Minutes of the Greenbelt Internet Access Cooperative Monthly
Meeting, December 9th, 1999

The meeting was held in the Conference Room of the Greenbelt Police Station. Gilbert Lee President, presided over the meeting. The meeting began at 7 p.m.

Board Members and Officers present:Gilbert Lee, Bill Dupree, Ed James, Neil McLeod, Peggy Bates, Shawn O'Neil, Patty Merryman and Doug Love.

Guests and members: none

Status of November meeting minutes: Up and linked. The status of the GIAC pages will be reported on, items will include what is missing or seemingly incorrect. Verification will be ascertained and amended.

First, the inappropriate use of our subscriber list caused 26 irate calls on the voice mail system the day of the broadcast and 15 the second. The secretary did not respond pending board action. The board directed Patty Merryman to call Joyce of Chesapeake and see what they were offering in the way of a package deal for GIAC subscribers and about multi-year discounts. Gilbert Lee - President will call Joyce about the broadcasting of competitive offers using our subscriber list. The board felt to blanket total broadcasts would cut us off from informational items like upcoming service outages but voted to draft a letter to instruct Chesapeake not to broadcast competitive offers in the future. Neil noted that the broadcast was probably not intentional and that was the way Chesapeake's server was set up. However it pointed to the necessity to have our mail moved to a separate server to curb the broadcasts by one, being selective and second by helping with our mail problem of leaving messages on the server. The apparent differences in prices between Chesapeake and GIAC were misleading. Due to different offerings of free local onsite setup and trouble calls, web space, classes, goodwill of the Greenbelt community web site and name, a direct comparison was and is inaccurate.

Status of remaining ISP transition issues:

1. The work order processing gets better than backslides. The list is supposed to be done but the system administrator has had to monitor Chesapeake's performance. This is not what was agreed upon nor is it the level of service GIAC expects.

2. CI scripting: Doorman Winter field has been working with Chesapeake to resolve the problems. The technical items need to be resolved.

3. Leaving mail on the mail server: For something that is an industry standard everywhere else, Chesapeake needs to come into the present and again give GIAC customers the service level it has promised. GIAC has offered technical help and appealed to Chesapeake's owner. Even their tech person agrees that it can be done but to no avail.

4. Customizes setup software: Chesapeake has presented GIAC with A disk but we must have it configured for Greenbelt.com and customized for our setup parameters as promised. The discs promised are used to do local onsite setup where necessary.

Doug Love's work on our outsourcing contract has come to the point of a meeting with a lawyer to draw up an agreement. GIAC will first look within to keep fees at a minimum.

Doug Caprette did the research on ways to create a non-profit foundation. The fee would be $150 based on our income/reserves. A meeting should be held soon to draft new articles. Doug Love did a good job in interpreting the IRS laws.

This information is available by visiting Treasurer's Summary.

Neil and Peggy Bates will close the books and collect the old tax forms, define the chart of accounts, produce the books and appoint an auditing committee in January of 2000. The item about depositing liquid assets into a CD requires more investigation.