BITS Board Meeting for October 9, 2024

AI Generated Transcript

Good evening, good afternoon, or good morning, depending upon where everyone is, because we have people all around the world in the organization.

And welcome to the October board meeting of BITS, normally held on the first Wednesday.

But because we wanted to make sure that we were celebrating holidays that were important to our board members and the BITS family, we moved it to the second Wednesday.

So we appreciate all of you being diligent and coming to the meeting tonight.

It’s not normally the time that we do it, but again, thank you so much.

Before we get started, I just wanted to recognize any of our BITS family who are in the Florida area or North Carolina area, where we’re seeing lots of very, very dangerous storm activity and hope that everyone is safe and that you ever need anything from us as a BITS family, please reach out.

You know, if there’s especially someone who is, you know, put in a situation where they need some help, we might be able to at least help a little bit.

We can talk about that if there’s a specific need.

So please, please, please let us know.

Let’s see, let’s get started.

I’m going to turn things over to our secretary, Robin, who has been working her fingers to the bone like crazy on all kinds of projects, which I’m delighted and happy about ’cause she’s amazing, for our roll call.

Robin.

Thank you.

Good evening, everybody.

President Jeff Bishop?

Here.

Vice President Brad Snyder?

Here.

Secretary Robin Frost, I’m here and happy to be so.

Treasurer Diane Scalzi?

She’s here.

She’s not here.

Oh, there she is.

Oh, there she is.

Hi.

Michael Babcock?

I am here with my tree trimmer.

John McCann?

I’m here.

David Edick?

I’m here too.

We would also like to welcome all of our friends and members who have chosen to spend time with us this evening and let you know that you will be recognized individually by name in the written minutes of this meeting.

And with that, Mr.

President, the call of the roll is complete.

Great.

And I know this is a little bit out of order, but since we have your attention, I’m gonna jump down to number four, which is to handle the September minutes.

Do you have any comments to make about those before we ask for a motion?

No, sir.

Okay.

Can I have someone move to accept the minutes, please?

I move.

I’ll second.

Okay, Dave and John, right?

Okay, perfect.

All those in favor? – Aye. – Aye.

Any opposed?

Excellent.

I sent out a pretty detailed agenda.

And as far as I can tell here, we have 62 lines of it to go.

Not that I’m counting.

And so unless anyone has any objections, I’m not gonna walk all the way through it.

It was re-sent out to all members as a Word document with headings so that you can actually navigate this 31 page tome of knowledge.

And you’ll hear why that’s all here in just a few minutes.

But just thought I would just throw that out there.

Anyone have anything that they wish to add to the agenda tonight?

All right.

Can I get a motion to accept the agenda as circulated? – I move. – I move. – Second. – Second. – Okay, John and Brad, I’m gonna recognize.

Okay, all those in favor? – Aye. – Aye. – Any opposed?

Excellent.

Okay, let’s move to our financial report and we’ll turn things over to Diane.

And Brad has the actual recording to play.

So we’ll take it in when we’re ready for that from Diane.

Go ahead, Diane. – Okay, well, I try to do these reports perfectly and I just discovered that I have 31 days in September.

So I have now corrected that on my copy and the Dropbox copy.

Other than that, I guess one of the things that I wanna remind people, of course, we’re not going to start collecting dues for next year, I guess, until November.

And we have, I’ve been going through and making spreadsheets and trying to separate the people who would need to receive reminders about paying dues.

And we have over 300 people.

I don’t have the exact number in front of me, but there’s over 300 people who are already paid through at least 2025, either because they’re BidsLife members or because they maybe took the moratorium, but also paid dues.

And we pushed those ahead through 2025.

So I’m trying to separate the ones that we need to contact from the ones that we don’t.

And it is important though, that if there’s anybody who wants to be able to vote because you have to be a member in good standing by the end of October in order to be able to vote at our business meeting.

So if you haven’t paid in a while and want to be able to vote in the business meeting, then you should still send your dues in.

And I think that’s all I’ve got. – All right.

So are we ready to listen to the report then, Diane? – Yeah. – Perfect, thank you so much. – Bits Treasures Report, September 1st, 31, 2024.

Checking, beginning balance $6,258.17.

Credits, transfer from PayPal, $2,951.27.

Total credits, $2,951.27.

Debit, in-corp, corporate registered agent, service fee, minus $129.00.

Zoom monthly subscription/increased meeting size to 500 participants, minus $53.

Amazon/Smart Glasses for ACB Media Auction, minus $318.44.

Total debits, minus $500.44.

Ending balance, $8,709.

PayPal, beginning balance, $391.85.

Credits, 55 regular member dues payments, $1,100.

Seven Bits Life member dues payments, $1,400.

Two possible ACB Life member dues payments, $30.

Three student member dues payments, $30.

Three donations, $85.

Total credits, $2,645.

Debits, PayPal fees, minus $85.58, asterisk one.

Transfer to checking, minus $2,951.27.

Total debits, minus $3,036.85.

Ending balance, $0.00.

Savings account, beginning balance, $37,130.09.

Credits, interest, $0.31.

Total credits, $0.31.

Debits, no debits.

Total debits, $0.00.

Ending balance, $37,130.40.

Total for all accounts, $45,839.40.

Asterisk one, for information on PayPal fees, visit https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/paypal-fees.

Submitted for audit, prepared by Diane Scousy, Bits Treasurer, October 3rd, 2024. – There’ll be a test on that link, by the way, so everyone make sure to write it down.

Just kidding.

Any other questions for Diane?

Great.

Go ahead, David. – I’m trying to do a friendly question.

I hope it’s appropriate.

What’s the status of Fidelity? – Oh.

Yeah, I have, I’m gonna have to have Ira go over it with me one more time.

I do have all the documentation I need now because John was able to get a copy of our articles of incorporation that we have to attach to the application.

So I think I have to fill in some bank account information.

And then the next step is going to be, there is a part of that where people have to fill in information about themselves, and I’ve already done mine, and Jeff, I think, is going to have to do it as president.

He’s gonna have his name on the account, as I understand it. – Think so. – So, you know, once we get to that point, ’cause, and I’m gonna have to find out, I hope that you’ll be able to fill out your part of that and scan it and email it to me.

I hope that’ll be, you know, legal and everything.

And then the next step I’m hoping to do is to make an appointment with somebody in a Fidelity office here and, you know, have them go over everything and see if we can, you know, actually set up the account. – Yeah, it’s been my understanding also and experience that they’re willing to help you, so you don’t have to depend on Ira.

You might want to independently verify it, but they’re willing to help you fill out stuff and deal with potentially inaccessible things, so. – Oh yeah, that’s what I figured.

I figured if they want, you know, if they want our money that they would help me, so.

But I still have to get, you know, all the signatures and everything, you know, that are required. – Yep. – And it’s a long form. – Thank you, Diane.

Thank you, David.

Anyone else with questions for Diane?

Very good.

Nothing heard.

I will then move to our presidential report and I’ll try to make this brief.

I sent a pretty lengthy report in the board packet.

So if you would like to go read that, I’ll give some– – Jeff? – Yes. – I see here in the outline, there’s an audit for bids from Diane.

Do we need to talk about that at all? – I don’t think that Taylor is here and there’s not much to report on this one.

So I think we’re going to postpone that until the team can get together and have a discussion about that. – No, I just wanted to make sure. – Yeah, yeah, no, no, I got it.

Yeah, I saw it.

Yeah, thank you. – Mr.

President? – Yes, ma’am. – Just one quick question.

We did vote on approving the agenda, but you also have a consent agenda item.

Is that folded in or does that need to be– – Yeah, it’s folded in. – All right, I was just asking. – Yeah. – All right, thank you. – So the consent agenda is, are all the committee reports, by the way, everyone.

We’re going to ask the committee chairs to give reports, but we want them to try to keep them as brief as possible with the understanding that people will refer to the packet for their full report if they want to dive deeper into the activities of the month, okay?

So first of all, let’s start with, I have some really great things to talk about, and then a couple of lessons learned that we’ll actually be talking a little bit about later in the meeting, and which means that there’s always room for opportunities for improvement within this organization, and I will sit here as president and say that that is indeed true, and there’s no one perfect, including one, yours truly, including myself, I am not perfect either.

So we need to do a little bit of assisting everyone here to make sure that they’re feeling supported and valued and all those things, but we’ll get there.

Okay, let’s start with the good and fun things, and then we’ll turn to the other things in just a minute here.

First of all, we’ll sort of consider this as part of the education report as well, but education activities are going well and strong.

Inside of BITS, we have our Office 365 course with over 430 registrants involved in that course.

Most weeks at class, we have over 200 participants, except for this last Monday.

That was a difficult class too, by the way.

That one was pretty involved.

So that one’s gonna be tricky for folks, I think.

But the feedback has been amazing.

I asked for testimonials from members of the class and members of the BITS family on all of our educational opportunities.

It will become apparent as to why that’s important in the future.

We won’t talk about that here tonight, and I would kindly ask that the board also not give clue to that ’cause there’s kind of reasons, but suffice it to say that, and we’re not trying to hide something from you, but all of the ink is not dry.

So we have to wait until everything is sort of fully imprinted on the paper before we make an announcement there. – Can we still turn those in? – What? – You know, testimonials. – Yeah, sure.

