BITS Board Meeting for June 5, 2024

AI Generated Transcript

Good evening and good afternoon to everyone, and welcome to the Blind Information Technology Specialists’ June board meeting. I want to thank you for attending tonight’s meeting, and we will have an opportunity for the public to make comments near the end of the board meeting after the board conducts its business. And we’ll take it from there. So good evening, everyone. Let’s go ahead and get started here. I’m having a bit of a slow computer problem here, but I won’t get there. All right. Let’s start with a roll call from our secretary, Robin. Robin? President Jeff Bishop? Here. Vice President Brad Snyder? He’s here. I know he is. Secretary. There you go. There he is. Yeah, he’s just hiding from me, giving me a worry there. Secretary Robin Frost, I’m here. Treasurer Diane Scalzi has an excused absence. Michael Babcock is here. I am here. John McCann. I’m here. He’s here. And David Edick. I’m here. We would also like to welcome all of our members and friends who have chosen to join us this evening and let the members who have joined us via Zoom 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. Thank you very much. The agenda of the board meeting, along with the committee reports, have been circulated to the membership as well as to the board of directors. Can I get someone to move the adoption of the agenda as noted? I’ll second. All right. Any discussion? All right. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Thank you. And as usual, the wonderful Robin has graciously and kindly generated tremendously amazing May minutes. And they’re quite complete. We never really have to make corrections on these things, which is just, you know, is astounding and is a tribute to your astute professionalism so thank you for that yeah um can i get someone to a to move to adopt the minutes he’s proposed i’ll second i’ll second oh go ahead david okay all right any discussion all right all those in favor hi hi any opposed excellent uh the consent agenda is which is basically all of the committee reports has been circulated. And unless the board has any objections, I’d like to just move by by consensus that that be adopted. And we’ll move on to reports. Any concerns? Nope. Nope. All right. Diane is not here tonight. She’s out partying and having a good time. So we wish her well at that and going to her, I think it’s a school reunion, is it not? Yes. Yes. So, but we have some, we have some reports out from her. So Brad, can you play the treasurer’s report? Yes, here we go. Bits treasurer’s report, May 1st, 31, 2024. Checking. Beginning balance, $5,519.74. Credits. Transfer from PayPal, $343.21. Quarterly MMS donation from ACB, $75. Total credits, $418.21. Debits. Zoom monthly subscription slash increased meeting size to 500 participants, negative $53. Blind Girl Designs, deposit for upcoming fundraiser, minus $500. Purchased items for ACB Convention Drawing minus $428.61 Total debits minus $981.61 Ending balance $4,956.34 PayPal beginning balance $43.22. Credits. Four regular member dues payments $80. One BITS life member $200. One ACB life member dues payment $15. One international member dues payment $20. Total credits $315. Debits. Refund of dues overpayment minus $5. PayPal fees minus $10.01. Asterisk 2. Transfer to checking minus $343.21. Total debits minus $358.22. Ending balance $0. Savings account. Beginning balance $37,128.87. Credits. Interest $0.31. Total credits $0.31. Debits, no debits. Total debits, $0.00. Ending balance, $37,129.18. Total for all accounts, $42,085.52. Astros 1. Items included in a gear, low-profile mic arm, bought by mistake, $133.99, two Samsung technology recording and podcasting packs, $139.98, Zoom H4 Essential 4-track handy recorder, $191.99, SanDisk memory card, $19.99, and estimated tax, $32.66, Total $428.61. Asterisk 2. For information on PayPal fees, visit https://www.paypal.com slash us slash web apps slash mpp slash paypal hyphen fees. Submitted for audit. Prepared by Diane Scalzi. Bits Treasurer. June 3, 2024. Excellent. I will say that underneath the committee reports, under the budget report, there is a proposed budget of which we’re going to probably table for this evening unless the board has specific questions about it. But I don’t know that we have the right people here to answer those questions. Anyway, since Diane is not here, and there are three options on that budget that need to be decided upon as well before we can actually adopt the new budget. But it is there for both the members as well as the board of directors to review. And I would suggest that we table that discussion until the August meeting, since the July meeting. I don’t think we should have a July meeting since it’s literally 24 hours or so before many of us fly away to convention and other places beyond. So unless there’s a really significant need to do that on that Wednesday before we all fly away, that would be what I would recommend. All right. Is there any concerns from the board at this point on that? I think that’s the way to proceed. for all the reasons you stated. I agree. I do have a couple of thoughts. There was two items purchased that were different than I remember them, the podcasting starter kits and the other, I think that’s what it was called. The other thing is I would really like to see a 2024 budget before we have a 2025 budget. Yeah, okay. So we will discuss this on the board list when Diane gets back next week, and then we will have time to banter this back and forth and figure out where we want to go from here. I think the intent of the Budget Committee was to work on next year’s budget because we’re already halfway through this year, and they’re trying to figure out even how to assess how do we even determine a budget, let alone figuring out what this year looks like. So I think, I mean, I’m not trying to make an excuse. I’m just explaining what I think the thought process was based on the committee. But let’s wait and talk to Diane about that. We’ll proceed from there if that’s okay with you, David. Michael, can you answer the question about the podcasting packs? I think these are the QTUs, right? Yeah. David, can you elaborate on what your question is about them? Or were you just wondering what they are? um yeah just to sound like there was more than you know than we would we’re talking about but so so the amount is more because she combined both of them together so um because it was two microphones that were purchased that’s why the amount’s probably higher than what you anticipated uh because i think each of them were uh 69 a piece the podcasting uh bundle includes the microphone and the mic stand and the USB cable. And I think it might include an XLR cable. I’m honestly not certain about that, but I think that’s why they call it a podcasting mic bundle. No worries. Got it. Okay, great. Thank you, Michael. Any other questions before we proceed? Okay. I don’t have too much to report this month as far as a president’s report, but I’ll give you the things that are top of mind at the moment. The first item of business, of course, is our upcoming convention for the national organization. So many of us are preparing for, I know Brad and his committee, both on the convention and the presentations committee, have been diligently working very, very hard, both on presentations and convention material for the pre-convention workshops that will be held on the 27th, 28th, and 29th. And you’ll hear more about that probably later tonight. Brad, including yours truly working on the AI three-day panel, which we pretty much have almost the outline complete on that, and we’re going to be meeting with the team and getting all of that solidified. So that’s going very, very well. Plus, Brian Hargen is eagerly anticipating the event and has been talking about it on Mastodon. So that excites me. It’s kind of cool that he’s doing that. We’ve been talking to affiliates throughout the month. In fact, I was on a radio show, and this was a little bit of a surprise to me because I wasn’t expecting this until last night when Katie spoke with me about this and said, hey, did you get my email with a calendar invite for tomorrow morning? I went, no, nobody sent one to me. Well, anyway, so I spent an hour speaking on the Ohio Radio Reading Service, all about bits. And we spent an hour talking about all the great accomplishments that we have had made so far this year and the great people that we represent. And we’re hoping that we will see some growth from that. In fact, I’m pretty certain we’re going to get at least two or three members out of the deal. So I’m pretty excited about that. That was a very fun and entertaining event. I also had an opportunity to speak with Georgia in that chapter, and I spoke to a number of other people about Bits and just answering questions, taking phone calls. The Be My Eyes, I will say this, the Be My Eyes directory is proving to be a quite fruitful thing. This is an area in the Be My Eyes app where you can get a listing of organizations, and Bits is listed in that. And we’re actually getting phone calls about Bits. And some of these phone calls are quite long and lengthy and great, and that’s fine, asking lots of great and wonderful questions. So it’s very, very exciting to be sharing the great goodness that each and every one of you are doing at the committee level, the board level, and at the membership level. So you should be proud of the work that you’ve been doing. Tonight, we will be talking about voting opportunities coming up at the national organizations. So there are multiple ways in which we will vote. You will vote as individuals. And I would encourage each and every one of you to do that. And we will also have an affiliate vote. The affiliate vote is based on the votes of the membership. So what we will do is for those that we hear from, we will calculate the number of votes based on the people that we heard from, and we will calculate percentages of how we should allocate the 25 votes that the BITS organization will be able to cast. