BITS Board Meeting for March 6, 2024

AI Generated Transcript

Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the March BITS board meeting, where things have been quite interesting over the last month or so. I think we’ve been really busy in committees and just doing a lot of busy work. So it’s kind of been an interesting report, but we’ll go over all of that throughout the evening. I will go over the agenda. We’re going to, the agendas are pretty much not going to change. We’re going to, we’ll call for a roll call in just a minute from Robin. And we’ll accept the agenda as proposed. And we’ll deal with both the secretary and treasurer reports. I’ll give a brief report, although most of it’s in writing, so I don’t know that I want to spend a great deal of time going over a four or five page document that I wrote up, but we’ll cover the highlights. Then we have a bunch of committee reports and we’ll go through all of those. We have some old and new business to go through. Tonight, we want to talk a little bit about the classes, specifically the Python class and the ask for ensuring that we have vehicles to support our Mac and NVDA customers with RIM more than an hour. That looks like that might be an issue moving forward. So we want to propose some spending of money there if possible. and then under new business we’re going to talk a little bit about blind it and developing a subcommittee to work on the letter of intent and partnership work that’s going on there to meet with them and develop a partnership and plan so we’ll talk more about that new business we want to talk about streaming of the board meeting this came up at the last meeting just to give it away, we have permission, but we want to talk about that a bit to just make sure that we have that to the agenda. And then I want to bring up something that I don’t know that we’re actually going to do anything with, but I’d like to at least discuss it. And that, because it came at the leadership conference, and I thought it would be interesting to at least discuss. And I think it would require a constitutional change anyway. And so we wouldn’t be able to do we would allow state affiliates to have bits chapters and affiliate with us. And then member comments and questions. And that’s the agenda as as I proposed it. So before we get to it, which I did slightly out of order here, but it’s fine. But before we do that, I’ll have our secretary call the roll. All right. Good evening, everybody. President Jeff Bishop. Here. Vice President Brad Snyder. Present. Secretary Robin Frost, I’m here. Treasurer Diane Scalzi. Here. Michael Babcock. He’s here, I know he’s here. He’s here, he’s just hiding. He’s here, he’s just hiding. He’s hiding. John McCann. Present. And David Edick. Here. And we would also like to take this time to warmly welcome our friends and members who have chosen to spend time with us this evening. Each will be recognized individually by name in written form in the meeting minutes. And with that, the call of the roll is complete. Thank you, Madam Secretary. Yes, sir. And keeping with the secretary role, here while we have you, well, first the agenda. Can I get someone to move this agenda? the agenda is modified uh be accepted second okay all those in favor aye aye any opposed all right and we have we have board minutes from february that uh have been so eloquently prepared can i get some motion i’ll move their adoption a second all right excellent michael you’re back Excellent. Okay. Any discussion? No corrections or anything that we need to make? No. All right. Excellent. All those in favor? Aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? All right. Excellent. Good job, Robin. Thank you. Before you move on, sir, I just wanted to remind everybody, the board, that I have compiled all of the board meeting minutes that exist in digital form going all the way back to 2015. They have all been compiled and collated and placed into a folder structure organized by year and filed where they need to be filed so that the board and the IT infrastructure team can find them whenever they should need. Holy smokes. That was so much fun. Oh, my gosh. Ambitious. Keep going. If you want to keep organizing, have at it. Holy smokes. Carrie and historian. That was quite a monumental effort, so thank you for that. Wow, holy smokes. You’re welcome. Yes. Do we have them on the website? And if not, I think they should be. I think the majority are, but we will make sure that they are. Okay. Yeah. Should we add that to Robin’s plate? We can once the new website is up, which we’ll hear more about later today. Yeah, I forgot about that. Good, excellent point. All right. I mean, most of the work has been done for what Robin just said. Yes, exactly. So we just need to upload the material. So it’s just a matter of putting money. Yes, exactly. Yes, it’s just, there you go. Yeah, excellent. Thank you. Thank you, John. Thanks to Robin, yeah. Yeah, and thank you, Robin. Wow. You’re welcome. Holy, wow. That’s the kind of work that’s tough. That takes a lot of patience. It was not. It was so much fun. Well, I’m glad you liked that. I do. If you want to keep going, that Dropbox. I was going to ask if I could, but I didn’t want to overstep into anybody’s territory. But I am. It could use a bit of tender, loving care. I am all in for any reorganization. I would just ask that if you are doing things like looking at the financials and things that you coordinate with Diane and such, just to make sure that she knows where you’re moving things and just have a conversation. sure yeah i would have no problem with that and i don’t think that i well i should check i don’t have a problem with it diane to have some help in organization would you oh heavens no okay awe of our treasurer because it’s never a role I would want. And that’s Diane. So it’s time to hear Diane. Okay. And you have my dulcet tones tonight, not the artificial intelligence that Checking. Beginning balance, $11,143.85. Credits. Transfer from PayPal, $1,529.77. Total credits, $1,529.77. Debits. Zoom monthly subscription slash increased meeting size to 500 participants, $26.50. Transfer to savings, $5,000. Total debits, $5,000. I’m sorry, $5,026.50. Ending balance, $7,647.12. PayPal. Beginning balance, $114.66. Credits. 