I’ll take ’em anytime. – Okay. – Yeah, absolutely.

One of the other things that I strongly believe in in this organization is that no student should be left behind in reference to providing them access to tools, technologies, or services where we can.

You know, with that many members, we have to be a little bit careful about how we do that, but we selectively chose people who inquired to obtain free copies of Microsoft Office.

And there were a number of people in the BITS family who also stepped forward, who contributed to that effort.

And I am internally and honestly, sincerely grateful to those that participated in that.

And there were far more people that wanted to than we needed, and I value you too.

So thank you for supporting that effort.

A lot of students are able to now participate with modern versions of tools that they didn’t have before.

We had students on Office 97, and yeah, it was kind of interesting.

Didn’t think that would run on some machines, but anyway.

Yeah, so we, you know, where we can, I think the organization should try to step up and help where we can.

Not always possible, but in this case, we were able to do that.

So not only are we providing education, but we’re providing the tools to be able to allow them to succeed.

John will be talking more about this later, but I wanna send a sincere thank you to the team who put together all of our new bylaws and constitution framework for the organization.

There was a tremendous and valiant effort that took place there over many, many, many, many, many days of hard, hard work, slogging through lots of legalese and all kinds of things.

You’ll hear about that.

And if you read the packet, you’ll notice that the constitution is embedded in it, but this is a constitution that we will be voting on later this fall.

And you’ll hear more about that coming up in just a few minutes, which brings us to the annual meeting.

We’re diligently planning for that.

You’ll hear more about that in the upcoming weeks, as well as the upcoming elections.

Our nominating committee is in full swing, and you’ll hear from Debbie Hazleton near the end of the meeting tonight to talk about that.

So we continue to work on professional development.

That’s an ongoing process.

We’re working with the actual owners of that service.

And so that’s not quite done yet.

And you can kind of blame me on that one.

There’s a lot of paperwork involved in that.

So I’m working through that process.

We have very exciting announcements to be made at our annual meeting.

So everyone should stay tuned for those.

I think people will be pleasantly surprised on what is coming and what sort of things we have up our sleeve for next year.

But I think you’re going to see that we have been working pretty hard behind the scenes to try to put BITS in an even stronger foundation for the future, not to say that we don’t have other things to improve upon.

And then finally, everyone needs to be thinking about renewals.

Those are coming up in November.

So if you have felt that BITS has been of value to you, then we would really ask you to consider renewing for the 2025 year.

And many of you already have, so thank you.

And if you haven’t, please, please do consider that.

You’ll get a personal invitation from us on that.

But just wanted to throw that out there.

I’m going to mention just a couple of things here from the actual document that I wrote up for the presidential report, specifically around lessons learned and internal thank you.

So in the presidential report, I pondered greatly over the last, from the last year that I have been president.

It’s been a humbling and sometimes, sometimes a major growth opportunity for me to learn how Jeff should improve himself.

And I’ve learned that I have imperfections and cannot necessarily be perfect, but I do the best that I can for the organization.

And I appreciate those who sometimes put up with Jeffisms, as I’ll call them.

And so we won’t say more about that, but I spent a great deal of time here thanking many people, both on the board and at committee levels.

And that is a very sincere and warm thank you to each and every one of you.

We wouldn’t be the organization we are without each and every one of you picking up an oar and contributing.

Whether you’re a leader or you’re a member, everyone is valued equally.

And I appreciate each and every one of you for everything that you do for the organization, that your voice matters and your voice counts.

And that culture of transparency and being willing to step up and lend an oar is important.

I highlighted what activities that we’ve done over the past year, and we’ll talk more about that at the annual meeting, so I won’t spend time here.

But suffice it to say, we got a heck of a lot done this year and we ought to be very, very proud of the work that we did.

However, comma, no, I’m not transcribing things.

This brings me to lessons learned.

And I think that there’s opportunities here where we as an organization need to sit back and reflect on what we could be doing better.

We have done tremendously great and lots of positive things, but we also need to recognize where we have not necessarily achieved what we set out to achieve, and we need to reset and figure out what that means.

So we’ll talk more about this later on in the meeting, but I want to specifically call out the fundraising committee.

If you read the packet, you will have seen the fundraising committee report, which was very frank and open and honest, and I appreciate that.

And for full transparency, I wanted the membership to see it.

And I first want to say a public and sincere thank you to each and every one of those committee members.

While we may not have achieved as much as that committee would have liked, and there’s lots and lots of factors that are also documented in their report, part of that lands on us as a leadership team in ensuring that we are making sure that everyone feels valued and supported.

And that’s something that I think we can improve upon.

But I also think that we need to be transparent with one another about where we’re going next and making sure that we’re just having more open and honest communication.

So we’ll talk more about this in a few minutes near the middle of the meeting.

I’m sure that many of the board members will have comments.

I have comments.

I’m hoping that representation from the fundraising committee is here to be able to provide any input.

And if not, we are happy to call a special session of, like maybe have an executive session if they wish to have it, or have just a separate meeting or the next meeting, we can bring that up and have a discussion with them, whatever really facilitates their needs there.

But I think we have also a plan that I think will help us in the area of communication in really elevating the needs of this organization all up, not just centered around fundraising, but our email lists, our calendar of events, and lots of other things.

So if you read the report, if you read the packet, you’ll know that that’s all included here.

And really it’s just a framework of to start discussion and no more than that.

So, shoot, I just moved my cursor and now I lost my spot.

Okay, I got back.

Thank goodness for quick fingers.

Then I talked about the future of BITS and just empowering people to achieve more through by giving them opportunities.

And you can read the rest of the report if you wish, but I’ve already spent enough time upon to indicating all of this to you here tonight.

I will now open the floor for any board member to ask any specific questions at this time.

Wow, silence is golden or something, right?

I did notice a problem with the agenda, by the way, there’s two number sevens, which I’m not sure that’s a good thing. (laughs) – Very important. – Oh man, I’ll tell you, it’s just one thing over another around here.

Okay, by the way, we’re down to 42 lines.

So we’re doing pretty good here. 41 actually.

We will now move to committee reports.

Let’s start with communication and we will hear from Merv, Rosanna and David for this section, just to kind of let Chanel know, by the way, she’s our superhero and here helping sort of manage the flow of people in and out of the meeting.

So thank you so much for that.

Merv. – All right, my report is in there.

So I don’t have a lot to add to that, except that we do hope to improve the communications and that has something that has been ongoing as far as lessons learned.

I am somebody who tends to have a lot of very high goals.

So I’m right in there with Jeff.

I do have plans.

However, a lot depends on whether everybody else shares those plans.

If anybody has any questions, please feel free to reach out to me.

I especially would like my moderators to reach out to me as per the packet.

So I don’t wanna reiterate what’s already in the packet.

So that’s all I have to say. – Great.

Merv, I would ask you to take a look at the communication plan that I kind of published near the end of the packet.

‘Cause that might have more impact on your communication as well.

But we need to figure out that plan.

And I think what we should do is sort of getting ahead of ourselves here.

I’d like to meet with the public relations and fundraising committees together so that we can figure out exactly how we wanna disseminate that and then we can move forward.

But give it a look and then we can have a chat.

We can start a discussion on the email management list or whatever.

It’s perfectly fine.

I just wanted to mention that to you.

All right.

Thank you, Merv.

Thank you very much.

Rosanna. – Hi everyone.

Good evening. – Hello. – Happy Rosh Hashanah to those of you who celebrate Rosh Hashanah as well.

Publications has been busy.

This year, as you know, we have two parts to the publication committee.

One is the social media side.

The other is the handbook side.

Social media on the social media side.

I’m happy to announce that we now have 241 followers on Mastodon.

Robin has been doing a fantastic job with keeping up with our Mastodon stats.

Facebook, Marianne has been doing a great job with getting our events posted up on Facebook as well.

So that’s pretty much what’s going on on the social media side.

On the handbook side, as I put in the packet as well, is that the one big achievement that publications has done this year is we have submitted our draft to the board for the handbook.

And I want to just thank the people on that committee who did a fabulous job with working with this challenge that was Robin Frost, John McCann, and Penny Moss.

So it’s something that I’m very proud of and this committee is very proud of and we’re looking forward to that being approved and getting that up eventually on to the BITS website as well.

There isn’t much else to report in publications.

There’s a lot of things that we’re thinking about or I’m thinking about for going forward.

I would like to see more communication or intercommunication among chairs so that those of us on publications can be a little bit more aggressive in getting information out to the membership.

And I just would like to say that if anyone has anything that they, or questions that they have regarding publications, please feel free to reach out to me so that publications can address any of those questions that you may have.

The BITS bulletin should be going out shortly.

Deborah Armstrong has been a little bit behind only because she’s been so, so inundated with office hours and work and a whole bunch of other stuff on her plate.

But that should, I know she’s got it almost all done and put together.

So I know that that will be going out shortly.

We will be looking for articles for the Winter Bulletin and in the packet is the website that, I’m sorry, the email address that you can send any articles that you may have to that email address.

And we do hope that you take the time to consider writing something for the bulletin so that you can share what you have with the BITS family.

And that, so that will be coming up now for the winter.