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, 25 votes that we will cast for each and every vote, each and every affiliate vote that we will cast. So we will be talking a little bit about this a little bit later. We have an email alias already set up for this that you’ll be able to email. We’ll disseminate that to you later this month. But board members and committee chairs, I’m looking for some volunteers. I think we should have more than one, if at all possible. to help consolidate the voting of members and the collection of that data so that we can, it’s going to be kind of hard to do that when I’m on the floor at the convention, but I can definitely take text messages and those things. But we’ll talk about that. It’s on the agenda later on. So be thinking about this. I’m specifically looking at you, Marie, and I’m looking at maybe Robin and maybe John. But those are just my thoughts, and all of you can say no. And then if everyone says no, then we’ll call out to the audience and see who might be willing to help volunteer and help do that. Okay. Renee’s here. Excellent. We are continuing to work really hard on the education front. The Education Committee is working this month. In fact, a meeting is coming up quite, quite soon. I don’t remember the exact date. In fact, if Ms. Armstrong is here, she can remind me or if someone’s going to look on the calendar, that would be great and tell me. But our Python course is ending in about two weeks. We’ve got two more classes to go, one more on object oriented programming and one on diving in deeper into the use and answering questions of the use of Visual Studio Code. We are in deep discussions with GitHub, both at a product level, as well as a policy perspective and meeting with GitHub as an organization to see what they can do to facilitate helping us as an organization. I had one meeting today with them and I’ll have another one tomorrow. So I’m hoping that that will prove to be really interesting. We’re going to be making some specific asks of GitHub to see if that might be possible, to be able to further how we actually handle the training opportunities going forward for some of our development classes, as well as even some of our office training and some of our other training efforts that we’re looking at doing later on this year and next year. So stay tuned for that. I think there’s some very, very exciting things going on there. It’s almost time to start the dues process again, meaning that we really will start in October, November-ish. But we can start collecting them in July for the next year. So I would like, and we’ll talk about this a little bit later, to talk a little bit about this from a board perspective and see how the board would like to pursue things going forward. So we’ll talk about that in just a few minutes. And then I’m leaving this on here as I usually do, which is the asks for prioritization by committees. And some of this is changed slightly, but not too much. And much of this actually will change, especially after this meeting and especially after this month, because a lot of things have already changed. And so this area of this bullet item and some items underneath it will have already been executed and things are moving forward. So you’ll especially hear about things like that about the website and some of the work that the publications committee has done and so forth and so on. So stay tuned for that. Okay. Does anyone have any questions? Jeff, I believe the training meeting is our education meeting is next Tuesday, the 11th. Yeah, it’s coming up. It’s like either later this week or next week, and I just don’t. Yeah, so the 11th? Okay, perfect. So we’re going to be meeting and talking about that. Some of us are already pondering what that might look like, and I think that we might even undertake a couple of different paths, but we will talk with our committee chair, that being Debbie Armstrong, and committee, to see how we want to proceed. I think that there’s some work that this that at least on for some of us that have been driving the education front on the development side. There’s some work that we need to do before we’ll be ready for students again, because we want to adjust the way that we taught and potentially improve the way that we did that and restructure things a bit to make things even stronger. We did actually put a call out for interest, and we’ve already gotten about 25 people who are interested yet again to take on the learning of Python. So we’ll see. And that actually might be a little easier for us to deal with, too. I will say that it has been amazing to deal with first the starting of about 130 people, and by now we’re down to about 80, 85, including admins, which is still a tremendous number of people, and we have about 75 to 80 of those students committing code still in completing their projects. So very, very proud of them. All of you should be very, very proud of the work that these students accomplished. And it has been recognized. The work that we did in this space has been recognized by people like Microsoft and others in the industry as being highly innovative and rather intriguing. And they want to talk to us and learn how we did it because they are shocked that we even accomplished such a feat. And actually, I’m very, very proud of the work that this group did. The number of hours contributed, and I think, John, you can attest to this. Very much so. Yeah, the number of hours that were put into this process over February, March, April, May, and now June is literally probably in the thousands of hours of volunteer time that this took to accomplish. We took on a very, very bold and ambitious event to try to accomplish. And if we can do this, we can pretty much teach anything, I think. It was unbelievably complex, and I’m delighted of its outcome. So anyway, enough babbling on that. Okay. Any other questions before we move on to committee reports? because we’ve got a bunch. All right. So let’s get started. We will start with communication. And Merv, do you want to talk about email? Okay. We’ll come back to Merv. Renee, you’re raising your hand. Do you have a comment? Renee is the chair of the fundraising committee. Oh, no, I just wanted to let you know that, yes, I am here. And as a fundraising committee, when that report comes, I would like to acknowledge Marty Sobo. He’s here to give that particular report. And I appreciate all of my committee, but I wanted to let you know that I am here. Yeah, I heard you come in. So, yes, we’ll make sure that happens. And that’s OK. And Marty’s on the agenda. So no worries. It’s all good. Okay. Oh, that’s right. Merv, you need to unmute. That’s the issue. Sorry, I was trying to unmute and I couldn’t. That’s okay. That’s okay. That’s quite all right. So again, we’re going to be having Rosanna and David Edick next just to sort of keep our people who are helping hands here. Merv, it’s all you, sir. Go right ahead. Okay. I’m not going to repeat my very detailed report. I’m just going to say that we did we did restructure the list and so far they have been very successful jason did most of the works we’re very grateful to jason and we are already looking forward to beyond the convention and we have a lot more plans for this year so stay tuned all right well that i love a report like that, Merv. That’s the way to represent my man. Short and sweet and to the point. I love Does anyone have any questions of Merv? If you want the detail, you can read his voluminous report, which was outstanding. Very great work on this. And it has been recognized by many how much better our lists are. So thank you. And we appreciate you and your patience and letting us work through this and learning throughout this process and how to make things best for all of our members. So thank you for that. Murph, thank you for leading such a tremendous crew of people. All right. So Rosanna is next. She needs to be able to unmute. Hold on. There she goes. And real quick, just while she’s getting unmuted, David will be up next and then Brad will be up next. Hold on one second, Rosanna. And then Brad will be up next to talk about presentations and convention, just so that people know where we’re heading. Okay, go ahead, Rosanna. Yes. Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the June meeting as well. Publications has been busy doing a whole lot of stuff. I think I’m going to start with Mastodon. I’m really proud to say that we are now up to 117 followers on Mastodon, which I think is really awesome. Marianne is still updating on Facebook. So all of the events from Brad’s committee are posted up on Facebook as well so that, you know, the message is out there, which is really great. I also want to let everybody know for the first time we have gotten the spring bulletin out. This is our very, very first inauguration newsletter. It did go out last week, finally, with, you know, a couple of we had to go through it and make sure everything was right and that we had everything that we wanted in there. So I hope that the membership had a chance to read it and look at it. You can always respond if you wish. We’d like some feedback from it. We obviously are going to be looking for articles for the summer edition. So if you have thoughts and ideas that you’d like to share or write about as far as technology, then please send them. And the website is listed on the top of that page where you will find, you know, where the Bits Bulletin is posted. So you can get it off of there. The handbook. I want to just say the handbook portion of publications has met. And they are still, we are actually all still working on the chairs part of that handbook right now. We’ve circled back a little bit to the board as well. So sometimes some topics take us from one place to another. So a lot of times we don’t always end up where we started, so to speak, if you want to put it that way. However, most of what we’re doing right now is an interim copy. It is a draft at this point, simply because there may be changes down the road to the bylaws, and that’s going to affect what goes into the handbook and how it’s written. But the interim copy, when we finish it, will be submitted to the board. There will be a membership portion of that handbook, which will be created from the ground up. We have not started working on that yet. The handbook side of this will be meeting again this Saturday, and we will continue on our path. As far as social media goes, as I said, Master Don is doing very well. Facebook is doing well. we still need to get Facebook into and under Bits name. I have not had a chance to reach out to and he wasn’t at the last meeting. So hopefully I’ll be able to catch up with him and go through that with with herbie and get that done uh the last thing i wanted to say is that we have been the um finance on a finance um the fundraising fundraising yeah thank you jeff it’s been a long day uh that’s okay we work with the fundraising committee we’ve been working as you know on a logo The logo has been done. It’s been created. And I’m going to leave that to Marty, who will share with you what has been done with that. But it’s totally marvelous. And I’m really excited that this has gotten done. It will be able, as soon as we can get everything in place, it will be able to go up on the new website going forward. And we will be able to use it for documentation that needs to be sent out from Bits as well. So that is like super, super exciting. I’m just going to circle back for a minute because I did forget one thing. And that is to also let you know that when the new website does come into play, the BITS bulletin will be posted on that website under the publications tab. It’s already been sent to Michael. He has it in his possession. So when he’s ready, that will go up on