21 regular member dues payments, $420. Three bits life member dues payments. That’s two $250 payments and one $200 payment, $700. One ACB life member dues payment, $15. One student member dues payment, $10. Four international member dues payments, $80. Three donations, $255. Total credits, $1,480. Debits, PayPal fees, $45.78, footnote one. Transfer to checking, $1,529.77. Total debits, $1,575.55. Ending balance, $19.11. Savings account. Beginning balance, $32,127.98. Credits. Transfer from checking, $5,000. Interest, $0.28. Total credits, $5,000.28. Debits, no debits. Total debits, zero. Ending balance, $37,128.26. Total for all accounts, $44,794.49. Footnote 1. For information on PayPal fees, visit https colon slash slash http://www.paypal.com slash us slash web apps slash MPP. Looks like slash PayPal hyphen F-E fees. Oh, that’s it for that. Submitted for audit. Prepared by Diane Scalzi. Bits Treasurer, March 4th, 2024. All right. So we have enough to, we’re doing pretty good. I think we’ll be okay for our big check we have to write here in what, what a month or so, three weeks or something. What’s shocking is when we write that 3120 check for 3,125, we won’t even be below 40 K. That’s unbelievable. Yeah. We, we, we doubled the amount in dues and, and something like that. Right. Diane, I don’t have the exact number, but it’s close to doubling. Close to double. Yeah, which is unbelievable. Unbelievable. And we’re still receiving payments. Yeah, and we’re still receiving payments. So good job. I have a quick question, if that’s appropriate. Sure, of course. Is there a reason, and I’m just asking for my own edification, is there a reason we track international membership fees versus any other membership fees? I don’t know. I know that, I know, John, I suppose we, I suppose it wouldn’t necessarily, I just based because the paypal fees attributable to those members is higher by about 30 cents i think it’s not significant but okay you know if you were to do a straight out division of members versus okay does that make sense i mean obviously it certainly does yeah about that so thank you for Yeah, that’s interesting. And I think the practice should be retained. I’ve seen that before, so. I think what everyone will find very interesting is when John reports on the membership stats, when we hear about the different countries that are represented, I am in awe of the number of countries represented in this process. So it’s pretty darn neat. I wonder how they found out about this. Yeah, me too. oh trust me we we blasted it everywhere so i mean if you were living under a rock you probably So thank you for that. Okay, thanks. I’m going to run through this presidential report stuff rather quickly because it’s all, you can all, you know, take it to bed with you tonight and fall asleep reading it. Perfectly great. But I just, I have a number of items here and I’ll run through them really quickly. Where the membership drive for BITS is kind of slowing down, but it’s still, the drum keeps beating. So thank you for everyone’s support and a valiant effort by my many team members who have been diligent in this process with a specific emphasis on John and Diane’s efforts. They’ve just been monumental in just it’s been a rough ride. So I would just want to just call them out publicly for their their valiant efforts throughout this process. I just want to also say that, you know, we’ve grown a lot and we’re learning a lot about ourselves as an organization. So you’re going to see that we’re still trying to be nimble and quick to respond. And we’re doing lots of learning in all aspects of the organization. So I just want to ask each and every member to be cognizant of that, that there might There might be a couple of bumps in the road or just a couple of learnings that we’re finding throughout all of this process and throughout all of our committees. So just like we have a list for this, just be gentle with us. But we are open and willing to hear constructive feedback. So if there is any of that, then we have the opportunity for you to participate in office hours as well as just sending email to us. And we’re open to all that feedback. We just ask that it be constructive and team-oriented. And it’s okay to even bring up negative things if done in a really constructive manner. Real quick, a number of people from our board, as well as others, participated in the ACB National Leadership Conference just a week ago. Just a few days ago, actually, including myself. I gave a presentation, helped give a presentation. having to do with special interest affiliates and the partnering that they do with both state and other special interest affiliates. I thought that