And other than that, that’s all we have for right now. – Okay. – Thanks, Jeff. – Yeah, you bet.

One thing, board members, I would like you to take a look at the handbook and I would like us to vote at the November meeting to accept the- – The draft. – The draft, yeah.

So that gives people a month to sort of review it and get any feedback.

If there’s any feedback, please distribute that on the board list and we’ll make sure that the committee has that information to be able to adjust anything or make any corrections to it.

But I suspect it’s probably perfectly awesome and doesn’t require any changes, so, which is good. – Well, there are some question marks in there, Jeff, and you’re gonna see them because, and we can’t take those question marks out until after Con and Bylaws has been approved and passed.

Once that’s been approved and passed, then we can go in there and do a final draft, which we will be able to submit.

And that’s the one that will go up on the website. – Okay, great.

And the constitution as presented has been distributed to everyone that will be voting on later this fall.

And so you can, if you want to make like a draft of a draft, you could start manipulating the handbook with that information if you wish, ’cause I don’t think it’s going to change unless a member brings forward any specific changes or authorizations through our normal process that would require us to then make changes to the constitution, so. – Okay, cool.

Yeah, well, we will be meeting again now next month.

We meet twice a month.

Well, we did with the handbook we met on the 12th and the 14th, but now that we’re done with the handbook, we will be only one meeting in November and December, unless there is something else that we need to work on. – Okay.

I suspect that there shouldn’t be that much of a change unless there are constitutional changes that will come forward from the membership, so. – Yeah, exactly. – Great.

Any questions for Rosanna before we move on?

All of you are so quiet tonight.

Oh my gosh.

Okay.

Thank you very, very much, Rosanna.

I appreciate you and all your hard work and your committee’s hard work.

It’s amazing.

Good, good, good work.

Lots of effort there. – You’re welcome.

And it’s an honor to be there.

It’s an honor to chair this committee.

It really is. – Thank you for serving. – You’re very welcome. – All right. – My pleasure. – Yep.

David, you’re up next. – I guess that’s me. – That’s you. – Well, I sent out the report.

It’s very brief, but we have had a lot of attendees in the chat.

I’ve been sending it out to the ACB conversation in addition to our other announce lists of our events.

And we’ve gotten a few members that direction.

And as I said in the email, if you’re not there, you can’t be part of the conversation.

So we do welcome you to come in and be there ’cause a lot of people seem to enjoy it. – Very good.

Any questions for David? – And we got a great team of people and we’re adding more. – Woo-hoo, love that.

Any other questions for David?

All right, our next two presenters will be Brad followed by Michael.

And then we will hear from, is Marty here? – He is not.

I’ve been looking for him, but he is not. – Then we will move to John McCann just so that Chanel knows what’s coming up so she can kind of be aware.

Okay, Brad, take it away for your two reports. – All right, first let’s talk presentations.

I’ve submitted my reports in the packet.

I’m not gonna go over all of it.

I listed the presentations that we had during September.

We had six or seven, the highlight of which I would say was Jeff Bezer was able to get us on his calendar right after the JAWS Fusion 2025 beta was released.

And he did a very nice presentation on what’s in the new update that the full public release should be out at like always end of October.

But anyway, it was very well attended and thank you to Jeff for doing that for us.

He enjoys doing it.

We certainly enjoy hearing what he has to say.

Okay, so moving on to October, just the highlights here.

We have our usual, let’s see.

Well, my list says MacBytes.

Well, we actually did that last night ’cause I wrote this up ahead of time.

Then we will have Basics with Bits this coming Saturday and we are going to, what is it?

We’re going to do NVDA part one.

Joel Dotson’s gonna do that presentation and then– – And part two, two weeks later. – Say it again. – And then part two at the end of the month, right? – That’s right.

Part two will be on the 26th.

He’ll do that in two weeks.

We are going to have Sri Roy, who does a lot of presenting for the iBug Today group is on the presentation, it’s not my, our presentation committee.

Well, ’cause I twisted his arm, okay?

So anyway, he’s going to do a presentation on the updated Reminders app in iOS 18.

And that is a week from tonight on the 16th.

So then we have Maria Kristic.

Many of us are familiar with Maria.

She’s going to do a presentation on Tuesday the 22nd on the new, well, Braille screen input has had a lot of changes.

I’m not a Braille user, so I’m above my head when I’m talking about it.

But Maria is, I’m not going to say she’s an expert.

She’d probably blush if I did that, but she is very well versed in Braille screen input.

And she has been planning this for us for a while.

So she will be doing that for us on the 22nd.

And then we have Applebytes on the 23rd.

And then, like I said, to round out the month, Joel will do NVDA part two for Basics with Bits.

Tentatively planned for October, we, October, November, we will be doing a revised Bits and Pieces, a revisited Bits and Pieces of Family Tech hosted by Jeff.

We had a really good turnout for that last year.

And we have talked about doing that again ’cause a lot of us weren’t members when Jeff did that last year.

So we thought we’d recycle that one.

So we’re going to do that.

So that’s my, oh, we are now holding our regularly scheduled, the Applebytes, MacBytes, and Basics with Bits are being held on ACB community accounts in keeping with the changes on ACB community.

They’re wanting everything on community, on community-owned accounts.

So we are doing those.

We did the, some of our one-off presentations going forward, maybe on community, or they may be in our own room.

The JAWS Fusion update that Jeff Bazer did for us, we did that in our own account.

We do put the announcements out on ACB conversation as well as on our own events and Bits announce list.

And we had a pretty good showing, even though we weren’t on community.

So just be aware, we’re trying to work out different ways of doing these things.

So we have that.

And obviously we made the decision not to move the board meeting to an ACB account just because it just works better to do it here on our own.

So that is my, oh, I don’t want to steal any of Michael’s thunder, but I’ve been working with him, helping him get as much content ready to post our presentations.

And I believe as Michael will address, the floodgates are about to open on that.

So long awaited, we’re gonna get old content, current content, all that up on the website, but Michael’s gonna talk about that.

So let’s move to, oh, I’d already changed. – Convention? – I’d already, yes, I am checking.

I had already done the switch to the other document.

So I put in my report.

We finally have the invoice from convention.

I’m not gonna go through all of it here.

It’s pretty detailed.

I wrote up a summary.

The good news is we won’t be writing ACB a check.

They will be writing us a check.

So that is good news.

A lot of that is, I think we had 163 people.

You know, when you fill out the registration, convention registration form, there’s a place to make a $10 donation to an affiliate.

And we had 163 people donate $10 to BITS.

So thank you everyone who did that.

And that also helped us.

We had a very successful reception and when you add everything together, we’re in the black on all of it.

I did just kind of quickly go over, ’cause a lot of people are concerned about this whole reception idea.

How would this work out?

And I think, you know, we talked about it and with all of the tremendous influx of members, we certainly had lots of dues to help us out with everything.

But just real quick, I wanted to go over.

We sold, we ended up with 53 tickets sold for a total of $795 were generated in ticket sales.

We sold another $80 worth of raffle tickets at the reception for total receipts were 800.

Is that eight?

Sorry, I got my screen reader right away. 875 is what I got, 875.

Our expenses were, we had $175 to have a bartender and I knew that, we knew that was coming.

And we paid $120 for a snack mix that we had around on all the tables.

That was our little food.

We had 40 drink tickets redeemed and we paid $10 for each one of those.

That ended up being $400.

We were charged $130.

That was one I didn’t know about in advance.

I believe we were charged $130 for the room.

We did have a representative from the hotel there on duty.

The whole event, in addition to the bartender, but the hotel representative took care of whatever we needed, getting us a table for the check-in people to sit at and anything else we needed, move furniture around, help us with anything we needed.

The woman, Mary, she was very, very helpful and we appreciate her being there.

So that was well worth the 130.

There’s a surcharge here.

It says, what is it?

106,159.

That’s of the $15 we charged for tickets to the reception that you paid on the conference registration, $3 out of every ticket goes to ACB.

So that was their cut, was 159.

We paid, I believe it was just under 400.

I’ve put down $386 is what we paid for the raffle ticket, the H4E bundle that we did.

And it was the raffle ticket prize.

So all total, I got $1,384 were our expenses.

And when you subtract our receipts from that, we ended up with $495 is what we paid out of pocket.

Now, of course, we’re not gonna have to write ACB a check because we had all that 163 people paid $10 donation.

So ACB is gonna be writing us a check for about 1,100 something.

But overall, I thought that was a pretty successful event.

I think it was worth 400, what I say, 495 for the publicity, exposure, goodwill.

I think we made a lot of friends.

I think we helped, if there’s anybody on the planet who didn’t know about Bits yet, well, hopefully we made that number even smaller.

And there were lessons learned, even though I thought it was a successful event.

And as always, you learn something.

And I think should we decide to do this again, which I think we should, it was a good event for Bits.

We’ve learned some things that I think will help us go even smoother the next time.

So with that is my, and we’re done with convention for this year, and we’ll start thinking about next year.

So that’s my two reports. – The meetings are already happening at the national level for convention. – Yes, I understand. – Oh my goodness, okay.

Excellent, and Diane, we haven’t gotten the check from ACB yet, right? – As slow as they took to get this invoice to us, I wouldn’t hold my breath. – I would not, I doubt it.

