WPLUGBoard/Meeting-20160419

Venue Info

Meeting to be held at IBM Squirrel Hill at 7:30pm, Tuesday, April 19th, 2016.

Agenda

• Approve minutes of the March 29th board meeting.
• List your item here
• List your item here

Minutes

The regular meeting of the WPLUG Board of Directors was held at 7:30pm on April 19th, 2016 at IBM Squirrel Hill.

In attendance were:

• Vance Kochenderfer (Chair)
• Joe Prostko (Vice Chair) (by conference call)
• Terry Golightly (Treasurer)
• Pat Barron (Secretary)

Not attending:

• Justin Smith (Director at Large)

The meeting was called to order at 7:42pm.

The minutes of the previous (March 29th) board meeting were read. No changes or corrections were offered, and the minutes were adopted as read.

Reports of officers:

Chair: No report, other than was pretty pleased with the turnout at the last GUM.

Vice chair: Didn't get a chance to follow up with the systems engineer to talk about FreeIPA, will try to talk to him on Friday. Has some e-mails to info@wplug to follow up on, need to sort out the spammy ones from regular ones. There was one asking for a link exchange which we may not follow up on. There was a small discussion on link exchange spam and wiki spam and pruning dead links from the wiki.

Secretary: WPLUG currently has 17 members. 3 joined in April - one new member and two rejoining members. All those members who were due to lapse in April did lapse. One member is due to lapse in May, and has been notified.

Treasurer: As of March 31st, WPLUG's checking account balance was $436.47. On April 16th a deposit of $140 was made, including a donation from a GUM attendee, and new member dues, which would bring us to $547.47 after all bank transactions are completed.

Director at large: Not present, left no report

Reports of committees:

Technology Committee: The WPLUG VPS continues to have some memory errors still, symptom shows all swap in use - there is memory free, but if you try to run a program it generates an out of memory error. It hasn't been pursued further; the only thing that seems to fix it is to reboot, and sometimes that must be done from the Linode control panel. Vance thinks the problem is that things aren't being removed from swap. Anyone who has time to investigate this would be welcome to do so. There was a lengthy discussion about how to go about troubleshooting such an issue.

Event Committee: We still need to follow up with plans for May. Vance hasn't checked with Wilkins School about availability in May, Vance can try to follow up but success is doubtful due to the May event being only a month out. The proposed event is a social/workshop, ideally with hardwired network if we are going to help people do installs. Some other attraction such as food would be nice. For this event, we primarily need a space we have access to for 3 to 5 hours. We also need to get in touch with the libraries to inquire about using space there. Terry thinks we should have some "before you come" instructions on the wiki, due to multitude of possible hardware configurations and advance prep that may be necessary; we might want to know what people's goals are in advance so we can be prepared. Vance thinks it might be doubtful to secure a venue for May given the timeline. Could we do something entirely non-technical? What locations could we get? CLP Squirrel Hill and some other locations have historically had poor availability. Joe offered to check into whether we could hold an event at his workplace, but this could be difficult. We may need a fallback plan for May, or we could possibly take a break for May. Games N' At could be a possible backup. We will otherwise continue to pursue leads of people who might want to do a talk.

Investigating Committee: No report.

Marketing and Communications Committee: Joe has been trying to post to social media whenever we have events.

New business:

Joe asked about beginning the planning for the picnic. Vance indicated that, as is our tradition, we should try to plan this event for August. We would like to try to drum up interest, get space reserved early. We have some funds we can set aside for this purpose. Vance asked Pat to investigate looking into a shelter at North Park. Pat pointed out he might not have a debit card at the point when the rental would happen, so someone else might need to go to North Park in person to do the actual rental, and also wondered if any other venue would be more desirable. Joe suggested going with North Park as a first option, and pursuing other options if needed. Terry investigated, and found that facility rental at North Park can now be done online. Vance moved that the treasurer be authorized to spend up to $50 to rent a shelter; the motion was adopted.

Old business:

None

There being no further business, it was moved to adjourn the meeting. The motion was adopted. The meeting was adjourned at 9:07pm.