went really, really well. There was maybe, Michael, you can comment on the oohs and ahhs that you heard in the audience about he’s he’s he’s eating or something he’s still in awe yeah he’s still in awe yes exactly and i was there were quite a few oohs and ahs when we talked about our numbers particularly the international membership that you’ve already mentioned yeah it was it was quite you know um well you were impressive but the information about bits was very impressive and impressively presented if i do say I will say the feedback we got from the reactions we received after you shared information about how not collecting dues turned into substantial donations was very, very impressively received by the audience. Yes, very much. Cindy was very impressed, too, with what we did. Cindy. Oh, yeah. She wants to. She sings our praises for sure. Yeah. She, she wants to talk more about that. In that meeting and in another one. Yeah. It’s, it’s kind of crazy. We’ll talk about another number after John gives his report, because I am absolutely blown away. I’ve mentioned it at the leadership conference, but I am absolutely blown away by one number in our growth. That is just, I don’t even know what to think about it, to be honest with you. I am flabbergasted by it, to be honest. So we’ll get there. We’re expanding our reach, and you’ll hear more about this in Brad’s report in the presentations committee as well as partnerships with the education committee. But I’m excited about this, and I think this is really going to elevate us to a different level within the national organization, too. So you’ll hear more about that in just a few minutes. We published an article in the Braille Forum. And if you have not had a chance to read it, I would definitely encourage you to do so. It is in the board packet. It is long, and I am sorry about that. It’s about seven pages long, but it’s good. It tells the BITS story, and it leaves affiliate presidents, both state and special interest affiliates, some thoughts to think about, about leading their organizations. And we even use the acronym of BITS to represent that. So I thought I’d try to be a little clever in that. I can’t talk too much about where we’re going next in partnerships, but suffice it to say we are working really aggressively on new opportunities and new things that might be coming to BITS members, both software discounts and potentially other things. We are in discussions with quite a number of people right now. We’ll talk about one of them a little bit later. But the others I’m going to try to keep on the download while I’ll let the board know about them privately, because it may require us to have some discussions about them before we talk about them at the board meeting. But no real consequence to that. We just want to try to see if it’s going to work really is where we’re going with all that. But you should all be thinking about what something might look like. One of the things that I’ve been exploring is what would it look like if we bundled a bunch of services together and offered something like a Bits Plus membership where you might gain things that you’re already paying for. At least I think the majority of us are already paying for, but rolled into Bits. So we’re looking into it. We’ll see if that can come to fruition and we’ll share more when the time is right. I did want to casually mention the Python training course. I will tell you that I mentioned this at the leadership meeting that I don’t know that well, I mean, being president of BITS is also very overwhelming, but this class is also extremely overwhelming. It’s intense, very labor intensive and very, very rewarding. and we have about 125 to 127 people in the course and all of them are engaging well we’ve had a few people dropped out due to medical reasons and other things but no one has dropped out because of uh any sort of other reasons at this point so we’re really really happy about that and it’s going very very well i will tell you that juggling that many people with different levels of uh competency as in reference to their skill sets has been challenging, but rewarding. And we have a team of people who are subject to none. Just amazingly awesome that we’re working with to make all this magic happen. And I think all of you should be proud of the work that we’re doing here. We’re setting up ourselves to do something here. Pretty impressive and pretty magical that we’ll learn a lot from that we can then take forward and do for the next set of classes and opportunities that we’ll be able to where we broaden our horizons for education and opportunity. We’re going to be sponsoring a town hall event in April. We’ll talk about this a little bit more that matter, ever before. And we also have a number of people who may not realize what joining BITS really means or what joining ACB really means. So we are going to be partnering with the president of ACB, the executive director and others, and bringing a town hall event to the BITS membership to discuss that and to tell our story and to tell the ACB story and to make sure they understand what opportunities exist for them as well. So I think that’s pretty important to do. We’ll talk about committees, but I just wanted to point it out that the committees have been working very, very hard and that work continues. I have a few asks for committees and I just wanted to sort of highlight them here. One of the things that we want to try to do is come up with a welcome letter