But suffice it to say, we’ll have another 1,100 dollars in our check account. – Correct.

I like the invoice they sent, said it’s due on receipt, but I’ll bet you it’d be 30 days before they get us a check. – Yeah, that’s fine. – Just that quick.

I’m gonna sit over under at 30, and I’m gonna take the over. – All right, does anyone have any questions for Brad, either on convention or presentations?

Excellent, you were very, very thorough, Brad.

Thank you kindly very, very much. – Thank you very much. – Turning to all things IT, or IT, let’s move over to Mr.

Babcock, who will give us all of his great wisdom and knowledge, and tell us all great things. – I’ll try, I’ll try.

So first of all, if you guys can’t hear me, let me know.

They literally are topping down trees right outside my window.

So this is the IT website committee meeting, or committee report for October.

I’m gonna go over a brief overview, probably won’t take, review everything.

There is important information for you to review in your packet.

So if you have heard us mention this packet a couple of times, and you have ignored that email, I highly recommend taking a look at it, ’cause Jeff did a great job putting it together.

So all members now have access to the BITS website.

This means you should be able to go to either bits-acb.org or joinbits.org.

They both go to the same place.

And in the right-hand sidebar, if you’re looking at it visually, or use heading navigation to locate the appropriate heading, you can log in with your email address and password.

If for some reason you’re not able to log in with that email address and password, please take advantage of the forgot password link that’ll allow you access to reset your password.

We are adding content, as Brad said, starting with the, well, I put starting with the newest and then working backwards.

And then in the sample that I’ll give you here in a moment, it was from October of last year.

And I’m like, well, that doesn’t look right.

But that’s what ended up happening.

So we do have content up on the website.

And primarily, it is Apple BITS prior to May of 2023 that is currently on the website.

And right now a Mac BITS that is from October of 2023.

I’ll talk to you about that in a quick moment.

By Monday, members will be able to log into the website and access the content for members only link.

So this link will only show up if you are logged in.

I feel this is probably the best option at this time to solve the problem of getting access to the content.

And after consideration and talking to a few different people who unanimously agreed, not even showing the material publicly is probably gonna be the best bet.

So there isn’t any confusion when someone sees the material and they’re like, I can’t play it.

And then we find out that they’re not logged in.

So in recap, that means you’ll go to bits-acb.org or joinbits.org and use the email address and password fields to log in.

Once you log in, there will be a link in the main navigation bar at the top of the page.

This says, again, what did I put here?

Content for members only.

So you’ll use the search for the word content and you’ll be able to access that.

When you click this link or press enter on it, depending on how you access the link, this will lead to a categorized page, which means you’ll be able to go in and say, oh, I want MacBytes or oh, I want AppleBytes or I want to see the round table presentations.

All of those will be broken up into categories that you should be able to access.

And then clicking that link for that specific category will bring you to the most recent content that’s available on the website, followed by older content that’s available.

Yes, someone asked me this afternoon, will I be able to just see all of the content that Bits has posted?

So on that categorized page, I think it’s gonna be important that we put a link to all Bits content.

So if you wanna go listen to the hours and hours and hours of content we have, that’ll be available to you.

Each category, oh, I already summarized that part.

So on each post though, and this is where we talk about the packet, thanks to A, Michael Doiz for doing an amazing job and putting his hardcore Mac to work to do a lot of transcription, really appreciate that.

And the power of AI, the way that we currently have the post set up is that a title will be shared, you’ll then have an AI based summary of the content that’ll give you a brief overview of what that content was available, a link that you can click to access a transcript of the content, because we know that some people may prefer to read the content, an embedded player where you can play the audio.

And again, there’s also a link there.

Currently, there’s not a link to download the audio.

We are open to suggestions, but we feel like it would probably be best for members to be able to just play the content on the website.

There are some other options there that we as a board and or an organization could talk about moving forward and in relation to getting that content to members as well.

If you wanna see what the post will look like, go check out the link that’s available in your packet at the bottom of the first section in the bulleted list.

Now, not so much fun stuff, but I’ve got to bring it up here.

IT committee chair transition program.

So I have overextended myself, full transparency.

And I think anyone who has been involved in multiple different organizations has probably met this element in their life.

And if you haven’t, you possibly will.

And after careful consideration in a couple of different discussions with primarily my wife and some other people, I have realized that I need to start stepping back from some projects.

So I am looking to step back from a role as the IT committee chair, mainly because I feel like there are other people out there who may be able to better organize people.

I’m realizing I may not be the best person to organize people.

And I love doing the tech aspects of things, but it’s not a sometimes a good fit for my personality.

So I’m willing to help serve wherever I can when possible.

But again, I don’t know that being a chair of this committee is the best fit for me.

I definitely would love to continue my current role right now to help with a transition period, because as some of us may know, when you’re dumped into a project and have no assistance, it can become overwhelming.

So I’d love to help whoever ends up being in this position with getting access to all pertinent digital properties.

And of course, sharing knowledge, because I’m all about providing people with the knowledge they need.

And if I don’t know it, then I’ll go ask chat GPT or Google it and try to figure out the answer for it.

And also all of the plugins and collaboration that I’m willing to do is definitely available.

And there’s been some plugins that are installed on the website.

And honestly, I think that whatever we can do as a organization to help facilitate making a better user experience for our members is ideal.

And I’ll do whatever I can to help with that.

Last section here is website feedback and memberful integration.

So I am seeking feedback from the board and members on how we can make the website more useful beyond just hosting content.

‘Cause right now the primary focus has been to, well, for me and the way that I’ve seen this, the primary focus, folk I have been to A, make sure that members who register on the membership form get added to the website.

And then B, those members have the proper role attached to them so they can see the content.

And then of course, getting that content onto the webpage.

So that’s been our primary focus, but I’d be curious and open to feedback for ways that we can better use this property that we have and I hope I’ve been transparent with everyone.

Do not write copy.

So I am not the person to go write everything for the website, but I know we have some great people and Rosanna has been amazing to work with to get content published on the website and we’ll be able to get that taken care of and help work that out.

John, David and I had a meeting with an amazing lady.

I think her name was Michelle, but I’ve already forgotten.

And I’ve met her twice now with memberful, which was discussed in our September board meeting.

We discussed how memberful can improve the membership management of keeping track of all of our members and getting all that data into memberful and being able to let members self-serve their renewal processes if they want.

We also had a conversation with them about importing me members and being able to make sure that that membership data was available for our members and for admins.

I did not organize a improv board meeting towards the end of September, which I appreciate people letting us know that we were supposed to do that ’cause I dropped that ball.

And so definitely open to answering questions here or we can set something up or whatever the board wants to further discuss this.

Again, memberful does cost $50 a month with a 4.9% processing fee that’s paid to memberful.

And then on top of that, Stripe does take 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction.

And so that’s not paid to memberful, but that is paid directly to Stripe.

Memberful does not integrate with PayPal, which is our current payment processing tools.

So we would have to set up an organizational Stripe account if that’s an avenue we wanted to pursue.

Full transparency, I use memberful for a membership site that I manage and I am familiar with the process.

I don’t get paid any sort of commissions.

I don’t get paid any sort of kickbacks if anyone makes a decision, but this is the tool that I have the most experience with.

For the most part, it is fairly accessible.

And I know that’s a catch term.

I have brought to the attention of memberful some challenges that people may face when signing up and it is my understanding that they are investigating ways that they can improve this experience.

However, I also don’t recommend anyone making decisions on products or services based on promises made because you want to make sure that the product or service meets the needs that you as a person or an organization has.

There are other tools such as Paid Memberships Pro.

And I haven’t had the time to explore this tool further, though I do know several members of BITS who have used this particular tool and there are other membership plugins with WordPress.

I will wrap this committee report up and of course be happy to answer questions with, memberful on the surface sounds expensive and ultimately it can be expensive, but also it’s one less infrastructure thing that BITS as an organization would have to manage.

We would be outsourcing that infrastructure management to a third party.

And that is my report and I would love to answer any questions. – All right, any questions? – Yes. – David. – First thing I wanna say, thank you for an awesome job on getting the website transitioned over from Drupal to WordPress.

I think that’s great.

And the second thing is, I would love to see it possible like we used to have before to have the ability to download content because you don’t always wanna listen in front of your computer, smartphone or whatever.

Whether that’s the form of an actual download option or via a podcast that’s private to members that’d be interesting.

So I’m willing to help explore with that.

The third thing that I wanna mention is, I do like Memberful as a customer side using it on that site that you work with it on.

It is a great experience.

But I am concerned with the PayPal integration and it is a pretty good cost because every membership would cost us whatever that percentage is, combined percentage for that and we couldn’t integrate PayPal.

So those are my concerns, but thanks for the job. – Yeah, thank you, David.

I’m gonna address those real quick.

And then of course, if you have more questions or anyone else does feel free to let me know.

Number one, I considered the download feature and that is something we can add to the site as well.

And that’s why I’m looking for feedback because what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna set up a template.

So we literally just drop in the content into that template.

And then once that’s done, then we can just start cranking out content ’cause we have all the content.

It’s all been transcribed.

It just needs to get systematized and put into the system.

