APPROVED Minutes
UNITE Board of Directors Meetings
November 17, 2015
Present
Guy Bonney, Chairman
Michael Easter, Director
Kenn LeFever, Director
Chuck McIntyre, Unisys Liaison
Jim Shelton, Vice-Chair and Secretary/Treasurer
November 17, 2015 Page 1 of 3
APPROVED Minutes
UNITE Board of Directors Meetings
November 17, 2015
Absent:
Guests: Alan Lechtenberg
November 17, 2015 Page 1 of 3
APPROVED Minutes
UNITE Board of Directors Meetings
November 17, 2015
Minutes: Guy Bonney and Kenn LeFever
Chair Bonney called the meeting to order at 3:07PM EST on November 17, 2015.
Minutes of Previous Meetings
The Board reviewed minutes of the Board Meetings held on October 11 - 15, 2015. Jim Shelton moved that the minutes be approved as amended. Kenn LeFever seconded the motion which passed unanimously.
UNITE Web Site and Server Update
Guy Bonney reported that GoDaddy performed some maintenance on the server complex housing the UNITE_ICE server and the unit did not come back up automatically. Kenn LeFever informed me that the unit was down so I requested analysis and reboot by GoDaddy. The reboot was successful and Kenn verified that ICE was back on the air. Kenn also reported that there have been some hack attempts at that server but all appears to still be in good working order.
Scott Kennedy has been asked to clean up the website and post some updated pages about UNITE 2015. We also requested a review of the current membership signup facility and implementation of a coupon based no charge sign-up for regular membership which would ease membership activation for conference attendees and for Company memberships. Scott has also been asked to evaluate the performance of the web site so he has cloned our site to one of his test servers to evaluate response, resource usage and overall service levels. Scott will also verify that we have sufficient capacity to host the conference presentations from 2015 and possibly the Gregory materials library and code repository. Note that the 25 MB file upload limit experienced by the Mentors does not appear to be an issue for any of the conference presentations.
UNITE 2015 Review
The attendee list was sanitized and sent out to all attendees and sponsors with a “thank you for participating” message. We still need to complete collection of the presentations and posting to the Conference Presentation Archive and to distribute instructions to attendees to claim their membership in UNITE. That action will be possible with implementation of the basic coupon enabled membership signup capability.
Casual discussion at the conference with Steve Koss yielded a suggestion to contact Unisys University regarding possible training credit for conference sessions. We need to consider this and have discussion with someone from the Unisys University.
UNISYS Update
No news to share with the Board at this time.
Mentor Program Planning
Alan Lechtenberg reviewed the discussion at the Mentoring Program Session at the conference and subsequent thoughts and discussion on the topic. To recap, the Mentoring program just completed was good for most of the mentees but not meet the expectations and desires of most of the mentors. The sessions for the most part became lectures by the mentor without much interaction by the mentees as was expected and hoped for.
Alan is considering migrating the Mentoring Program to 1) smaller, sharply focused topics for one-to-one mentoring that could evolve to private consulting or training by the Mentor if appropriate; and 2) a Mentor Forum available to the public (with signup) for discussions that could evolve into a Special Interest Group (SIG) or a Mentoring Group but one with much more mentee interaction in the mentoring process. Note that SIG forums currently planned mesh well with this idea and those could certainly feed interested participants into the mentoring Program.
Alan proposes open [free] forums until we develop bigger, more viable “special interest” communities.
UNITE Memberships Discussion
Guy Bonney suggested that we need 4 levels of membership in UNITE and the website:
· Public – view only and not all areas;
· Web site access member ($0) with access to view and post on public forums, access information on UNITE functions and activities;
· Regular membership – full access to all public and member only areas; and
· Admin – manage website as required
A question was raised for discussion: Does being a mentor result in granting regular membership in UNITE? Example candidates are Jim Cogan, Ed Reid, and Jim Stewart. This will be discussed further at a future meeting.
Michael Easter and Jim Shelton are to flesh out the plan for defining and implementing multiple membership levels for Board discussion at the December Board meeting.
.
Executive Session
Chair Bonney then called for the Board to go into Executive Session to discuss UNITE business planning. Kenn LeFever moved that the Board go into Executive Session and the motion was seconded by Michael Easter. The motion passed unanimously and the Board entered Executive Session at 3:56PM EST.
The Board returned from Executive Session at 4:21PM EST. No motions resulted from the Executive Session.
Open Action Items:
· Michael Easter (lead) and Jim Shelton to propose a formal definition of UNITE Membership levels and benefits to the Board.
· Kenn LeFever to collect conference presentations for posting on the UNITE site.
· Kenn LeFever to collect and finalize conference session statistics for Board review.
· Guy Bonney and Jim Shelton to finalize conference expenses and revenue and report to the Board.
· Paul Kimpel and Tom Schaefer to propose a plan for archiving the Gregory Manuals, Journals and Utilities for access by UNITE members via the UNITE web site.
· Alan Lechtenberg to propose the plan for the next phase of the UNITE Mentoring Program
Next Board Meeting: Thursday, December 3, 2015 at 3:00 PM EST.
Meeting Closing
Michael Easter moved to adjourn the Board of Directors meeting at 4:25PM EST. The motion was seconded by Kenn LeFever and passed unanimously.
Respectfully submitted,
Guy Bonney, Chairman,
Kenn LeFever, Director and Assistant Secretary.
November 17, 2015 Page 1 of 3