the new website as well. So the next general meeting for publications will be also now this month. I think it’s on the 13th, somewhere around there. And the handbook will meet on the 8th. We have to separate them because it’s just too much to do in one meeting. Oh, yeah. Yeah, no, it’s way too much. And, you know, and that’s my report. And there is a copy of my report that I sent in to Jeff, So you should be able to find it in the packet. It is in the packet. Yes, absolutely. Awesome. Thank you so much, everybody. Thank you. You’re all you want. Yeah. While we’re talking about fundraising and the logo and the work that that committee is doing, and I know this is a little bit out of order from what I had just mentioned, but I thought just from a timing perspective, we might as well go ahead and just do this now. Let’s see. Marty, can you raise your hand, please? Okay, well, before we get started, I will just say this, Marty, and you already know this, but just for everyone else’s benefit, Marty texted me the new logo, and I have shown it to my wife, who can see, and she was ecstatic about the logo. I think it’s going to be marvelous. So, Marty, why don’t you go ahead and give your fundraising report? Hey, Jeff, I had a couple of comments. Okay, how about now? you get a chance that’s weird okay can you hear me now okay uh hold on one second marty uh and i’m Okay. I said, have you considered a theme for the publications, like the summer edition and the fall edition? No, that’s actually something we could address. That’s a great idea. No, we have not. And are you guys able to produce the publication in more than one format for those that need it? Right now, we have just decided to do it in HTML. That is what Deborah said she preferred. I can address that with, you know, with her going forward. Sounds great. Thanks. And while I think about it, David, you just reminded me of something as well. The other thing that we talked about in the publications meeting was the angel wall. And I just want to say that it is just something that right now is still under discussion. Okay. Yeah. Even the national organization is making some pretty radical changes to the angel experience as well. Exactly. Really? Yeah. Okay. All right. Not much, actually. I’ll fill you in later. Okay. Okay. Sorry for the slip up there. Okay. Anything else, David? Nope. That was it. Okay, great. Thank you, sir. Marty, go right ahead, sir. Okay. Thank you. Hello, everyone. Continuing on with the logo. So the logo has been completed and we do have a digital form of the logo now that we can do whatever we want with. Michael Babcock already has that to be able to implement that into the website. so we’re moving forward with that um so the logo is awesome everyone’s excited about it who’s seen so um yeah that’s something we’ve been working really hard on so we’re definitely really proud of it uh going on from there merch so we’re doing a merch campaign for bits with the new logo from Blind Girl Designs who makes tactile t-shirts, sweatshirts, all that stuff. So we’re going to have our logo on there and we’re going to be doing zip-up hoodie sweatshirts. We’re going to be doing traditional, oh, and the logo will be on the back of that. And then we’re going to be doing regular pullover sweatshirts with the big pocket in the front. The logo will be on the front of that. Then we’re going to do t-shirts. We’re going to do tote bags and aprons oh and there’s also going to be a regular plain uh sweatshirt no hood no zippers anything just a plain sweatshirt with the artwork on the front so all of that stuff is all We can go crazy promoting it and hopefully lots of people will buy Bits merch. The other couple things to go along with that is they will be at convention at her booth, Blind Girl Designs. And so if you see people wearing it and you want to go check it out or you want to order one, you can do that at her booth. And she’ll take your order and then she’ll mail it to your house. The last part of this is she also is submitting an item to the national ACB auction right before the national convention. So we’re going to have something there as well. So does anyone have any questions on any of the merch stuff or anything so far? This is Michael. Go for it. For the members who might not know, and if you don’t have the information, Marty, I understand, and maybe Jeff can, can someone describe what we did finally decide for a logo for Bits? Sure. So the logo on the outside is round. On the outside, it’s like a full circle. And across the top of that circle, it has Bits spelled out in full, you know, from left to right, going across and around the top half of the circle. and then uh there’s two hands that are white but they’re very contrasty on the black background same with all the text and the hands are come together at the wrists so your fingers are real uh bold font and then right under that it uh says bits in braille and all of that’s going to tactile and you could feel it you know on whatever garment you end up getting so that’s pretty much really really uh stellar awesome so did mallory she loves it any other questions on graphic or merch okay all right anything else marty yeah one last thing is we’re also getting ready to do a candy fundraiser um that is almost done from what i understand there was an issue with the tax portion of what Diane was filling out. I was going to say, if John’s helping us I reached out to her this morning and she saw that before she saw my thing. I’ve been busy. I haven’t had a chance to look at it yet. I’m in the same position. But let’s you and I coordinate is the point. Yeah, I’ll give you a call, whatever. I figured I’d get my – I’d figure out how to print it out and get my wife to help me fill it out. Then she’ll scan it. Yeah, that may be all that’s required. I think that’s all that needs to be done. Yeah, the form looks intimidating, but basically the certification is two things. We don’t owe back taxes. which we don’t, okay, and our name, you know, the text, if you need the text, E-I-N, I can get that we’ll coordinate. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Perfect. Great. All right. Thank you, John and Brad. I much appreciate your help and so does the committee. And in closing, I just want to say our committee, everyone’s been working really hard. Everyone’s been super awesome chipping in. It’s been a ton of work, but we’re all really excited about what’s to come. So I want to just say a big thank you to everyone on the committee and for taking the time to, you know, do all this extra work and time to make all this stuff happen. So, and that’s all I got. Great. Thank you very much. And again, we will talk about budget, uh, later and just to get this whole area all buttoned up. Uh, Taylor has reported that, uh, she’ll be meeting with, uh, the, the CPA firm who is going to be giving us some advice on this on June 15th. I wish you reached out to Brad on that. So I think we’re all set there. Okay, Brad, you’re up. Okay, let’s see. We’ve got convention and presentation. Let’s talk about the one that comes, the big one, convention. We got six, as been previously reported, we got six presentations during the virtual portion of the convention. Jeff is spearheading our series of three panel discussions. Well, two of them are panel discussions. One of them is Brian Hartshut on AI. Those are all going to be at 11 a.m. each morning, June 27, 28, and 29 in the afternoon. We have three standalone sessions. iBug’s doing a session on productivity apps. We got Michael Babcock doing a website implementation and computers for the blind with moderated by our very own Marty Sobo. We’ll be bringing up the on Saturday. Those three. Information on presenters, panelists has been submitted to Janet Dickelman for the program and webinar contact webinar invitation. contact information has been submitted to Cecily Nipper. All that’s left to do is show up and do the presentation. So hopefully that will go well. I know everybody’s working on polishing up their presentations. We have a reception event planned, and believe it or not, that’s coming together very nicely. I even know the room it will be in the St. John’s room at the Hyatt Hotel. Janet says that’s a big room. Now, I talked to her, oh, God, 10 days ago. She gave me a number. Twenty-nine people had signed up. You sign up for the – Janet encouraged us to have people register on the convention registration form. She says we need a head count. That helps you know what’s going to happen, food, stuff like that. So people are registering. And the number was 29 about 10 days ago. I thought, my God, that’s small. She said, don’t worry about it. Everybody registers last minute, so you’ll get lots. She anticipated we’ll end up with quite a few more than that. So this was all discussed and approved by the board last month. You register. It’s a $15 fee. We’re going to have a cash bar and some snacks, just bar snacks, salty nuts, sesame sticks, stuff like that. And when you register, it’s $15. You get a drink coupon. You get a raffle ticket. We have a raffle. We are giving away another one of those Zoom H4E podcasting bundles, just like we’re doing for the summer auction. Same thing. it has been shipped to me and it is my job to schlep it to Jacksonville we have the p4 we have microphones we have the xlr cable two of them we got the um um sd card and I got to come up with they’re good to go like Christmas morning so you must be present to win as I said you get a raffle ticket when you register we will have more raffle tickets for sale at the event we have there’ll be one for five three for ten what else do we got I think that is oh I ordered little raffle tickets It’s from Amazon. You can find everything on Amazon. And I got tickets. My wife helped me pick those out. The drink coupons are larger. So when you hold them in your hand, you can tell which is which. The raffle tickets, we’re going to have to figure out what to do about that. Standard raffle tickets, you buy one. You tear. It’s got perforated. One half goes in the proverbial fishbowl. The other half, the person gets, and there’s a number on it. We’ll figure out how to deal with reading these numbers. We’ll use our technology. How about that? So I did put a call out in the Convention Planning Committee report. We need people to help. So if you will be in Jacksonville and would like to volunteer your time to help us in one capacity or another, When people come in, there’s a registration. They’ll have a list of who’s registered. We’ll give them their drink coupon and a raffle ticket, and then we’ll need somebody to help sell more raffle tickets. And I don’t know, probably four or five half-dozen people is all we’re going to need. It’s got my email address in there, but I got a simpler one. If you are interested, send an email to me at brad.snyder at swbell.net. It goes to the same place as the other email address. So I’ll get it no