OCF Board of Directors Meeting
19 January 2000
Board members present: Stephen Callahan (calman) Eugene Chan (ceugene) Devin Jones (jones) (co-gm) Bem Jones-Bey (ajani) Eugene Kim (eek) Stephen McCamant (smcc) Ken Ott (kenao) (co-gm) Akop Pogosian (akopps) (acting sm) Suzie Tang (suztang) Katrina Templeton (katster) (sm)
Board members absent: (Board composition unknown due to previous missing minutes)
Others present: Mark Goodman (mgoodman) Lei Shen (ASUC Webmaster) Marco Nicosia (marco) Wayne Kao (kaow) Ivan Jen (ivan)
The meeting was opened at about 5:15pm
Reports
General Manager
Devin reports that he's been working almost exclusively on
recruiting companies for the upcoming jobs fair (Feb 2).
Since the fair will be in Pauley Ballroom, there's room for
about 120 companies. Out of about 200 companies that Devin
has contacted, he's gotten responses from 42 so far, but he
still needs help to find more startups. If you haven't
gotten his email messages on the subject, email jones@ocf to
learn how you can help. Recruiting companies for the fair is
an important way for the OCF to fund the new lab.
Later, Ken came in and discussed the progress of
negotiations for the Heller Lounge lab. Ken and Devin missed
a meeting about the project with ASUC building officials,
but got filled in later. The process is being slowed by the
need to rebid the contracts, especially related to the lab's
electrical needs. There was a discussion of how to reduce
the peak power needs of the lab machines, servers, and the
TDA by powering them up one by one, and some speculation
about what would happen in event of a power
outage. Unfortunately it appears no work on the lab will
start for at least 5 weeks, and some work may need
to wait until Spring Break.
Site Manager
The OCF's machines all survived Y2K with no major problems,
but Akop reported that were some incidents of computers
malfunctioning after running out of space for log files. The
mail server (war) also went down for an unknown reason last
week, but came back to life again with no apparent problems.
The CD writer in mudslide is just about ready to use, with a
large /scratch partition available to store the data before
writing to the disk, but documentation is needed, and a
graphical interface would also be nice. The web server has
been upgraded to a new version, and PHP and secure
connections are now available for future projects.
Other Issues
Lei Shen, the ASUC's webmaster, came for the beginning of
the meeting and asked who she should coordinate with to move
the ASUC's web page back to the OCF. A new disk has already
been installed in the web server (death), and after the
files have been transfered she'll work with Bem and Akop to
reestablish DNS service.
Several members suggested that board meetings on Wednesdays
were not compatible with their schedules this semester, so
it was decided to move the meetings to Mondays, and the next
meeting will be on Monday the 24th.
Ken had suggested on the board mailing list that the OCF
purchase a digital camera, since the GMs have been spending
a lot of time and money developing and scanning pictures for
the webpage and other publicity. In discussing the issue
today, however, there were some concerns about who the
camera would be available to, and the danger of it being
stolen. It was decided that the OCF should just continue to
borrow a digital camera as it needs one.
Because the attendance list for a board meeting last
semester was lost, the board had to revote on a previous
motion to allow an account for a non-Berkeley affiliated
acquaintance to help with a user database and documentation
project. The motion was passed by a unanimous acclamation.
Finally, there was a short discussion of the
background process / server process policy still being
formulated. Several board members complained about IRC bots,
and Kat explained how users had had their accounts disabled
in the past for running servers, under an existing policy
prohibiting excessive resource use. Everyone seemed to agree
that such a policy is needed.
The meeting was closed at about 6:05pm.