so that when someone joins the organization, that we can automate the process of sending them a welcome letter that contains a bunch of resources and links and, you know, uh, all of our, our policies and procedures and all of those kinds of fun things. So I, I’m hoping that we can collaborate with the publications committee and the membership committee just to draft such a letter so that when we’re ready for the new website to be launched, that that can be sent out, uh, as part of their welcome email. that they would get after joining the affiliate. We haven’t been doing that. And I think that’s something that’s really important and one of the resources we often get asked about this. So it’s an area that we want to definitely put some attention to. that we are planning on making in September for our constitutional convention, which we want to do prior to elections so that we can get some changes made potentially in our constitution so that we can hopefully make voting simpler as well as some other things that I think all of us would like to see. I know that I would like to see a couple of things changed. So I’m just letting the Constitution and Bylaws Committee know that we should at least be thinking about those things. I don’t know that we have to have full steam ahead on them quite yet, but at least, you know, some, you know, gray matter should be spinning around in there to think about it at least. Website fundraising and publications should be an ongoing thing. Just wanted to just say that. And especially the website, I think that’s going to be something that we definitely need to be putting attention to detail on because we need to make sure that members get access to the resources that we provide. And I know that that’s in works, and I’m not saying that to point out that we’re not making progress because I know we are. I’m just saying, just trying to point out things that I think are the top most important things that we should be focusing on. Okay, so that’s what I have for tonight, and there’s plenty more in the report. You can go read it for yourself, as well as the report that was published in the Braille Forum. Lots of nitty gritty details in that. 22 pages for all of you to ponder, including all of the committee reports. We tried to be very transparent in our process to make sure that everyone has the same level of detail that the board has when we meet as a board. except for board minutes and the financial reports, which we will not distribute until such time as an audit has been approved. We will then make them public. All right. Any questions from either board members? Well, yeah, from board members. Any questions from any of you? No, it’s sounding good. All right. Let’s go into committee reports, shall we? Maybe we’ll break a record and finish early tonight. that would be amazing. All right. So, I want to talk about this. Is Taylor in the audience? I don’t think she is. I heard her come in. It was quite a while ago though. Yeah, she’s here. Okay. So, we want to ask her to unmute, but Taylor, your report spawned some interesting conversations both from board members as well as from members of the affiliate is larry walkinson also um in the audience yeah i see him okay if you can ask him to unmute as well um desperate controversy no no no no no no no but i think no no no no no but i think we’re going to try to simplify this for you, Taylor. Oh, that is amazing. Okay. So I think we’re going to try to simplify this for you. So I think we’re going to try to simplify this for you. an audit report, which basically looks like a, and I know that that was probably not your intent, Taylor, but it looks like sort of like a proposed, you know, staff member position within BITS. It’s how it read. And then I don’t think that’s what your intent was. I think your intent was just- Actually, it was a volunteer position, but it was basically a draft job description for what we’d be trying to find for qualifications. Got it. Okay. Perfect. Okay. That’s a good way to propose it. So we’re not hiring the employees here, folks. Right. Okay. Because that’s what people were concerned about was, oh my gosh, are we hiring a full-time person? Okay. Good. Okay. No, no, no, no. That’s good. Okay. I just want to make sure that you clarified that first. So now Larry has a substantial background in 501c3 organizations and understands a lot of, he’s not, he’s definitely not a lawyer, but he served on many, many boards and he just had some comments and I thought it would be good to hear his comments on this. Larry, are you here with us? I am. So I do not practice law. I want to make that very, very clear that I don’t. I also do practice as a CPA. However, I worked with lots of boards, 501c3s and that structure. And Taylor, I will simply tell you this. If I were to go out and hire an auditor or a CPA to do work, I want you on my recruitment team. I want to make that very clear. That was very factual and very detailed. What I said to Jeff, and again, this is only from the experience I have in AtrisX, Hiring an auditor to do anything, that’s what I looked at, was either hiring an auditor or hiring a CPA to be your audit reviewer. The minimum cost to get into that starts at $10,000 for an organization under $50,000. If they were to be doing an audit for a fundraiser, if you were going to go out and ask people to donate or to become sponsors of you, oftentimes nonprofits are subjected to having an independent audit done. And again, that starts