matter which one you use. So if you’re available and want to help us out, we’d appreciate it. So just let me know. And that is Wednesday, July 10th. It is 4 to 6 p.m. Happy hour time. So hopefully this will work and it will be a lot of fun. Convention Planning Committee has been meeting about every two or three weeks as we’ve been moving this thing along. Our next meeting will be this coming Saturday. It might even be our last meeting. We’ll just have to see how that goes, what else comes up that I haven’t thought of. So that’s our convention planning report. Let’s move to presentations. I’ll change hats here. We have some presentations planned coming up in June. We had just our standard in May. We only did our reoccurring ones. We did MacBytes. What was that? The May 11th, I think. I can’t remember. Herbie did AppleBytes on the 22nd. And we did Basics with Bits, which usually is twice a month. We did it on maybe that was the 11th. And MacBytes was the 14th. Anyhow, we only did it once in May because the second occurrence, the fourth Saturday, was the Memorial Day weekend, and we decided to just not take that weekend off. Let our presenters and our attendees enjoy the Memorial Day weekend. We will be back at Basics with Bits. We’ll do this coming Saturday, June 8th. We will have MacBytes is going to be then on Tuesday. That’s the 11th. There’s where the 11th for MacBytes comes from. See, I’m not using notes. The next night, Wednesday, June 12th, our very own Jeff Bishop is going to do a WWDC wrap-up. The big Apple Worldwide Developers Conference keynote is on Monday. They will announce all kinds of cool stuff. hopefully and Jeff’s going to do a wrap up on Wednesday evening we’re going to put that out on ACB community we think that’s a good one to um also you know promotes bits and that’s something and virtual convention and all of the convention activities that will be hybrid. There has been some interest in a presentation that will help people gain their confidence in using Zoom. A lot of people are still rough around the edges when it comes to Zoom, so we thought we’d do a refresher course using Zoom on the computer, the smartphone, even dial in, just to make sure people are comfortable with the upcoming convention. will be Wednesday, July, July, June 19th. And that will again will be on on the community. We will we have scheduled a not the second basics was bits would be Saturday, June 22. I don’t believe there’s anything on the pre convention or community that’s going to conflict with that so i think we’ll be good um and then there will not be an apple bites this month because that would the fourth wednesday when herbie usually does that is during the committee community blackout because of virtual convention events so herbie usually will take off in july like I won’t do MacBytes in July that’s right after convention week but because of the virtual convention Herbie’s going to go ahead and take off June and he’ll be back on I believe it is July 24th he’ll be back in the saddle with Applebytes and I’m sorry that wasn’t as short as Merv’s presentation something to strive for but that’s the conclusion of my presentations report so The auction is June 22nd, I think. So that’s another reason why we’re not doing anything like that. Okay, so we won’t do that. I knew there was something. Okay, so we won’t be doing it. Thank you, Sheila. Thank you, Sheila. So we won’t be doing it. Well, Basics with Bits is in the afternoon. When is the auction? Is it daytime? It starts at like 6 Eastern, right? Well, then we’ll get Basics with Bits in because that’s at 6 Eastern. We’ll talk about it. Okay, we’ll talk about it. In fact, why don’t we talk about it now? Ms. Armstrong is here tonight, so we can just ask her. Debbie, what do you want to do? And see what she wants to do. So talk about flying by the seat of your pants, right? Yep, exactly. Something like that, yeah. I didn’t know your seat of your pants could fly, but whatever. Yeah, that’s what I hear. Let’s see. Debbie Armstrong, can you raise your hand, please? I just asked her to unmute. Yeah, let me unmute. Great. You should be able to hear me? Yeah, we hear you great. Okay, so I’m absolutely happy to have Basics with Bits happen on the fourth Saturday. I will try to get someone from my committee to do it, and if nobody volunteers, I will do it. I’m doing it on the second Saturday. Okay, talk to me. Maybe we can figure something out. If someone doesn’t step up, I can help with that too. And then here’s the other one to think about because I already looked ahead. July 13th is the second Saturday in July. Oh, man, that’s going to be tough. Returning from convention, it would be my suggestion to take that one off. I know that I will not be in any position whatsoever to do anything. I will be traveling back from Jacksonville and will be in recovery mode. And I will be sleeping in a coma probably by the time I get back and come back. So I would suggest you to skip the 13th, but then on the 27th of July. So it’s up to you, Debbie. Well, we’ll ponder it. I’m in favor. Yeah, I think we’ll get. That’s what I would propose. We get low turnout if it’s right after convention. I’d skip that one. I think that’s right. And I think people, you know, if we can’t, if there’s nothing conflicting, we can do June 22 and skip. june 3rd july 13th yeah well we’ll we’ll we’ll we’ll see we’ll talk making out um about that debbie we since since you weren’t here earlier we did talk a little bit about the education committee in reference to a meeting on next tuesday and just formulating the plans for the future and that we’re looking at a couple of different paths and things so did you have anything else to add on the education front well we’re waiting excuse me yeah go ahead robin um Brad, I just wanted to say on behalf of my dear mother, may she rest in peace. She would have loved your use of Yiddish. So thank you. You’re welcome. It tickled me. Thank you. All right. I’m unmuted again, I think. You are. Okay. Sorry. Yeah. I just wanted to add that we do have two pretty comprehensive lists of things that people And we are going to go through those next Tuesday. but the important thing to remember is that we will need someone who can teach one of those things. So even though we have a great list, we may not have a list of people who are qualified to teach those things. So I will be asking my committee to start searching for people who can teach some of those, but we will be going through. One of the lists was created by my committee, and the other list was created when BITS members signed up and listed what they were interested in. And so I do have two separate lists, and I will be reviewing them with my committee next week. Excellent. Okay, great. Any questions for Debbie? Excellent. Okay, let’s move on to one of our favorite things anyway, and that’s our IT Infrastructure Committee, Michael Babcock. Thanks, Jeff and board. Super exciting times. I have learned a very important thing about myself, and that is that I work a lot better with deadlines. So we have a deadline coming up. Very important. Very soon, actually. Yeah, like I think the 15th, if I recall. Yes, exactly. So we are in the process of launching the new website that’s been coming for six months. And I want to sincerely on behalf of myself, because I take full responsibility of it, apologize to the membership that it’s taken this long. A lot of this has been my own mental self getting in my way. So we are excited. This is going to transition over this weekend. We have full backups, and I’ve actually downloaded those backups and opened them and made sure I can access them. They’re not proprietary formats from GoDaddy that allows us to have access to all of our files. So, yes, not everything that is currently on the website will be active on the website. Probably when we launch, there will be some missing things. And that’s where we’re going to come up to the membership and other individuals and say, hey, if you notice something’s missing or if you want something, let us know. And we can make that happen because ultimately that’s what’s going to be able to grow this tool into the amazing platform that it’s going to be. In my report, I did mention that we did receive some positive feedback about the website. I did also receive a few things to change, and I was able to get those few things changed fairly quickly. One of the biggest things that people really appreciated is the fact that your members’ homepage, So when you sign in, that homepage you’re taken to can be dynamic based on specific criteria that your membership account has. An example given in the report was if you’re a Python student, you see the links that Python students see. But if you’re not a Python student, you don’t need to see those links. So they’re not even there. And I learned visually it actually looked very smooth. So I was super excited about that because I know how it should look. How it should and how it actually does sometimes can be two totally different things. During the transition, let me take a step back. We are, due to several factors, finance being one of the biggest ones, finance and reliability being some of the biggest reasons, we are migrating all of our services away from GoDaddy, which is the company that we have used, that Bits has used historically in the past. Our web hosting account has been migrated to a HostGator, no, DreamHost shared hosting account that is provided at no charge to nonprofits. I’m going to be fully transparent and say, I’m not happy with the speed of the way that the website experience is on this hosting solution, but I think we need to try it out and see how well it works for us right now. And that is something that can easily, for the most part, easily be resolved in the future. But the advantage of this is it does give us, well, A, it’s free, and B, it does give us the flexibility of using our hosting account for other solutions that we may need in the future as well. In addition to that, we are moving our domain names to a service called Namecheap. And I picked Namecheap. There are several different, well, thousands of registrars out there. I picked Namecheap, A, because I’m familiar with it. I’ve used it for 12 years. And B, it gives us the ability to delegate access to accounts. So that means I don’t have to send Jeff the login to the Namecheap account. and I don’t have to send Diane the login to the Namecheap account. We can actually invite them and they can set up their own logins, which means that if something changes in the future with individuals who need access to that account, that information can be re-delegated and or revoked if necessary. That’s amazing. That’s great. It is. And it takes away the password. That’s something we should have a thing about is passwords. But it takes away the password sharing, which ultimately I want to get away from, unless we’re using secure manners such as password