Minutes/2020-07-31

Present: TM, RL, JE

Wiki

TM has moved the archive of meeting minutes to the public part of wiki: Meeting minutes. It was agreed to post subsequent minutes there from now on. Rather than embargo the minutes until they are reviewed, it was agreed that each Board meeting would conclude with a short discussion of whether anything that had been discussed should not be publically minuted due to security or privacy concerns.

JE reported that he has posted a second tutorial, on Filtering Spam with Thunderbird‎. The meeting discussed possible ideas for future tutorials, including netiquette, INN, and how to find active newsgroups.

STUMP

RL reported that Igor Chudov had responded with his consent to our hosting STUMP on GitHub. He did not specify whether there is an existing source control repository or archived released that we could import; RL has sent a follow-up query. It was agreed to wait for a response before we upload anything to GitHub. In the meantime RL has set up a GitHub organization for the Board, which we can also use for documentation and other projects. RL and JE to get a "verified" badge for the account, which entails us (temporarily) adding a DNS record to big-8.org.

At the previous meeting it had been agreed to place comp.ai under interim management by the Board due to the current moderator's having lost access to their moderation account. This will also serve as a test run of the relevant procedures. Paul Schleck sent RL a README file explaining how our .procmailrc file works, which RL will distribute. We can then set up a STUMP system, get Russ or Todd to notify ISC about the new moderator address, and possibly recruit a new moderator per the procedure described at Moderator Vacancy Investigations.

Publicity

A Media Contacts page has been created and populated by JE and TM. At some point in the future we could reach out to these contacts to announce the reconstitution of the Board and our availability to speak in support of the preservation and revitalization of the Big 8 in particular and Usenet in general. JE and TM to investigate best practices for writing a press release to accompany such an announcement.

Admin

JE raised the issue of the possible overlap between news.newusers.questions (moderated, but with no postings other than automated messages) and news.announce.newusers (unmoderated, but with very little traffic). TM said some past Board member (Kathy?) may have already approached us about this. JE to investigate the purpose and history of the groups and find out who moderates the former.

TM mentioned that now that we are getting essential technical infrastructure and procedures back up and running, we should give some thought to the internal administrative ones (Board elections, etc.). For the moment we should consider the internal procedures and rules to be suspended, but only because we haven't had a chance to review them in detail. As part of his work to clean up the wiki, TM will examine the internal policies and present them in small batches to subsequent meetings so that they can be formally amended, adopted, repealed, or superseded.