Minutes of Free Geek Michiana Board of Directors Meeting, October 28, 2006

Submitted by Thomas Brown

I. Call to Order

Thomas called the meeting to order at 6:00 PM, Saturday, October 28, 2006, in the Fellowship Hall of the Salvation Army Corps in South Bend, IN.

Unfortunately, we didn't have a quorum of board members.

Clearly, in preparing for the board meeting, Thomas relied too much on email. Phone calls and personal invitations to the meeting would probably have worked better. Another problem is the board only meets formally once per year. The active board members meet informally almost weekly at the lab and warehouse. If board members are not also active volunteers, they are pretty much out of it. This needs fixing.

Our board may be too large and certainly has too many inactive members. Why they are inactive will be the subject of a review and interviews by the board officers (Michael Cook - Sec., Richard Zimmerman - Treas., Thomas Brown - Director) who did attend the meeting.

We discovered at least one of our board members is not subscribed to our listserv and couldn't have read the announcement of the meeting.

II. Advisory Council Meeting

There was a good turn out of volunteers plus the three board officers so we held an advisory meeting. We discussed the topics on the agenda for the board meeting. The discussions were productive, and the advisory group has definite recommendations for the board.

III. Recording the Meeting

Richard and I recorded the meeting. Goose used a .wav recorder several times the size of a thumb drive, but still tiny. I used a traditional shirt pocket size recorder and standard tape cassettes. Richard has already converted his recording to mp3. I may not convert mine if Goose's recording is good enough quality to use. The mp3 file is about 140 MB.

Next Tuesday we will attempt to edit the recording at the lab using our monster server, way overkill for audio editing. We're not even certain it has an audio card. Later, we will decide whether to put an edited recording of the meeting on our web site.

IV. Adjournment

The meeting adjourned at 7:00 PM.

Page last updated: Sat Feb 7 13:26:04 2009