managers to build the share passwords where necessary. But if we can delegate access, that would be even better. This comes with some important awareness for members. We will be migrating the domain name from GoDaddy to Namecheap over the weekend. During this migration process, I can’t emphasize this enough, emails sent to any at bits-acb.org email address, treasure bits-acb.org, class at bits-acb.org, etc., any email sent to those email addresses may not be delivered. And ultimately we want to limit any sort of downtime that’s going to occur, but I anticipate there being some downtime with emails being delivered. This will not impact the groups.io email list service because bits.groups.io is unrelated to our domain name. So I just want to make sure that we have some emphasis on that. Once this migration is complete, everything is over on the new site. What’s going to happen is existing members. So if you’re a member that has joined prior to, I would say, June 1st, for example, because we can move everyone else later. But if we’ve gotten any new members, but if you’ve joined prior to June 1st, you’re going to receive an email that’s going to say, hey, welcome to your Bits account. Please activate your account. What you’ll want to do then is there will be a link that you press enter on or you click on. however you navigate your computer, or you can use your mobile. And this will then send you to a page that says your account has been activated. Please check your email to set your password. The wording could be slightly different, but that’s the general concept. You’ll then have a second email in your email inbox that will ask you to set a password, and it’ll have you click a link. I know that’s a lot of clicking, and it can be complicated, But we’re going to make it as simple as possible. Once you click that link, the system is going to say, hey, here’s a really good password for you. Stick with that password if you can. If you can’t set your own password, you’ll always be able to reset your password for the website. Once that’s done, then your account will be set up on the new bits website. And then once you log in, you’ll be on your members dashboard. You’ll have access to all of the material that’s available, plus more that’s coming as well. And if you are logged out, for some of the content, and I’m specifically thinking of the newsletter that’s already on the website or some of the past content that’s been published, you may see a notice that says this content is only available for BITS members. If you’d like to join BITS, click this link. Or if you’d like to sign into your BITS account, click this link. And so that means that, hey, you’re not signed into your BITS account. You need to sign in in order to see access to that specific content. And I think that’s everything. If I missed something, check the report. And because of the email outage, I did give my personal email on the report. So if you have any issues, then feel free to reach out to me. Or if you just want to say hi, I’m open to those two. Michael, I have a question. Do you know what time we’re planning on doing the domain transfer? I know that I plan to try to start that process early-ish Friday morning because I’m also moving this weekend. I have a button for punishments. Oh, my God. You’re crazy. But because the way domain – and you know this, Jeff, the way that domain transfers can take, it can take several hours to honestly a couple of days. That’s why I said – Generally, though, if you’re just changing name servers, that generally goes pretty quick. So the outage should be relatively minor unless you’ve got some weird ISP that, which, you know, I mean, I might even have one of those for all I know. But what we can do is we can probably post a message when we’ve tested and made sure that all the emails are working again. That way everyone’s aware. We’ll post something to the members list and make sure that people have access to that. I might recommend that we do this, and we can talk about it later, Michael, but maybe like late Thursday night that way, you know, if it that way there’s hours of time where people are sleeping, where the internet can chew on it and propagate something like that. I don’t know. I don’t know. Just thinking out loud. Yep. So we don’t have to, we will, we’ll, we’ll let everybody know when the process is starting. How’s that? There we go. Yep. That sounds good. Okay. Anything else, Michael, any questions for Michael? I have a question for Michael. Go ahead, Brad. David, sorry. Sorry to be difficult. Are you going to have a backup of the mailboxes, such as treasurer or president, in case they need to access their emails? Right now, the way the setup is, is that those emails aren’t stored anywhere. Those are forwarded to individuals. So yes, I will have a backup of the list of email addresses that are currently receiving those forwarded emails. But no, there’s not actual email boxes to backup. They’re not IMAP mailboxes or anything like that, David. We’ll be hopefully changing that, but they are not. Yes, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Right. And I just wanted to point out one other thing. If we do see that there’s a performance issue with the new website in reference to it being on shared hosting, we simply just have to log in and tell DreamHost that we want to move it to a virtual private server. Right. and pay the money, and it’s done instantly. And you’d notice a substantial difference. But we won’t know if there’s degradation. I can sit and look at the website all day long and say, I don’t like how slow this is. And we won’t know until we put load on it. And joinbits.org, by the way, has been running on shared hosting, and it got hit like a crazy gorilla. And it did okay. Yep. Okay. All right. Excellent. Any other questions for Michael? Thank you, Michael, for your great diligence. I have an IT question for Jeff. Oh, sure. Yeah. Real quick. Where do the phone calls go from Be My Eyes? They go to my cell phone. Okay. Because we didn’t have a phone number for bits. Yeah. So we could talk about that, I suppose. But I was asked, and in the heat of the moment, I just said, we’ll just have them call me. Yep. So everyone calls Jeff late at night. Yeah. Well, that’s what do not disturb is for. That’s all I got. Okay, great. And finally, tonight, we have two reports from John McCann, one on membership and one on Constitution and bylaws. So I’m going to hand things over to you, John, and let you go ahead and move forward through those two. Okay. Blessingly, the courts are fairly short, uncharacteristically so in the case of membership. But that is because, you know, the AMSA shut down again. Again, it’s a planned shutdown to accommodate the record requirement, record date requirement for the ACB convention. So from, again, it was shut down from April 1, basically exactly the entire month of April, from April 1, April 30th. So from April 1 to May 24th, we added 24 people. So we went from 731, which was the figure I reported in my May report, to 755. We have 755 members. Strangely enough, as I was adding new people, even though I was setting the ACB flag to yes for registration, that wasn’t being honored. And that was apparently happening globally. Nancy saw that. We discussed it. Nancy’s on it. I can assure you that there’s a one-to-one correlation because there’s two fields, ACB certified and BIT certified. And there’s a one-to-one correlation. Everything syncs up. All 755 members are entitled to vote at the ACB convention. So there’s no problem there. We did a review of all non, sorry for the dog, all those whose emails might have been carried over for people who did not certify for 2024. and we removed eight email addresses there just so that we have integrity that if it’s a member benefit, only members are getting those benefits. Something I didn’t include in the report, but I’ll just give it here because I think it’s something to be proud of. We have 47 life members, BitsLife. We have 47 bits life and 40 of our 755 bits members are ACB life members. So that’s quite interesting. That is interesting. Yeah. We have 40 ACB life members. We’ve always had a high amount given the number of, well, it shows that people are really dedicated to ACB in addition to being dedicated to bits. But 755 boys and girls, I can’t remember the last time that any affiliate hit that number. That would be a very interesting thing to research. So does anyone have any question on the membership report? I’ll take that as a no. Constitution bylaws, again, is going to be a short report. I finalized the committee, and this is all in the report. I’ll just state it here for people who didn’t see the report. I’m pleased to continue as chair. We have Rosanna Beaudry and Robin Frost from, you know, that’s going to be a great intersection between the handbook committee and Constitution bylaws. Larry Watkinson, Maria Kristic, I was able to talk her into it. She is super busy. But I told her that, well, you know, the ACB con and bylaws will basically not be in play for August. So maybe you could take the time you would have devoted to that and give it to us. She was on board with that. And Renee Zellixson. So the committee is made up, constituted now. Going forward, what I want to do is do a survey to see what people think we need to pay attention to. And we’ll begin, you know, again, we’re approaching, let’s be honest, we’re approaching convention season and all that that entails. So we’ll begin in earnest come late July, mid to late July at the latest. And I think two months will be plenty of time to put something before a de facto constitutional convention, which will be a special meeting called solely to a single format of bylaws rather than this separate constitution of bylaws, which is an construction and one that there’s no need for us to honor. I think putting it all in one document will be best. Yeah. Well, we will hope to simplify. You want to strike a balance between getting the important things down and writing in a way that they really require a lot of time, energy effort, and not to mention a two-thirds vote to modify. There are rules that you strongly believe in and that they should be not tamper-proof, but not easily adjusted to reflect gravity of what they deal with, but not putting everything in the kitchen sink to where you tie yourself up in knots. It’s a delicate balancing act, but I have a lot of confidence in the committee members, and we will be soliciting certainly board input as we go through the process. And there’ll be a period for membership comments short of outright voted up or down. But now that’s going to receive my primary attention with membership receding a bit. Okay. Any questions for John? All right. We’re going to move into old business first. And we’re going to talk a little bit about convention related activities. And the first one I want to talk about. Oh, go ahead. Sorry. You skipped a