out usually 10, it usually ends up being around 30,000. So I thought to Jeff that, you know, maybe it’s a little bit more than what you really want to spend as an organization. So what I had suggested to Jeff you could do is look at forming an audit committee that would be strictly defined. And I have not looked at the bylaws to see how that structure is now. But within what you’ve done with Diane’s financial statement that I heard her present tonight, you could actually form a structure to do simply an audit review of what your banking documents are. And of course, you can do that and essentially do an audit, a self audit, self review with an audit committee who, in fact, would do similar to what you’ve talked about in your job description. But because you’ve clarified that it’s not hiring an auditor or hiring an audit firm or employee, it sort of changes the scope of what I’ve suggested because you may already have that infrastructure in place. So, again, I’m a fairly new member, and I just wanted to offer the perspective that you could structure that within the organization itself by ensuring that people who have signature on the checking account would not serve on the audit committee. your treasurer would only serve as a ex-official member of that. And you could actually structure that with folks who have some accounting and financial background in, you know, posse solar. So I just want to throw that out. I did not have that knowledge, Diane, coming into it tonight after I talked to Jeff. So I want to make that disclosure. That’s it. All right. Thank you, Larry. Okay. Diane, do you have a comment? Yeah. I was going to say that’s what we did last year, actually. And we were concerned. I wonder if the word audit might be a problem. I think the word review would definitely be a better word to describe what we would be doing. But, yeah, that was what we did last year. And, you know, I think it worked out okay. I was a member of the – it must have been the year before last. because I was a member of the committee before, you know, I was appointed treasurer last year. So, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, I have a lot of comments. So let me just make this as brief as possible and succinct. I really appreciate. First of all, I’m going to say that I really appreciate the thought provoking comments that were given. And I do agree that internal audit review would be helpful. The concern that I have, and let me just be clear, I’m not a CPA, I’m a bookkeeper, but I know a ton of CPAs and I converse in the CPA circles, and also a member of the State Society of CPAs. But anyway, with all that gobbledygook aside, the thing that I want to be careful of is that I do like the internal audit approach. However, What I am concerned about is that I, even though for a review, what I’m concerned is that, especially while I don’t have training, I don’t have the necessary training that a CPA does to detect, like if there’s fraudulent activities or other things on a bank statement. And so while I make my best efforts, and I’m sure committee members like Diane and others, when we did this last year, made our best effort to mitigate this and look extensively in the documents and things like that. We don’t have the training that we need to understand and make sure that it’s actually okay, right? Because if we do an independent audit, that’s fine. But we also don’t have the training to understand if there’s other things going on and other things like that. And so that was mainly the concern. I actually did talk to a couple of CPA friends at one point. And so, you know, that’s kind of where this all got brought up. And I kind of started to reflect on it. And that’s kind of what I came up with. But yeah, like I said, an internal audit would be a good idea if we even had somebody with a more of a robust accounting background than I did. OK, so I really what I was. Oh, sorry, Jeff. So go ahead. What I was really thinking is, again, it was kind of acted like a staff position. And mainly why I did that is it would actually act like a volunteer position. So there are different places where you can post volunteer ads, where you can get volunteers for your nonprofit. And really that I should have been more clear on the report. I’m sorry. I actually had to trim it down because it was originally four pages. And I didn’t think you guys wanted to fall asleep to four pages of audit reports. So for your sanity, I trimmed the entire report down. But I mentioned in there, I guess I should have kept some of that in there. But I mentioned that this would be strictly a volunteer and that we would recruit a volunteer and that would cost us nothing. Okay. So Brad has a suggestion. Okay. Which is not volunteer, but I think it’s a good one. I’m glad to hear it. So Brad, do you want to? Sure. Well, after reading Taylor’s report that was sent out to us, and of course I was like, called Jeff, like, what in the world is this? I’m sorry. I felt what we need is to be a client of an accounting firm, someone who could just, you know, you, Taylor, Diane, talk to them and say, this is where we are. This is what we think we need. Can you tell us what we really need? And if we do need an audit, you know, I’m surely these guys are accountants. This is what they do. They would be able to do it for us. It’s an accounting firm here in Texas. I have done business with them for more than 30 years. I know them. It’s a small firm, three partners and some staff are located