And then that goes up.

So that is pretty easy to do.

And then to add the download feature is something we could do.

I do wanna be fully transparent.

Once we let people download that content, we as Bits have no control over it.

So if someone decides to take all of our content and publish a public podcast, we really couldn’t do much about that aside from potentially revoking that member’s access.

So that’s why I at this time pursued just embedding a audio player.

But again, I’m open to that.

And then lastly, related to PayPal, you are correct.

There is not direct integration with Stripe.

If PayPal, or I’m sorry, there’s not direct integration with PayPal and Memberful.

If Memberful was an avenue, we as an organization decided to pursue and we wanted to continue offering PayPal payments.

I think offering PayPal payments could be handled as an exception for individuals who may not feel comfortable with entering credit card information online and who are more comfortable with PayPal.

Yes, on the admin side of things, that would take a little bit more work to go in and put their account in.

It can manually be added with a manual expiration date for that specific member’s access.

And we as an organization would just need to realize that when that member’s access expired, they’re not gonna be able to renew it unless they add a card on file within their membership profile and renew it, or we go in and manually renew it because they submitted a PayPal payment, if that makes sense. – I just wanted to add too, that we’ve actually had, and John can probably testify to this as well.

We’ve had, in fact, I have a member right now that I’m gonna go pay his membership dues and he’s gonna send me a check.

It’s actually very common in bits.

In fact, I would venture to say that literally probably five to 7% of the membership do not have a PayPal account and do not want a PayPal account, but are willing to put in a credit card.

So I think in some respects, this is going to eliminate some burden from us as well in allowing people to use Stripe ’cause it’s totally integrated into the system.

There’s no outsourcing you to a third-party website.

There’s none of that activity.

And I think one of the things that the board has to consider is, you know, how much of our time should be considered as part of payment for volunteers doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

And I think that’s one of the big burdens that we’ve had in this organization and we need to solve it.

So any other questions before I propose a next step?

Yes, go ahead, Brad. – Yeah, I just wanted to follow up on David’s comment.

I don’t know if anybody’s tried.

I have.

The new website is extremely accessible on a smartphone.

I have done, checked it out on my iPhone.

I realized nobody wants to sit in front of their computer and listen to recordings of our presentations, but it’s certainly easy to do on a smartphone and then you have it on a mobile device.

And one of the reasons I did look into that is I am very strongly opposed to allowing our content to be downloaded for the very reasons that Michael has outlined.

There are individuals out there who would love to put it on a website or make it publicly available and not necessarily monetize it, but just make it available to anybody who wants it.

And we have always stressed these presentations when they’re on their members only or they’re on community, you can listen to them live.

We have never let ACB put them up in podcast form.

These are for members only.

And once we allowed downloads, we have forfeited any control over our own content.

So like I said, for the reasons Michael pointed out, I am very much opposed to allowing downloads. – And Brad, thank you for bringing that up.

I’ll just say here, ’cause I kind of hinted at it, like who’s to say in 2025, Bits doesn’t have an app that you can consume all the content in the app.

I don’t know what that looks like, but that is a possibility. – That’s right. – Yeah, exactly.

And that would be another avenue.

But again, that app would not allow downloads, but it’s an app, but it’s not really any different.

Like I said, the new website, it is extremely accessible through the Safari browser on my iPhone, and I’m sure it is on other browsers and on Android platform as well.

So you’re not stuck sitting in front of your computer if you wanna listen to these. – Yeah, go ahead, David. – First thing is for the last, I don’t know, five years, more than that, I’ve been only in Bits in three years.

We’ve had content available to download, and it hasn’t, to my knowledge, been abused.

I realize there’s always the potential, but even on other podcasts where your members only get it three days early, or it’s, again, members only, it’s still able to be downloaded.

It has your name embedded on some of them or whatever.

But I guess I think it’s possible, but then I think we’re putting too much work into making it more inconvenient for the members, ’cause we’ve never had a problem.

If we knew this piracy of Bits content was happening, I could see that being an issue.

I’m gonna table this discussion for the next meeting simply because the new person who’s gonna lead this IT committee should probably provide input.

And I think that would also give us a month to allow that person to get up to speed and bring a proposal to the board and have us vote on memberful at that time, unless anyone has any objections.

Any objections to that?

I think that’s a brilliant idea. – Great idea. – Okay, good.

And I’m not saying that to sort of limit conversation or anything of that nature.

I’m just saying that let’s leave all options on the table and then we’ll come up with a plan.

And I’m sure the discussion will be quite lively on this one.

Yeah, and an app is a really interesting idea.

In fact, we have talent within our organization to do such a thing.

And who knows what that might bring, content knocking on wood.

We’ll see, we’ll see.

Very fascinating.

There might be a way of, okay, we’ll be thinking about this.

Okay, any other questions before we move on?

All right.

Next, we’re going to hear from John McCann.

Diane is listed for the credentials committee.

And I think, John, if you want to sort of tailor that into this as well, ’cause I think that’s something we should be talking about.

And then we’re going to hear from the woo-woo wacky witch hazel on our nominating process.

Before we do that, Michael, did you get the email that I sent to you about the candidate email address? – Possibly.

It does not ring a bell, but we will figure that out shortly. – Okay, so she wanted an email address to be able to have it, as opposed to her personal email address. – Beautiful. – So I said, can you create candidates or candidate@bits-acb and forward it to her email address? – I will get that done today, yes. – Yeah, great.

Okay, okay.

And I’m sorry to jump that, but you were still there, so it’s all good.

John, I’m going to let you take the reins and take as much time as you need, ’cause there’s a lot to talk about here. – Yeah, there is.

And the quicker part of it, I think, is going to be in the membership committee report. – Yes, yes. – Of course, you have that in your packet.

We’ve gained approximately, and there was someone who just came in during this meeting, so we’ve gained in terms of since the last, since I think September, about 60, 61, 62 members.

The reason I hedge there is because some are updates, but most of the people who’ve come in have been driven by the office course.

So we’re in the low 60s, okay, in terms of new members.

And we have seven new life members, although two were mentioned in the last report.

After sort of an exchange of emails with the treasurer, Diane, I thought it best to synchronize monthly reporting rather than board meeting to board meeting.

Reporting so that since the treasurer’s reports are obviously synced to calendar months, it probably should be, and they are, that’ll eliminate some confusion.

Now, with the latest edition, we’ve had three more people come in in October.

But I wanna share some really, really good news.

It wasn’t in the printed report.

I went and downloaded the latest AMS spreadsheet today.

And I’ve been very muted about talking about this.

I don’t know how many people remember or how many people in fact knew that for whatever reason in August or since the last time I checked, which would be early September, it appeared that with respect to 280 BITS records, the BITS specific field information was somehow missing, just wasn’t there.

Well, guess what?

It is now.

Now, because of that situation and my concern about it, I have really kind of stockpiled a lot of the new memberships, putting them into AMS ’cause I didn’t wanna waste my energies, my efforts. 100 is a lot, but if I do 15 a day, that’s a seven-day task, okay?

I can get that done.

So the thing that makes me most happy about all this is that I now have a very, very high level of confidence that when the sun rises on November 1st, I’ll be able to push some buttons and we will be able to generate the membership list as of the record date as required by the DC code.

We’re gonna be in excellent shape.

The only other components of the membership report that I wanna talk about is, and it dovetails into what Jeff was mentioning, the credentials committee.

Credentials basically handles itself assuming that information is entered timely and correctly.

And while that is not exactly the case now for the reasons just stated, it certainly will be as of the date when we have to produce the list that the credentials required to certify those who are members in good standing prior to the meeting.

And the last point in membership is that, and I guess this will involve talking to the new chair of the IT committee and such members as remain on it.

I’m glad to hear that Michael Babcock, you are remaining on it.

I think we need to streamline the form and then we need, by calling out everyone whose memberships are good through 2025 and 2026, we can narrow the field of emails to whom the new form would need to be sent.

And I would really, really urge, while we can’t prevent people from prepaying, it’s not something I really wanna encourage.

Can’t prevent it, but– – Nope, I get it. – I don’t wanna deal with 900 up notes. – Nope. – Or 900.

I really don’t.

So that’s the membership committee report.

If anyone has any questions or thoughts. – John, real quick, do you have proposed changes that you want to the membership form?

And if so, can you email those to myself or Michael? – Well, yeah.

I will do that within the next two or three days.

I think, well, first of all– – Okay, that’s fine. – I’ll just outline them very briefly.

I think all the stuff about committees was sort of overkill.

It was a great idea.

I even got the opportunity to use it.

And the one big change I would suggest is that there’d be a nice question at the top of the thing saying, “If you believe that your information has changed “since your last submission, “check this box and hit submit.” (laughing) Zip, zip, bang, bang, easy does it.

Those are the two main changes I would– – So don’t even collect it, right?

So– – Don’t collect the information again.

I don’t wanna see it again. – No, I don’t wanna be– Ugh, ugh, damn. – All right, that’s fine.

Is that pretty much what you want? – That’s what I’d say, pretty much. – Okay, if you could just put that in, right?

Even if it’s just like– – I will. – Two or three bullets.

It doesn’t need to be detailed. – Yeah, okay, I will. – Michael, you were gonna say? – Yep, I was just gonna say that would be awesome if you could do that.