committee report. Did I? Zoom. Oh, Oh my gosh. Wow. Thank you, Robin. You are amazing. See, this is one of the reasons, one of many reasons why I’m glad I have a team of people. Just keep me straight. David, I sincerely and publicly apologize to you. Go ahead with your report. You got a lot on your plate. No, no, no. This was on me and I own up to that. understand no worries here um i want to keep it brief we’ve had chat well attended we’re still this time of year but i also want to encourage everybody to make sure that you’re on the events announced list so you hear about all our public events. That’s my report. All right. Thank you. Any questions for David? And again, I apologize to you, David. I just have one. Yes. David, if I could please, please, please, please ask you for your help in procuring the participants list, if you could, from the 2023 annual meeting. It would make my life super happy. Please. I just saw that on email and I will work on that. Thank you. No problem. Thank you for that. I appreciate that. Robin, we should talk about that because I think we’re going to, well, I’ll take that offline. You probably know what I’m going to ask. Okay. It might be why I asked for it too. Yes, exactly. Yes. I’m trying to be sensitive here. Okay. Old business. Voting opportunities. So as I said, we have an opportunity for the affiliate vote to be taken, especially for things like elections and all kinds of things. So I have a couple of questions before I have an ask, I guess, of the board. And I just want to sort of feel this out because there’s a couple of ways that we could go about this. So I’m going to ask Michael to unmute and talk to him first. Michael, we on the old Bith website, we had a ballot and we could mimic that with a WordPress form. Gravity form. Gravity form. Yeah. The problem there is, and I could even help you, but you and I are going to be at convention. Right. Because we won’t know what to put on the ballot necessarily. And some of these, and I’m going to ask John to speak for a minute too in a minute. Some of these are quicker than that, though. They want to know what the counts are. Like we can’t wait a day to get votes. right like it it’s one of these situations where you sort of have to tally things rather rather quickly so um we could either do it through a ballot and and then we could tell you have you know two hours or whatever the case may be and i can get get some direction from coney sims or maybe john you have some direction on this um on how we how we should proceed. Or if people are monitoring the convention, they can just send an email to the voting email address. And we could calculate and tabulate those that way. My only concern about doing that is that’s not a secret ballot. But then again, the affiliate vote is not secret anyway. It’s a collective. It’s not the same as you casting an individual vote, right? It is the collective votes of the entire membership of the affiliate, right? So I don’t know if it’s that big of a deal. John, do you have any thoughts on this? And then we’ll open it up to the rest of the board. I don’t think it’s going to be that big of a deal and keep in mind we have the weekend uh aren’t all the affiliate votes except for the elections and we may we may luck out on the elections because there may only be one or two well i guess there could be more but i think there’s going to be more really okay well i think i think board of publications could get interesting okay there was only three people who put themselves I understand that. But my guess is that we’re going to see more people coming from the floor. That’s almost an argument for having pre-filing, but that’s another discussion. We can talk about that later. But yes. Much later. Okay. As far as the resolutions and constitutional bylaw amendments, which may go to record vote, People should be in a position to know what the ballot will look like. I don’t know when the ballot will be released, but it’d be cleaner to do a ballot with gravity form if you could. So here’s what I would recommend that we do. I recommend that we have a form that that allows people to vote yes or no on amendments and, you know, bylaws and constitutional things. Those should be simple. I mean, those should be simple. And then I think what you do is you you you pick for the Board of Publications. We know there are three. That are that are going to be voted in. Right. So you could say on that form, you could say, pick your three candidates for the board of publications. Right. And then you can just allocate it that way, I guess. Yeah, I think that would work. I don’t know how many board positions. Yeah, I mean, one person’s not going to make it because, you know, or a minimum of one unless somebody jumps on the floor. But I don’t see any of those. The people who are declared are not vacating other positions, which would need to be backfilled if my memory serves. Right. So I guess what Michael and I should do is figure out from whoever we need, like Kony or somebody. Yeah, Kony would be the best one to talk to even more than me. because while I’m on Task Force 4.0 and while I’m willing to help, I’ve been concentrating on the machinations and just released today. So I think what we’re going to do is we’re going to come up with a ballot and we’ll probably release it in the next two, you know, like, like before, before the start of the, before the start of the actual virtual convention. And we’ll leave it up until whatever date we have to bring it down. And then we’ll take that and we’ll figure out what the percentages are. And then just to make it fair, we can restrict it. So members can only complete the form once or? Yes. Yeah, that must be. Absolutely. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Each member can only fill it out once. Yeah. Okay. So now I get to ask my question. After we get through all of that nonsense. And that is that we’re going to need some help in someone looking at that data and doing the calculations and tabulations. Now, it’s not a percentage of the overall 755 members. It’s only the percentages of the people who participated. So we don’t have to meet a standard here. It’s based on the people who participated. And then that’s the number that we would report as our affiliate vote. Does that make sense? yes we have 20 so we have 25 votes if there are three people you figure out based on percentage what percentage of you know how much does jane get how much does tom get how much does So I’m wondering, I mentioned three names earlier, that being Marie, John, and Robin. Yeah, I’ll help, you know, because all you need is a calculator and OCD pension for doing the kind of stuff. Right, but I think we should have multiple people who are willing to step up. If it spills in early July, I’m not even going to be on the premises some days because of flooring contractors. And we may be in a hotel somewhere. All right. Well, cool. That’s fun. Hope it has a pool. Well, yes and no. Okay. So are there any other people or any volunteers that might be willing to assist? And we would make sure we would get you the data, the appropriate data. I’m willing to assist, Jeff. David. Okay, David, anyone else? So we got John, David, anyone else? I’d like one more. And I would prefer it not be someone on the IT team who’s dealing with the ballot. Could I suggest someone? Yes. As long as they’re willing, I don’t know. Well, I don’t know if they’re willing or not. They may not speak to me after this, but I think our illustrious email chair is literally hardwired for this job. He would do a great job. Okay Okay That problem solved. And we just need to get this publicized and cheerleading and all those kind of fun things. Okay, and I will take that on as president. I will wave the banner and, you know, do all those fun things. Any other questions on this topic before we move on to something else? Okay, this one should be easier. And two and three actually sort of coincide with each other. do we want to have bits chat going on during convention and if so do we want to do it just on friday and saturday nights do we want to do it to allow people to be able to interact more frequently than that does anyone have any opinions or would you like to leave that up to the the bits chat team and let them make that decision uh this is david yeah i would like to see um like a convention recap on the evenings for those that aren’t in person. I mean, even if you’re in person, you could do that, but there might be fun things to do in the evening. I think it’d be great to have people that are at convention call into it too. So anybody would be welcome. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t think hybrid should be done, but while the mixer is going on. Right. Which leads me to the next thing. So the mixer is happening from 4 to 6 on Wednesday, and that’s 4 to 6 Eastern, yeah? Yes. Okay. Okay, thank you. Okay. God, I’m really proud of myself tonight. I haven’t mixed up. I haven’t said July. I haven’t said, you know, any other week. Don’t jinx yourself. It’s still early. Don’t do that. It’s early, but I’m doing pretty good. I’m doing okay. This is good. I’m setting a new record for myself. Okay. I’m jinxing myself right now. That’s the way that works. So my only question about that is, do we want to provide a way for people at the mixer to speak to people who are on the, on the chat? And I think we should, but I’m just wondering if that, do we, do we feel strongly about that? I mean, we could set up an iPad in the room and people could be going on during the reception mixer. Well, it could be, you could, you could set it up. You could set it up so that people could, you know, walk over to it. We could even have headphones if we wanted to, you know, and people could use them or not. You know, I don’t know. We could figure that part out. Give it a shot. But I think depending on where you hold it and the reliability of hotel Wi-Fi. Well, there won’t be a PA system in the room. I know that. Has not even been discussed. right right right i don’t know i think it’d be a little bit more complicated to do question about uh-huh if and and i i want to be devil’s advocate if we do and allow people to join in zoom then does that count them as no attending for the drawing okay you must be present in the No, no, we have stipulated that specifically. Okay. I just wanted to make sure that was clear. