Bylaws == Matt proposes a change to the bylaws: having the voting year end at midnight a week before the voting meeting rather than at the beginning of the voting meeting. This fixes a problem we had this year in which Minicon had a meeting the same day as the voting meeting, but several hours earlier, making it essentially impossible to make a list of voters on time, and also setting up the strange situation that, since you can only count one meeting per day, if anyone used that concom meeting, which was in the 2014-2015 year, they wouldn't be able to also use the voting meeting, which was in the 2015-2016 year. Kevin: Did we check with Laura to see if 7 days was sufficient? Scott did. Laura says that any length less than 3-4 weeks is the same to her. For meetings scheduled soon before the voting meeting, ballots should be sent to the meeting. Matt: Ok, should we do 4 weeks? That would make it easier for Laura, but would be a big change as compared to 1 week, which is a minor tweak. Everyone prefers the minor tweak, so we'll do 1 week. Need to decide on how to handle the transition year. We decide that this year still starts at the beginning of the 2015 voting meeting, but ends 1 week before the 2016 voting meeting. We agree that the bylaws don't need to explicitly spell this out. * Matt will formally write-up the bylaws amendment, exactly as the draft is. == Conventions == Minicon 50 - Matt Finances still look good, hotel is paid, we are now in the mopping-up phase. Minicon 51 - Ann Ann met with Keith Malgren last week. Keith needs information from Matt Weiser, who has been difficult to get a hold of. Would like permission to switch music GoH. In negotiation with Chas about doing music. He wanted to be part of choosing the music GoH, but Ann had already picked one. Ann felt she had to start querying potential GoH before forming the concom. She had not extended a formal invitation to her music GoH choice, but had talked to them, and Chas wants a different one. Ann would like it in writing that the chair gets to pick. Matt points out that the bylaws already make that clear. Kevin points out that it's just that if the chair picks someone a department head doesn't like, they risk losing the department head. So it's just social enforcement. Kevin suggests that we emphasize that during the bid process, we emphasize that potential chairs need not have yet talked to potential GoH, they can just be ideas. So add "can just be an idea" after bullet point on bid guidelines. Matt will tweak these. A fallcon in 2015 - The May 1 deadline passed with no proposals. A fallcon in 2016 - Matt again says that he is probably interested in running one, but still can't commit yet. == All other business == Scott has some old records from Don Bailey to send to Matt. It is a manilla envelope and two things about 1/2" thick. Ann will bring them to Matt when she comes down for the Nebulas. She will be landing in Chicago Wednesday June 3. Scott has a 2nd generation Minn-stf logo, about 2"x3", on paper. A photostat of one hand-drawn by Jim Odbert. It may or may not be the one that we digitized and now is our vector version. == Next meeting == Monday, June 22, 8pm. Need to double check with Lydy. == New TODO list == * Scott will see if Carol has paid ASCAP. * Ann will do the final edit on her Ken documentation and send it to the board. * Ann will follow up with Dean about removing Ken from natter. * Scott will make a last go at digging up Ken's history to support Ann's documentation, or not. * Lydy will put together the informational packet for new board members. * Lydy will get signatures for Ameriprise paperwork. * We will get all of our Ameriprise money into C-shares. NOT ASSIGNED: Is this for Lydy to do? * Matt and Lydy will figure out what change they wanted to the harassment policy. * Matt and Ann will work on a M51 policies and departments document. * Matt and Ann will write a definition for "quartermaster" and send it to board-chat. * Scott will ask DD-B to set up a Spideroak account for us. * Scott will renew minicon.org. * Matt will formally write-up the bylaws amendment, exactly as the draft is. * Matt will e-mail both Ann and Kelly his street addresses. (Done) * Matt will tweak bid guidelines on records page.