Just let us know what information we have to capture.

I think that’s important is what is it that we need, not what is it that we want?

And then we can build what it is we want in the member’s profile. – You know what?

I could do that probably tomorrow afternoon.

I really could ’cause I’ve given this a lot of thought and I know what I want. – And I think we just make a copy of the form, Michael, and then we– – Yep. – And hack it up. – And then we nuke everything. – A little bit, yeah. – Nuke all of the stuff out and add the checkbox and be– – Make it simple. – Yeah, make it really simple.

Okay.

Okay.

Any questions on member?

Yes, go ahead. – By the way, can I, I wanna say one thing.

You know, since you, I’m really happy, I was really happy in putting all that information that came in on my spreadsheet, you know, that I could assume that if someone said they were not a member of BIT, I’m glad that you left that question in. – Yeah. – You know, because I use that to set their, to set their dues, their membership expiration to 2025.

I did it based on that.

And I don’t know, John, you might still need to look at it, but I hope, you know, that most of it’ll be right. – Yeah, well, we always been good with coordinating.

And by the way, I will have an off list, as it were, confab with you ’cause your treasurer’s report referenced, referenced to could be’s, you know, in terms of life members. – Right, right. – And I need to verify that with Nancy, you know. – Yes, yes, yes. – And if you have to, you need to receive saying, hey, you said you were a life member, but National says no.

Yeah. – And we can work through this, but there’s a couple of other things that I would like to have implemented on the form, like a RIM email address field.

And we need to really make sure, I do really wanna make sure they at least reenter their email address and verify it. – Okay. – Because oftentimes that stuff, they don’t think about that.

And there should be a checkbox that says, is this the email address you want to be used on your membership record?

There’s some things there that I think we need to, we need to do there. – Right.

Yeah, okay. – But we’ll take that offline and figure that out. – Right, yeah. – Okay. – So, okay, I’m done, unless there are more questions.

At least I’m done as far as membership.

I guess I’ll be brought back. – Yeah, yeah.

We’re not taking questions from the group at this point.

So hold on to your question at the end of the meeting, and we’ll take that at the end there.

Okay.

Okay, John, Constitution time. – Oh, another life member is back. – What? – Oh, already back to back.

Okay, what can I say about bylaws and constitution? – Yeah, what can you say? – I can say a lot, and I sort of will, but let me run it down.

First of all, let me begin, and I know this is maybe people say, yeah, the pro forma, yeah, I want to think, like the Oscars, you know?

Okay, so I’m like, I just have a kick-butt committee.

I love everybody on that committee.

They all stepped up.

We sprinted.

We had our first meeting on September 26th, which was much later than I had wanted it to be, but you know, life and a lot of things going on, this, that, we’re all busy.

We couldn’t meet until December 26th, which I guess as of tomorrow, that’ll be two weeks, a two-week time frame, and in the space of basically 10 days, we, 10, 11 days, we put together an incredible constitution.

I couldn’t be more proud of what we generated.

I couldn’t be more proud of the members of my committee.

They really stepped up.

We had a lot of interplay.

I particularly want to thank Maria Christich, who is spot on with a lot of highly technical, detailed things that we hashed through in the weekend.

The board, the committee didn’t meet since last Thursday, but they did, the board sanctioned and gave its blessing to Maria and I getting off in a huddle to deal with some of the thornier or trickier DC compliance issues to make sure we were square there.

I think it’s a great document.

If anyone wants it sent separately outside of, you know, being embedded in the packet, I’m certainly willing to do that.

I want to bring your attention to two things.

First of all, I’m sure we need stylistic work.

I love editing in plain text, not in word.

My word skills aren’t as up to speed as perhaps they will be once I actually listen to the recordings and do the exercises for office.

But especially when I’m doing, you know, really kind of in-depth thought, appropriate drafting content, I like using a plain text editor.

So there are going to have to be stylistic work that needs to be done on it.

But that’s, you know, like sending it off to the printer to get the typeface right and stuff like that.

And that’s where Robin and Rosanna were really gonna, you know, probably take the lead on that as they did with the handbook.

The other thing I want to bring to your attention is that there are asterisks in front of those sections where I particularly desire input or where there are perhaps, put the word in quotes, philosophical considerations that people might want to pay particular attention to.

Now I got to own something.

All the while I represented that, yeah, of course we could have a special meeting, Jeff.

You know, we’ll come to find out our own constitution limits it to an annual meeting.

Now, maybe this is like putting a spin on some bad news, but I think it’s okay.

The fact of the matter is I think we can get this done at the annual meeting.

I think we can hold the elections and denominate one of the slots as provisional with the understanding that in all likelihood, I mean, I’ll be extremely upset if this doesn’t come to pass, that once the annual meeting closes, we can immediately bring the new bylaws into existence.

And we do this maybe with some provisos attached here and there, maybe not too much.

The mechanics of how this gets done are something I really haven’t agonized over, but it can be done.

And keep in mind, the reason why it can be done is because by DC law, votes on governing instruments for a membership organization, which we’ve declared ourselves to be, and we behave like that.

So we’re properly classified as a membership organization under the DC code.

Any amendments to governing instruments need to be done by ballot anyway.

So we could have that going on while the annual meeting is going on.

And I have great confidence in how well that will flow because I’ve seen how well asking votes for worked when we did our preferences for candidates in the ACB elections.

I thought that was beautifully handled.

I think if we resurrect that and put it in service for both the elections and the votes on the constitution or bylaws, which is now one integrated document, I think we’ll be fine.

So I think the news is really all good.

And I particularly liked it as opposed to having 30 days, we really now have 60 days to look at this.

We are well within compliance as far as pre-notice, any notice requirements under which we’re still subject or to which we’re still subject courtesy of the existing constitution and bylaws.

And I think, boy, the more I went through the existing constitution and bylaws, even though we lived under them successfully, I think this new one’s gonna be a vast improvement.

And I definitely learned my lesson about not overwriting.

I think it gives us a great deal of flexibility while being very prescriptive in those areas where it’s important that we be so.

And this new 60 day timeframe allows us to do teach-ins as we would have called them in the ’60s.

Yeah, I was in that era, although a little bit behind it, but everything was an in, a sit-in, a be-in, a love-in.

We can have teach-ins on this.

And we can and we should.

Because the one thing I don’t wanna see happen is the annual meeting deteriorate into an attempt to constitute a de facto constitution and bylaws committee of the whole to micromanage it.

That’s not gonna work.

So we’ve given ourselves a good timeframe to hash out anything that might be contentious.

I don’t think there’s gonna be much, but I’m, you know, it’s a quote Regis Philbin, “I’m only one man.”

So I guess I’m done.

Any questions, any? – So John, I just wanted to add one other thing.

I think that we have our presidential office hours coming up in October and in November.

And I think this facilitates an opportunity for us to ask, you know, you and the Constitution and Bylaws Committee to come forward and sort of take questions from the members and sort of, you know, I really truly want to not have to deal with this at a humongous granular level at our annual meeting or the meeting right after the meeting. – No one does. – Right. – No one does. – So the goal here, and I will make sure that this is strongly communicated to the membership, is that we are going to utilize the office hour events coming up in October and November to facilitate conversations around any rewording.

In fact, it might even be fine to even accept, you know, I’ll leave that up to you, John, how you wanna handle that.

But like if someone has a proposal or an amendment that they would like to make to the language or something that, you know, if we consider it friendly, then I’m fine, you know what I mean?

I mean, but I’ll leave that up to you, you’re the chair.

So, you know, but I mean, you know, would love to be able to get one document ready to be devoted upon at that time is what the goal here is.

Yeah.

Okay, great.

Any questions for John from the board?

All right.

Now we all must be gentle with Ms.

Debbie Hazleton because she’s not feeling well.

And so we’re gonna have her come up and speak to us briefly to protect her voice.

I am here.

Yay.

Well, hang in there, big hugs.

And speak to us with whatever you would like to say, but your report was rather concise and clear.

So go right ahead.

Thank you.

So nominations finally met and is together.

And yeah, I am hoarse, obviously.

And so the committee is a committee of five.

I decided to make it larger since everything we’re doing is larger.

Our membership is so much larger.

And I think if our board becomes larger, it’s just gonna be good to have.

I just wanted to make sure that the committee was a good sampling of our members so that it’s not about me per se.

So on the committee, we have myself as chair.

We have, and I don’t have anything in front of me, but we have Merv Keck.

I just couldn’t go forward and have this another really good committee without Merv.

He’s just so great to work with from email management.

And Jim O’Neill.

And, oh my God, I’m not thinking. – Refer to the packet, everybody. – Debbie, I mean, Laurie Miller.

And Laurie, Jim had recommended and she’s delightful.

And she’s had a lot of good experience with teaching and just working with people in many different kinds of situations.

So she’s very excited to be here.

So we’ve got, and there’s, oh, and Mike, my favorite troublemaker, Mike Hartwig.

And so he agreed to be here and he’s worked with nominations before.

And so it’s gonna be, and so what I like is it’s great minds, great minds to work together.

And so we have until the 27th of October for you all to get information to me if you are running.

And I will say as, let’s please not have this on the list.