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, no. Yeah, no. I think what we could do, I think the compromise would be that we could have officers and board members and others jump in and out of Zoom and let people know how it’s going at the mixer. You know what I mean? How many of us are going to be there? Right, exactly. So in other words, Brad could step out of the room and jump on his iPhone and say, hi, I could do that. Michael could do that. Any number of us could. So maybe that’s the way to handle it. I’ll do it. All right. Well, we don’t have to decide this tonight, but I wanted to at least throw it out there. And we’ll let the chat team figure out how they want to schedule these chat sessions and see if it works or not. But I think we’ve done it before, and I think it’s been pretty successful. So we should definitely try to do something like that, I think. All right. Any other questions on that topic before I go to the last item of old business? There’s two, but we can combine it into one. And it’s mainly just so that we get it into the minutes. Okay. So we took two votes on the board list since the last board meeting, one on the $500 check that was sent for the Blind Girl Designs– Deposit. Deposit, and also the logo. And so I just want to make sure that the board did take a vote on that and that it was a unanimous vote. There were no dissensions on that vote. And I just want to make sure that that’s recorded for the record so that it’s in the minutes. That’s correct. As far as I’m concerned, yeah. Okay. So, Robin, if you can just make a note of that for the record. It’s already there. Great. Okay. New business. We’re almost done, guys. I don’t know that we have to decide this one tonight, but we probably should. Does anyone have strong opinions on what we should do for next year’s dues? Do we want to offer free memberships again? Jeff, I’ll weigh in. I know this was beyond our wildest dreams. I think we have offered something incredible this year. There’s no doubt about that. Having said that, I think we give a lot of value and incredible, particularly this year. And we’ll continue to give a heck of a lot of value for what we ask people to pay for dues. So I’m really not in favor of having another moratorium year. I think it disrespects, in a sense, the volunteer time that so many of us give. And while I’m one of those people, I mean, what I’ve given pales relative to what you’ve given, to what the Python class team has given, to what chairs they give. I won’t beat it to death. But it’s not like we’re going to see any of the money. And I would also ask us to reflect. I became president of this organization in 2013, and I think we had $12,000 or $13,000. I would love to go back and get a report and see just exactly where we were. But we went from $13,000 to $14,000 at the max to the $42,000 we have now. And that happened due to dues selection. So I don’t think we should walk away from it. Maybe we could back dues in a future year. And I also think if we do solicitations for outside grants, and I can’t emphasize this enough, the people or the entities that we would approach asking for grant monies and things like that, They would want to see contributions as well. And the government would be called maintenance. Like, are your people stepping up? Or are you just asking to fill in for what you’re not willing to collect from your membership? So I won’t go further with that. No, that’s fine. Does anyone else have any opinions? And I just have one other comment on it that I would like to propose, but we’ll get there in a minute. Yeah, Brad. You know, it was my view of the dues moratorium was almost like, you know, I almost hate to go here, an olive branch to those who had been disenfranchised. Right, exactly. Or ill will that had been generated by things in the past. Whatever. And it was our way of saying, hey, we are reinventing bits. We are moving forward. Come back. With that said, we’ve done that and I don’t feel it’s a need to go back. Let’s move forward with the new bits as we are. Yeah, I like that. And just see how it is, okay? That’s my view. I agree with everything John said, but we’re offering so much more than we ever offered. Oh my gosh. The Python class, the RIM. Free Bookshare, RIM, all that stuff. There’s more to come. And there’s more to come, yeah. So this is just, you know, we’ve given people a chance, new members, returning members, put their toe in the water and see what you think of the reborn bit. So I don’t really see a need at this time for any dues moratorium. Let’s just ride the wave that we’ve created and let’s see how that goes. Okay. Anyone else before I make a proposal? David? Yes. I think our dues are relatively low compared to organizations even outside of ACB. There are some organizations that charge four times as much or more than what we do. And so we’re giving people an excellent value. I think if we want to do something special in a certain circumstance, you know, maybe case-by-case basis or, you know, just a promo to encourage, you know, like a handful of memberships. Maybe like a Black Friday sale or something or something like that. 10 or 20, you know, whatever. Well, here’s my proposal. And thank you for leading me that direction. I would like to see what we can do about offering some scholarships. And I’m not saying a lot. I’m thinking maybe 25, 50, at most 100. And that might even be too many. to people, especially in other countries where these costs for us in America is $20 is not a lot of money. Okay. Uh, you, you go to other countries and that, that becomes an astronomical fee for some, um, if they have to do the calculation of what that would be in their country. Um, you also have some students who, who, for whatever reason are students and they can’t afford, you know, uh, to, to to join us and and but i think it should be handled on a case-by-case basis it wouldn’t be something that we would say we’re going to offer 50 scholarships and for the first 50 people that come they’ll get them no i don’t think it should be that way i think it should be based on a member uh is can suggest a scholarship to be provided to a to an individual and they must not have you can’t be someone who has been a member in the past, but this is a one-time thing. And then we would have a committee and we could figure out what that would look like in August or whatever. But we would have a committee that would look at that and make a determination as to whether or not that was something that would be worthy of that person receiving. Would anybody be willing to entertain that? Yes, I would. I can think of a couple of people that would come to my mind if we were to do something like that. Jeff, it’s my turn. Yeah, yeah, go ahead. Okay. My only concern, and yeah, I mean, the board would have the discretion to do this. And the board decision would have to be non reviewable. But this necessarily creates a bit of bureaucracy within our organization, which is not in and of itself a reason to turn down the proposal. Right, right, right. But you’d have to have some really defensible criteria and means of knowing whether the criteria were met. I like the idea of a foreign country because, you know, you’ve got to give us your mailing information and your email address. Well, you could have an email address with Gmail that’s in a foreign country, but you have to give us your postal address. Right. So, you know, being from another country, being outside the U.S. would be would be readily verifiable. But income levels and the other thing will be verifiable with your first time, because frankly, we have very excellent. Yes, that would be verifiable. That would be very. Yeah. So we’d have to look at verifiable stuff, and beyond that, we’d have to be very careful to have very clearly delineated criteria. Yeah, well, and I’m not saying I have all the answers tonight. What I’m basically asking is, is this something that we could write up a proposal and bring it to the board in August and have a further discussion on? Certainly that much, yeah. I think we can and should do that. All right. So I will put together, I’ll seek some volunteers that might be interested in helping write a proposal. I think it does need to be equal and equitable. There needs to be a process. You know, for example, just like we did for Athens, where, you know, you have to get a letter of recommendation. Well, Jeff, I’ll help, too, because it’s going to be quasi-legal or legalistic in a sense. I understand. And I’m willing to be part of it. Okay, perfect. Okay. So is anyone else on the board willing to assist in this? And I don’t think that we have to, this isn’t something we have to decide tonight, but I would like to, I definitely feel we need to do this. And this actually came up during the moratorium when the moratorium was complete. And we, John, both John and I actually made some determinations that this, you know, we were going to make some decisions on that because of this impact. You know, like, you know, people in specific countries, $20 would be like $200 to someone here. right i mean that’s how that’s how wide the gap is for some countries so you have you have to think about this from a you know equal and equitable you know pricing structure i’d be willing to help out with that okay so david john me anyone else as well and i also want to say i’m super proud of bits that we’re being inclusive of of everyone and seeing what we can do to help everyone out to be part of this organization. Yeah, I definitely stand behind what everyone has said, that I don’t think we need to do the moratorium again. But I do feel we need to do something like this to make sure that we’re not leaving people out who could participate because of no fault of their own. Now, what that really means, I don’t know what even that means. So we’re going to have to figure that out. So that’s Michael, John, David, and myself, and the four of us will powwow, and we will come up with a semi-legalistic la-la-la-la-la letter, some kind. A proposal, something. I don’t know. Call it whatever you want. I’m getting tired. A Christmas present. A Christmas present, yes. Or something. Okay. And then, all right, that’s all I have. Does anyone else have anything under new business? Yes, Jeff. And I got one too. Yes, John. Well, this almost fell through the cracks. I think we need to come to a decision on ratifying the recommendation of the investment subcommittee of the budget committee. Oh, shoot. Do we have the right people here to do that tonight, John? I can do it. Diane asked me to make the presentation, and it’s pretty straightforward. Go right ahead, John. All right. The investment subcommittee, which is created under the budget committee, we met with a fidelity. Jeff, you know you’re there. We met with the representative of central fidelity. And the recommendation we came up with, and which I’m going to advance as a motion from the budget committee or the investment subcommittee, whichever you wish, but it is advanced as an official motion, okay, is that, and I’ll give some background here. The current rates on CDs, which are locked in for a year, when we discussed this in late May, is about 5.3%. So what we’re recommending is that 25, and we have, as you know, from the report, The report says our total net worth is $42,085 and some odd cents. OK, the cents is an important for purposes of this discussion. OK, we’re talking about investing $35,000. $25,000 would be put in a certificate