Minutes of the OCF Board of Directors Meeting

Date: February 15, 1994 Time: 7:15pm to 8:45pm Place: 120C Bechtel

Attendees:

Nevin Cheung Kenji Hubbard Andrei Cogan Eric P. Lee Chris Williams Keir Morgan Andrew Swan Thomas Moore Marco Nicosia Peter Norby Jean Yim Ari Zilka*

(*) signifies Directors of the Board. Lars Smith (because of a lab) and Amy Baron are the missing members from the Board.

The meeting started at 7:15pm.

Announcements/Welcome ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ General Manager Nevin Cheung welcomed all the Directors and other members for attending the first Board of Directors meeting of the OCF this semester.

The Members present were asked if they wanted to join the Board if they were not already voted into office. Andrew Swan was the only one who showed interest. He will be appointed a director at the next meeting.

Disk Usage Management Board (DuMB) elections will be held next week.

Site Manager's Report (State of the OCF) ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Site Manager Ari Zilka informed us that there are over 7000 accounts as of this week and growing fast. He made over 300 accounts the past weekend, and Andrei Cogan added that he added 50 in the past couple of days.

Ari informed us that we are in a dire need for disk space. Nevin added that 1500 accounts on //flood is an overload of the 330 megabyte drive considering that //planecrash is 660 megabyte and has only 1900 accounts.

Ari asked Brian Harvey (our Faculty Sponsor) for a $250 mini-grant from the CS department for a new hard disk and was subsequently approved. However, many Directors expressed concern that $250 would not buy us the proper drives that would work specifically for the Apollos.

Keir Morgan added that money can be re-allocated from the budget for some purchases.

IS&T Negotiations Report ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Marco Nicosia gave us a report of his negotiations between the OCF and the Information System and Technology department of the University.

Marco gave us a brief history of how Information Systems & Technology (IS&T) worked in the past. IS&T has been providing direct student computing services since about a year ago with the Microcomputer Facilities, and plans to expand into UNIX support. Marco emphasized that the University is planning on providing full UNIX workstations in the very near future, most likely in the WEB. He warns that we might be out of existence in 2 years if we don't do anything about it. He added that since IS&T owns all the space in the WEB, most of our computers, and provides us with electricity and other support, we need to make ourselves ties with them before they decide to boot us out quickly. He suggests that it is time for the OCF to be a part of IS&T's plans before they decide to mess us up.

The OCF's problem is mostly in two places: 1) Lack of hardware to run such a large user base. 2) Administration time is lacking at some times because of volunteer structure.

In Marco's proposal, IS&T can provide us with the hardware we need, and we can get some professional administrative support from WSS. The power structure that Marco showed us is as follow:

            OCF
             |
        Professional Admins
    BOD <        |
          Paid Part-time Students
             |
            / \

Students getting Course Credit Volunteer Staffers

The Board of Directors will act as an advisory board. (Note: Details have not been drawn up.)

Volunteer and credit-getters' advantage over a pros-run-only facility: - can keep lab open at any time - can provide around-the-clock service - match demand of students' odd hours (ie. late at night) - can keep physical lab open late - most importantly, fewer paid staff mean less money needed.

Marco stressed that providing for a decent lab is something rather than nothing, and added that it doesn't even compare to one full-time admin's salary.

If this plan goes through, IS&T and the University then has an existing program to build on (ie. present OCF), provide a service that they want, with the expertise of our staff at a low cost. Meanwhile, the OCF stays in existence while keeping some of the present autonomy.

Marco recently talked with Jerry Smith, the director of Workstation Support Services, on this possiblity of us merging with WSS. Mr. Smith was impressed with the service that we provide, with over 7000 total users and 5000 unique users logging on in any given week (about 15% of the total population of the University). Mr. Smith at first did not see the necessity of the University providing UNIX access at all, but now sees that there is definitely a need for it. However, he only agreed to consider our proposal.

Marco sees that while there is a long, uphill road to climb, and even though nothing has been agreed on, there has been definitely been progress made on the IS&T official's impression on the OCF.

Other Business ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ The possiblity of the OCF forming a intramural softball team for the second half of the semester floated around.

The next BoD meeting will take place on Wednesday, February 23. The place is yet to be decided, and will be posted publically.

Nevin moved to adjourn the meeting at 8:45pm.