We do not want nominations if you’re planning to run named on the list.

This is to be written privately, an address will be given.

And so once you write, and you can be sure you’ll be acknowledged by me, we will collect this group of names for all the different positions.

We’ll hold interviews and then we will meet as a committee, not only for the interviews, but then we’ll meet and vote.

And it’s an odd number of people so that we won’t have a tie in any way.

And then we will bring our slate forward by, what did we say, November 15th? – 15th, yeah, that’s constitutionally when we have to do it. – November 15th, so that’s when they will be listed.

So then if you’re still saying, well, gosh darn, I still intend to run, you can still be making that known and you can be in the candidates forum.

I’m gonna be reaching out to Amanda Selm about the candidates forum, and I meant to do that today.

But anyway, we heard really good things about Amanda and NextGen’s candidates forum.

And so we’ll reach out and see if they want to help and or co-host, conduct our candidates forum, which will be on, what was it, December 7th?

Is that right, Jeff?

Or December 8th? – We’re talking about when the annual meeting is? – No, the candidates forum is before that. – That’s the Sunday before the annual meeting.

So I think it’s the 11th, right, is the annual meeting? – That’s right, so that’d be Wednesday, 1098, it’ll be 8th. – Okay, so the candidates forum would be on the 8th.

That’s what I was trying to figure out, if it was the 7th or the 8th, yeah.

And then the meeting, annual meeting will be on the 11th. – 11th. – And so then at that time, other nominations from the floor can be taken. – As usual. – And we will go forward from there.

And we don’t know yet how many days the annual meeting will be.

Or, and do we know how many positions it’s in this election? – Yeah, but we can’t, we can’t.

Well, John, how do you want to address, ’cause the new constitution does talk about expanding the board. – I think we should definitely indicate that we should hold elections for two slots and characterize one of them as provisional.

And the word provisional gets removed the minute we conduct the election, which we can’t do for that office until the meeting closes. – Correct, okay. – And the other one is- – We’ll work out the mechanics and all the legal- – It’s the assumption that we’re gonna have two directors. – Right, so we’re at, we’re expanding- – No, no, no, one per year, I wanna phase this in. – Okay, one per, okay, but David already, like David’s is the only one that’s- – I understand, so if he wants to run again, you know, his slot is open. – That’s one more. – A provisional slot is also open. – Okay, so it’s two, counting his. – Right. – Yeah. – Okay, and then all the officers. – All the officers, yes. – Yes, all the officers, yep. – I think that’s everything. – Great, okay, David. – Question for John, and it also relates to this.

When we elected the new boards last year, we had three different people running for the board membership.

One got two years, one got three years, one got one year, to my understanding.

We would not do something like that with the new positions you want, if you wanna phase them in, I mean, put them in, one would get a one-year term, one get a two-year, one get a three-year, for example. – That’s not the way the thing is drafted, and I wanna make this sort of uncomplicated.

First of all, we cannot shorten the term of any director now in office, that’s against the DC code. – I’m not even suggesting that. – Well, I think this is sort of a constitutional thing. – I think, David, let me, sorry to interrupt you, David. – Go ahead, Jeff, go. – Let me, we’re not opposed to any changes here, David, but what I would like you to do is consult with John and team on this and have a discussion, and then we’ll sort of hash it out.

But I don’t wanna spend a lot of time here doing that.

I think that’s gonna make people very confused. – Yep, I understand. – Is that okay? – That’s totally fine. – Okay, great, okay, I’m just making sure.

Any other questions for Debbie or John or anything of that nature related to nominating in that process?

All right, we are near the end, and I’m actually gonna probably postpone some of these items for November, depending upon how long this discussion takes, but would like to now turn to old business.

And is Marty here?

He is not, right? – He is not, no. – Okay, okay.

Then here’s what I’m going to propose.

Is anyone here from the fundraising committee that would like to represent them, or would you prefer that we wait and meet with, try to have more members of that committee represented before we have that discussion? – I don’t know.

Was I put on the fundraising committee or? – You were not listed. – I have Renee with her hand up, so I’m going to allow her to talk. – Okay, Renee? – Yeah, hi, Jeff.

I know that I said I wasn’t gonna be chair because I didn’t wanna take credit away from Marty and Karen and Marcy, but as far as I know that people are buying some products from the Candy website, the Terry Lynn website, and I did briefly mention about they wanna sell coffee, but they felt that at that time that they already had the Blind Girl Design and the Candy website, and they didn’t wanna go with anything else.

And the other, Marty expressed interest in he wanted to be the chair of the fundraising committee. – Yes, okay. – Yeah, but that’s what I know. – Okay, very good.

Here’s how I’m going to represent this.

In your board packet tonight are a couple of items with headings having to do with communication as well as a plan for fundraising, which really was sort of designated as sort of this larger plan of board liaisons.

The board has discussed it, and I mean, I’m happy for other board members to put forward their voice, but the consensus was that we already have a lot of board members on a lot of different committees, and I think this is more of just to ensure that we have representation from the board, and that could be voluntary, that we could ask a board member, someone who’s on the board to help serve on that, and make this more of an informal process to be able to allow that person to be able to message things to and from the committee to the board and vice versa, and making sure that their voices are heard.

I think that the main thing here that was communicated, and I think everyone who has read the packet will recognize that, is that the fundraising committee has felt like the leadership of this organization, aka the board, was not as supportive as they could have been in reference to the success of their efforts.

I would really rather not get into that tonight because they’re not here, and frankly, it probably warrants having a more private discussion with that committee so as to not air all of this out and all here, but the goal being that, I’ll just say it, that we as an organization need to do whatever we can to be as supportive as possible for all of our committees, all of our board members, officers, and members alike, and I accept full responsibility for the inaction that has been felt that this board has not achieved, and we have developed a communication, or I have developed, I shouldn’t say we, ’cause I really haven’t gotten input from others on it yet.

I have developed a communication plan that I would like to get a little bit more refined, but basically this is going to be something like this, where right now we have announcements that go out about educational opportunities, we have Merv who sends out information about our lists, and we have information about our board of directors meetings and we have town hall events, and we have all these different announcements that happen all the time, right?

Wouldn’t it be cool if we had a weekly announcement that had everything consolidated into it, right?

You have fundraising information in it, you have a calendar of events with headings, I promise, it will have headings, I promise, (laughs) and it’s all consolidated into one thing, right?

And you have all that information front and center.

I’m not gonna go through all the mechanics of what I listed there, but there’s a lot of ideas that I think that we could work together and figure out how we accomplish that.

There’s some process that would need to be put into play where committees and other people would have to submit information to be included, and I personally don’t even mind putting the content together.

Like that’s not that hard.

It’s a lot of cutting and pasting and just putting it together.

It’s not really, if you do it in Markdown, you can do it really, really fast.

So what I would like to propose, and if the board would allow me to at least make this recommendation and then I’ll open it up for the board’s discussion, is that we would ask the public relations committee and the fundraising committee and the education committee, or at least representatives from those, I don’t know that we need to pull absolutely every member of those committees together, but if they would like to, that’s fine.

I don’t, I personally don’t care.

That’s fine with me, more the merrier, to just hammer out the final details of what this looks like and come up with, oh, and the email management team, and come up with what we think the format of what this would look like.

This would not circumvent the newsletter, ’cause I think the newsletter is a totally different thing.

This is much more of a, you know, what’s top of mind for the week type of thing, and would also cut down on the number of messages that go out on the members list, and announce and events lists, which I think people would find just amazingly grateful, not to mention the fact that we would also get the word out about fundraising opportunities in a more transparent way.

And as part of that process, I would like the public relations and fundraising team to get together and figure out, and come back to the board for discussion in November, the final proposal on where we can put ads for fundraising types of things going forward.

I have some thoughts in the document.

I have some thoughts in the packet that are just mine, and I don’t want them to be considered the answer to everything, but I really tried hard to make sure that we put forward an effort that’s minimal, as much as possible, but also meets the needs of the organization so that members feel supported.

And I just wanna end by saying that I personally, again, sincerely apologize to the members of the fundraising committee, and to those who serve on that committee.

You know, we’ve done a lot of great things in bits this last year, and I will say that you also have done a lot of great things on the fundraising committee, which I hope you recognize, because honestly, the work that you’ve done on things like the logo and all the branding things is so, so, so important, that that’s not money wasted.

And I just want you to know that at least from your president’s concern, and I can let other board members speak for themselves, you are valued, you are respected.

We are sorry that things haven’t gone as well as they might have.

We can’t guarantee anything about fundraising, ’cause you can bring your horse to water, but you can’t make them drink, right?

But I promise you that we will be more cohesive and transparent and more communicative in our process.

So having said all that, and I’m sorry that was a bit long and crazy and long and winded and all those things, but I felt it was important to get out there.

And I’m hoping that we can get a copy of this portion of the meeting circulated to the members of the fundraising committee so that they can hear it.

Since they’re not here, I know that a few of the members had other engagements and some other things.

So I just wanted to see if we could maybe do that.

Maybe we can ask someone to edit that portion out and the discussion that we’re about to have.

So I’m gonna call on our board members first, and then Rosanna, I’ll take you next, if that’s okay.