of deposit, which to judge by last, the figures from about 10 days ago would have earned, will earn us about 5.3%. It doesn’t vary by that much. Frankly, the only question you got to answer with respect to that is, are you happier with anything, you know, that’s above 0.001 or God knows what ridiculous amount we’re getting now. So we could expect about a 5.3 percent return on the twenty five thousand dollars. And the we are suggesting that ten thousand dollars go into a fidelity central fidelity money market. And that’s been in the five. That’s a very, very low risk fund that was selected. I don’t have its name in front of me, but I would recommend that you look at the – this did get discussed. It did get brought up on the board list. We’ll make sure the motion has the name in it, John. Yeah, right. Okay. So filling that in, on behalf of the Investment Subcommittee, I move that $25,000 be invested in a one-year CD at approximately 5.3% and an equivalent rate reasonably to be expected for the remaining $10,000 invested in Central Fidelity’s money market, named to be inserted. Okay, perfect. Can I get someone to second that? I will second that. I’ll second, yeah. I’ll do that, too. Okay. Michael is the second. Brad is, I’ll take Michael’s first and Brad is second. Michael can have it. Yeah. Okay. Perfect. And Mike, any, yes. Any discussion before we vote? John’s description was adequate. I think. Okay. All those in favor. I read about it. I’m good with it. Okay. All those in favor. Aye. Any opposed? Make it so. The only follow-up here is when Diane gets back, we’ll do it. We will coordinate with her. Contact the, I forget his name, Dean something. Yeah, yeah. We’ll contact the Fidelity people and get the stuff. And make the investment. This will be drawn off the savings account, which may leave us about, I don’t know, $2,000. Which is a good cushion. It’s fine. It’s a good step. It’s enough for Diane to go on Hawaii. I’d like to thank Diane and the subcommittee. I think y’all did good work. I really appreciate everything that y’all would share with the board. Yes, it was a very good meeting. It really was. The guy was great, too. I really felt confident. Thanks to Marie. Marie Nelson put us in touch. Absolutely. Thank you, Marie. Special thanks to her. I think it’s got to be that 31 cents that we make every month, you know, that’s been, that’s been ridiculous, but all right. David, that’s worth a few dues payments right there. See what these are. That’s right. That’s that’s so easy. I wanted to on the previous topic about dues, I wanted to make a suggestion. There are a couple of people that I can think of that have trouble with technology. Um, and one of which is a longstanding member of bits and hasn’t been able to rejoin. And I’d like to see that an option so that a member could help them fill out the form. John, uh, David, that’s always been an option. So if you, if you have a situation like that, you just need to get ahold of, how would they get payment? And that’s the question. We make it on their behalf and we can work wrong. I think I know who you’re probably talking about, and I wasn’t involved. They didn’t reach out to me. But I will tell you that in two cases, I have basically made a PayPal payment on someone’s behalf, and then they’ve zelled me the money. Now, the person you’re no doubt talking about probably doesn’t do zelle, but I’ll always take the – within reason, I’ll take the risk that somebody will get a check to me once they get a CITI to make the check out. If it comes down to it and I have to end up paying for somebody’s membership because they can’t get a check to me, I’m not going to lose sleep over it. Right. No worries. I just wanted to figure out if there’s a way. Now, I can’t do that for 100 people, but I’m just saying. So we have to be somewhat careful about it. Yes, Robin? No. This is Desi, your host. Oh, Desi, yes. I’m sorry. That’s okay. I made that mistake, too. I thought it was Robin. Go ahead. I’m sorry, Desi. I’m sorry. It’s fine. I just wanted to let you know that Marie has her hand up and I wondered if you wanted to take. Oh, yeah. Let’s hear from Marie because she was a shining star for the work you did on this. You should be able to unmute now. Yes. I just wanted to say very quickly, a few days after we had that meeting and the man’s name is Shane Dean. I purchased my own CD and I went for the six month. and while I was on the phone with him, they had a new CD come in, so I got 5.4% interest. Woo-woo! Better jump on this, boys and girls. Yeah, I don’t think you want to fool around too long. You want to get it done. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you, Marie. Okay, perfect. Can I just add a calculation? 5.3% of $25,000 is over $1,300. Okay, I’ll take it. That’s a lot better than what we’ve been getting. Okay, I’ll take it. All right. I mean, I won’t take it, but that’s good. Diane may take it. Yeah, Diane might take it. 10, 20, 30, 40. You realize that’s 65 memberships? Yeah. Okay. David, did you have anything else? Oh, no, no. I just wanted to mention that. No, that’s great. Okay. It is now time for any other new business before we open up the floor for questions. They mentioned that the next meeting, no meeting in July, we’ll meet again. August, that’s right. August 7th. Or whatever that is. 6th, 7th. As people are packing their bags and leaving for those. And I will be in the middle of a Python data science course. That would be a fun night. Brad, you might have to run the board meeting that month. Is that August? Yep. Well, we’ll talk about that. We’ll talk about that. Oh, boy. Good job there. Brad, you’re going to have fun that night. Comes with the territory. All right. I love you, man. Okay. You’ll get my invoice. Okay. Yeah, well, sure. Okay. I’ll buy you a beer. Okay. And I don’t drink beer, so. All right. I know. Good reason for that. I’m not sure how to take that. Okay. It was well-intended. yes I understood I’m just giving you grief okay I’m going to get out of here because I’m going to go listen to the D-Day coverage okay so let’s open up the floor we’ll take a few questions um if so if there are any hands that would like to ask a question of then feel free to raise your hand okay everything’s jumping around sorry okay pamela francis would like to go ahead pamela and she is able to unmute now so go ahead pam good evening everyone and hello first i want to say safe travels to convention thank you um secondly jeff you’ve at the beginning of a meeting that you had been in contact with a couple of different chapters having to do with bits. Have you explored any other outside radio stations, talk shows, et cetera, that might, where you might find family members who would benefit from this position? Yeah, we have not, but if you have contacts or ideas centered around that, we’d love for you to email us and we will look at them. Well, I know that here in Missouri, we have one of the biggest councils in the country. And I know here in Kansas City, we have quite the – we have an excellent local talk show. We also have a student radio station that’s, I think, this type of an issue would do well with. If you would like to help me get in touch with the right contacts, I would be happy to do some outreach. All right. Good deal. Thank you so much. Great. Thank you so much. That’s wonderful. Thank you for the really great information. Appreciate that. Appreciate it. Anyone else? Yes, we have two other hands right now. Next is Janet Wright. Janet Wright. Go ahead, Janet. What about in perspective with Bob? Oh, he does this to call an ACB. Oh, yeah. Sure. I mean, I would be happy to talk with him. Absolutely. Sure. And are you going to have some of the newest Apple Bytes and Mac Bytes put on your new website? Yes, those will be on the new website. They probably will not be on the website when the new website launches right away. But yes, that content will be on the website. Yep. Alrighty, that’s all I had to say. Thanks. Thank you. Good job, guys. All right, and the final hand? The final hand is Jamaica. Hello, Mrs. Jamaica. Well, I have two things I wanted to say to you. First of all, number one being that I wanted to ask about the form that you’re going to be putting together for that, for our votes. For votes, I hope. Do you have to have a – do you sign up for that form, or how do you even do that? You will be getting an email, Jamaica, over the weekend with the information about your new login for the new BITS website, and that’s what you will use to log. I’m talking about the form to do my votes for the… That’s correct. That’s right. That’s correct. So what you will do is you will log in to the BITS website, and then on that page, on that front page, you will be presented with a link where you can then fill out the form. But you will have to use your login on the new BITS website to do that, okay? Okay. All right. Thank you. You’re welcome. And my second thing is, sorry, real quickly, is that I would be willing to sit to help give out the tickets and things at the convention. All right. I’m actually coming. Oh, that’s wonderful, Jamaica. If you would like to send an email to – oh, let’s see. send an email do it before Friday Hang on, I was downstairs listening Jimmy, you can send an email To my name, brad.snyder S-N-Y-D-E-R At swbell.net Okay, okay You got that? Yes We’ll reach out to you though and help you And you just send me something and I’ll get Send me your contact information Phone number And that way I can, yeah, phone number That way I can give you a call Okay We would love you to do that. And if I don’t get it, I bet I know John probably has your information in the member database. So if you’re okay with that, Jamaica, I could get it to him because everyone’s data. Let me just do that. Let’s just, John will get it to me and I will call you. I would love for you to help us out. That would be wonderful. And I’ll make sure I put your name and number in my phone. And if we need to, I’ll help coordinate as well. Brad, I’ll get you. Thank you, Jamaica. I’ll get you Jamaica’s number. Yes, that would be wonderful. All right. Thank you, Jamaica. Thank you so much, Jamaica. And anybody else? Yeah, if anyone else wants to step up. Jamaica has led. Yes. Set the pace. You go, girl. That’s awesome. Way to go. All right. Love that. Okay. Love that. All right. One last call for hands. Okay. I think we are handless at this point. Handless we are. Yes. All right. Very good. All right. Well, we will see everyone in August. Stay tuned for information from the BITS board or the BITS members list on voting opportunities and other things happening and announcements and all kinds of things coming up. And we’ll take it from there, guys. Thank you, Desi. Thank you. Yes. If we need a motion to adjourn, you got it. Yeah. Motion we adjourn. I’ll second. Very good. It’s non-patriotic. Good night, everyone. Good night. I will close the room. Thank you. Thank you.