These are the UNOFFICIAL minutes of the gathering of the OCF Board of Directors on February 27, 1992. These are only the un-official minutes. In the event these had been declared official minutes they would have been posted to msgs and ucb.org.ocf, where the official minutes currently are located (along with /usr/local/OCF/Minutes/02.27.92).
Board members believed to be in the room for a substantial amount of time: Adam Richter gm@ocf Roy S. Rapoport s-and-m@ocf Alan Coopersmith alanc@ocf David Paschich dpassage@eden Eddy Karat karat@ocf Kinshuk Govil kinshuk@ocf Kier Morgan money-bags@ocf
Other people sighted in 120 Bechtel that evening were: Chris Jain cjain@ocf Adam Glass glass@chaos.org George William Herbert gwh@lurnix.com Leigh Haynes haynes@info Partha S. Banerjee psb@Berkeley.edu Sean Welch welch@xcf
People who made a brief cameo appearance to distribute the "Proceedings of the Chrono-Causal Contentions Committee": Jon Blow cccc@xcf
The meeting was scheduled to start at 7:00, but Roy decided to wait to do anything useful until Adam Richter arrived to take charge of things. While waiting the conversation wound through several subjects, including the 21st birthday of Dave "User Privacy Champion" Paschich, the whole Roy/Euphrasia/ "Why is there a cat in 238?" thing, and whether or not staff should be instructed to shoot Rob Menke for the good of cluster.
Leigh brought up the question of why the UCF was mentioned in the OCF constitution, and Alan followed up with the question of "Who was the UCF anyway?" Adam Glass, with help from the crowd, described the history of the UCF and the WEB's beginnings. George mentioned that both subjects would be covered in his upcoming "An Overglorified History of the OCF".
Changing the wording of various parts of the Constitution was discussed. Sean Welch mentioned that a well-written Constitution would not be truly representative of the OCF. Partha mentioned he had no problems with changes in the main body of the Constitution, as long as they were not amendments. Partha also suggested requiring that all copies of the Constitution be laser-printed. A certain line-printer user in the audience expressed her opinion on the matter by telling Partha to [censored for the sake of our younger readers - Hi Nick!].
After Adam arrived, the meeting got into the really useful bits. We discussed commercial use of the OCF machines, and whether or not we should allow people to post ads to UseNet. A Famous Usenet Personality was consulted, and it was determined that although the "Usenet Rules" are not written down anywhere, and no-one knows exactly what they are, everyone on the net knows the rules and most people follow them. (And you wonder how Usenet got to be the way it is today...)
The concept of allowing commercial use as long as the OCF got a 10% cut was discussed (although the concept of buying a new cluster from the first poster to alt.drugs was not). Partha suggested selling lines in the login message to Malt Liquor companies. Partha later claimed a trademark on "self-attenuation (tm)".
Sproul's regulations for Student Groups were brought up and much more discussion was held.
The non-board unanimously agreed on the following policy: Use of the OCF for an ongoing business is prohibited. WE WILL STOP YOU.
The actual board debated for a bit longer and formed a consensus on: Use of the OCF for an ongoing business is prohibited. Notice will result in such use being stopped.
It was decided to have staff bring a new account form to next week's meeting that says "use this account within a month or it will be nuked."
The EJC budget was discussed, along with the fact we want part of it. The forms must be filed by March 12 to get money for next year.
People there thought it would be a "Good Thing (tm)" if someone would collect all the OCF policies and rewrite them into a nice document.
Maragaret was not explicitly mentioned during the course of the evening, but her name was constantly on everyone's mind as it had been written on the chalkboard. Jon Blow (during his brief cameo appearance) declared that writing the name on the board was an act of sacrilege.
Random Quotes from Random People at Random Points during the evening:¶
"I've never had to take a class more than twice" - rsr
"If Adam gets to be god, can I be the Holy Ghost?" - psb
"Morality does not change with the time of day."
"The first in a series of traditions that never continued."
"I think that sounds really lame and not dealing with the issue - but other than that I'm in consensus." - welch
These have been the unofficial minutes. We now return you to your regularly scheduled junk mail.
- "self-attenuation" is a trademark of Partha S. Banerjee and has been used in this document without his permission. Sue me.