So board members, do you have any comments or feel like you need to say anything in addition to what I’ve said? – Mr.

Brad? – Yes. – Which one?

David. – Oh, I didn’t hear David. – Go ahead. – I heard David.

I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you, David.

I’m sorry. – Let David go first. – Okay, David, go right ahead. – Go ahead, he’s vice president. – No, no, no, stop that.

You go, David.

Go, go, go, go.

It’s not about that. – I know, I was just joking around. – Okay, okay. – So I got a couple of things.

Your liaison idea, I like it, but I don’t think it should be 100% required necessarily, but make it available for all committees that there can be a board liaison unless they’re already represented by a board member on their committee.

And just, if you wanna work with it, great.

If you wanna communicate directly, that’s fine too.

That’s how I would work with it, just having an optional thing.

I do like the idea of promoting what we’re doing in bits in every way possible, whether we make our own ads for our own events for audio when we’re doing another event, fine, or there are text snippets in the announcements of other things.

Oh, by the way, check out our fundraiser, things like that.

But, yeah, and even putting some of these things on ACB media, if that’s an option. – Yeah, that’s a sticky, sticky, sticky. – Well, yeah. – Sticky, sticky. – Anyway, but just getting the word out is a good thing.

Putting our best foot forward is another thing.

I know I’ve heard of and heard of people miscommunicating some of our best positives and lifting others up as BITS members, and that’s not the best thing, but either way, I’d love to see, figure out how we can support each other in and out of BITS in the most positive light.

You’re never gonna fix everything, but if we can try that, that’s an awesome thing, because we’ve got a great team here.

I’ve said a lot.

I probably forgot something, but– – No, you’re fine.

I’ll just say I 100% agree that we have done a lot of hugely positive things, and with this size of an organization and with this many moving parts, we’re gonna mess up something.

And it’s on how you deal with it and how you learn and grow from it and provide people opportunity to shape the future.

No matter how stumbly it was, we can improve and we can put our best foot forward.

So, Brad. – Okay.

Well, I wasn’t gonna comment on the board liaison thing.

I think that’s largely been deemed unnecessary, but there may be certain times when it is.

But really what I wanted to comment on, I think this, we don’t wanna call it a newsletter, ’cause we already have one, announcements, whatever we wanna call this periodical, be it weekly, be it biweekly, as someone who deals with presentations, if it’s a vehicle to get a list of our upcoming presentations, with the stuff that’s in my presentations report, the stuff that’s an upcoming, a calendar like you talked about, I think that would be great.

It’s another way to promote what we’re doing that I think is members need to know about.

I don’t want to say that this would replace a email that is sent with meeting information, the night before, the day, evening before we have a presentation, such as I do now, or the events, the announce, ’cause that has Zoom link information.

I don’t think Zoom link information would go in this announcement, or whatever we wanna call this periodical.

But I think, well– – We’ll talk about it, we’ll talk about it. – I’m trying to define, decide, that’s a conversation I have, what’s enough and what’s too much.

But anyway, just letting people know that such and such presentation is coming up in the next week or two, lets them know it’s there.

So when they get an email, the night before is not the first time they’ve heard about it.

So I like that.

And then there’s all kinds of other stuff.

The fundraising, the more we talk about whatever our fundraising efforts are, I’ve read what the fundraising committee has said, and I can’t argue with anything they said, that we need to provide more support.

Fundraising is about public relations.

It’s about getting the word out.

So I understand what they’re doing, and the more we can support them, the better.

And obviously, I guess we haven’t done as much as we could, and this is certainly a step in that direction.

So basically, I’m for it, I like the idea. – Thank you, thank you, Brad.

Any other board member that wishes to make a comment? – I can’t, just David one more time, sorry.

If there’s any way we could get some copy of what our current promotions, fundraisers, whatever are, that we can announce when we’re doing, when a host is hosting a BITS event, or whatever, that would be very helpful. – Okay, we can do that.

John, did you have any comments on this? – No, I think I’ve covered it on the list.

I really do not want to see us layer on more bureaucracy. – No, no, I got that. – And I’m just saying that now in front of the board, although I think that was said on the board list.

So I don’t need to talk just to hear myself talk.

I’ve done that in my life before, but I’ve toned it way down.

And as I pass my 70th birthday, I’ve toned that way down. – Oh my goodness, well, I’m catching up to you, John.

Okay. – You’re 12 years behind, I’m not worried. (laughing) – Rosanna, you had a comment? – Actually, I think your idea is a good idea, Jeff.

And one thing that I want to say is that, we did as publications, I worked with fundraising and we got out the information that we were given.

We got out on Mastodon and we got out on Facebook and we got it out, as you know, to ACB list as well.

I think, there was a lot of lessons to be learned from what took place here.

But as the chair of publications, if we are given the information that needs to be disseminated, I will make sure that it gets out on the proper platform.

And I think that’s where we need to have some organization.

And that’s what I was trying to allude to in my presentation earlier is that, I would like to see a little more succinctness, if you wanna call it, so that I can gather and I don’t have to pull from everywhere to get the information.

But if it’s given to us, we at publications will work with everybody to get that information out on the proper platforms. – Right, okay.

Any other comments before we, I have a hard stop at seven.

I think John McCann does as well because of a chapter meeting. – That’s not too far away from you. – So we have to hurry here. – Can I? – Yes, go ahead. – Can I make a comment? – Yes, go ahead. – I know that something that’s always, we just seem to be doing all this stuff and it’s great stuff, but I’m concerned, at least for myself about being spread too thin.

And I don’t know if anyone else feels the same way about that that I do. – Well, we’re hoping to solve that.

So I appreciate your thought on that though, for sure.

‘Cause that’s happening all over the organization.

Trust me.

There’s things that we need to be doing about a lot of different things.

Any other thoughts?

All right, what I’d like to do now is take a few hands, keeping in mind that I would like to end this meeting in about 10 minutes.

So let’s see how many we can do.

Yeah, because I have to run over to, and I’m the secretary and I have to get the recording started and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Anyway, so. – Speaking of spreading yourself thin, right? – I am already thin. – Yeah, I know.

Well, that’s not what I meant.

But anyway. – Okay. – We don’t have any hands at the moment, actually. – Nicolette had a. – Okay, I can find her. – I know Nicole. – Nicole, yeah. – Nicole. – There we go. – I’ll give her permission if she wants to. – Hi, I actually looked up my renewal records and I realized what I did last year.

So I know what to do now, thank you.

‘Cause I’m a lifetime member, but I paid the regular membership anyway.

So that’s what I wanted to find out.

Thank you. – We love you. – I love you guys too. – You’re good.

Okay, who’s next? – Now we have hands.

Merv and then Sunny. – Merv. – Yes, I just wanted to say that, you know, we post, the email management team, we post those fundraising links once a week.

And we also post them once a month.

So, and we also are willing to put them in the footers so we can discuss that privately. – Yeah.

Okay, that’s great.

I included that in the packet as well.

Yeah. – Okay, cool. – Great, we’ll get the team together and figure this one out. – Okay. – Sunny. – All right, Sunny and then Donna. – Hello. – Hello, Sunny. – Real quick.

When I get my computer shows up to power again, it’s my hope to be more of a volunteer with the organization, not just a member. – Aw, we love you for that.

Thank you. – No problem. – Yep, okay. – And Donna. – Donna.

Hey, Donna. – Hey, quick question. – Yes. – Wanted to make sure, so to renew our membership, we need to do it before the end of the month of October so that we can vote at the business meeting.

I just want to make sure I heard that. – No, you’re good through 2024. – Oh, okay, yeah. – So we’re going to start renewals for all existing members on November 1st. – Oh, okay, gotcha.

Wanted to make sure. – Not a problem, don’t worry. – Thank you. – We’ll get you to be a life member, then you won’t have to worry about that anymore. – Oh, there you go. – See, yeah. – I could do that. – Okay.

See, I twisted your arm a little there.

No, I wouldn’t do that. – You guys are weird. – Oh, yeah, I know.

Okay. (laughing) – Thanks. – Thank you.

Anyone else? – And our hands are clear for the moment. – All right, we’ll do the eight second count.

Our next board meeting will be on November 6th.

We probably will be meeting in some way, shape, or form with many of you, if not a good part of our leadership team over the next month.

We’ll be working on the annual meeting, which I didn’t talk about here tonight, and some other things.

Would like to make sure that we don’t lose track of scholarship opportunities within BITS, and that’s not necessarily something we need to solve by the end of the year, but at least I want to make sure that people understand that that’s something I’d like to see us look at.

And I think, and then a volunteer of the month would be a very, really interesting thing to sort of recognize the people who are doing great things in this organization.

So, any other hands? – They are clear. – All right.

Anyone else have anything for the good of the order?

Very good.

I will call for someone to adjourn the meeting. – So moved. – Okay, Brad? – Second. – Second from Diane?

Is that what I heard?

Okay, great.

All right, I don’t think we need to vote on it.

Then we’ll see everybody on November 6th.

Thank you, Boren, for- – You’d be in a mess. – Yes.

Thank you everyone for being here, and I appreciate each and every one of you for all of your hard work.

Thank you so much. – Thanks for joining us.

Thank you, Chanel, for hosting. – Thank you, Chanel, we love you.