outside Fort Worth. And I’m happy to give their contact of the partners that I do business with to Jeff and he can get it to you. And you just give her a call and talk to her. I’m just going to tell you to send it directly to her. Okay. You don’t need to do it to me. I’m fine with that. Okay. Well, I’ll see if I’ve got her email. Anyway, we’ll get that taken care of. But you can give her a call. I mean, you were telling me about a situation that they helped you with a seven-year thing. They did help us with another situation in another organization. I was with a mess. I certainly don’t. We are not a mess. No. This was a mess. I don’t want to go into the details of it here. Right, right, right. But they were very benevolent and helped us out with this mess. So I’m certainly would never want to go to them with a mess like that again. But we are not a mess. We have all our records intact. Everything’s good. And, you know, they won’t charge us for you to talk to them. But if we become a client, you know, their fees are reasonable. Are they reasonable? Well, I don’t know around that term. Well, yeah. Between $10,000 and $30,000. Let me put it this way. They’re not a huge, huge firm in a 50-story building in downtown Dallas. They are a small firm in a town outside Fort Worth. I’ve been doing business with them for years. They did have an office here in Dallas for a while, but it was also a small office. But no, they’re a very reasonable accounting firm. They know what they’re doing. They do business with all kinds of businesses. They do business that concerns things outside of Texas. You know, come on, you got computers nowadays. You can file tax returns anywhere from New York to Hawaii from your little office in Cleveland, Texas. So they know what they’re doing. So I think they can advise us on what we need. Yeah, Brad. I really, really thank you for that. And like I said, you know, sorry about that long report, y’all. Don’t freak out. They had good intent. And it was four pages. So I had to try to trim it down somehow. It was excellent. And just to mention the price I gave you was not a quote, certainly, but that is usually the cost of starting a certified audit for fundraising purposes. And that’s why I was asking Jeff earlier. And so, Taylor, I really appreciate you clarifying it. I would have not really had asked the question after your explanation. Again, very thorough. I want you on my team if I’m looking for a CPA auditing firm. Thank you, Larry. Thank you. Okay. Does anyone else on the board have any comments or questions? I think we’ve got a good plan here moving forward, which is good. I’m very excited. I like the idea of an internal review where possible, but I understand. Let’s find out what the CPA firm tells us. Like what, what legally do we need to do here? And I think even if they tell us, Hey, you just go do an internal review. Then they’ll fine. That’s what we’ll do. Okay. Perfect. Okay. Um, all right. Can I get someone to, uh, um, approve the audit report? Or do we need to do that for committee reports? I don’t think we do. And there was no motion taken on it. Yeah, I don’t think we need to. Okay. All right. Committee reports. We just, yeah, that’s fine. Okay. Rosanna is not here. Not Rosanna. Although she is not here either. We got two people with ours. So it’s messing me up here. Renee is out to dinner tonight. And so she will not be here to give a fundraising report. The only thing that she wanted to report is that she’s working on the logo and that she to speak to the national office and that there is no limitation on an amount of funds that we can actually have. So in our fundraising effort. Jeff? Yes. Don’t worry. I’ll come back to you second. Okay. Okay. I’m going to have you give you a report in just a minute. Is that what you’re referring to, Diane? Yeah. I did have a couple updates I wanted to provide. Oh, I will get. Yeah. I’m just mentioning this because she’s not here and then I’ll just hand it to you. Okay, great. So without further ado, let’s talk about budget. Diane? Okay. Yeah. So you saw the report that Peggy Carpenter did. And we had our last, we did meet in February. And the updates that I have are, number one, I was supposed to ask John about whether or not the budget is something that the board would have the authority to approve or whether it would have to go before the entire membership. And John felt that, you know, that we as the basically the trustees of the organization, that we would have the authority to approve the budget without having to go to the membership. Also, Jeff sent out a reminder. We are looking for expenses. If you have any idea of expenses you’re going to have either for 2024 or 2025 for your committees, all of you committee chair people. You know, we would like to know what that is. And if we don’t receive anything, then I guess we can assume that you aren’t going to have anything that we need to cover. And, you know, then we will just base our budget on current history and, you know, maybe some past treasurer’s reports for some of the items. And, you know, just adjust them accordingly. I have a phone appointment set up tomorrow at 11 a.m. Eastern with a Chase Bank representative so that I can find out if there is somewhere where we can put some of our money. I would really like to keep it with JPMorgan Chase because they are so accessible and they’re also very pleasant to work with. And they, you know, so hopefully they’ll have something for us that, you know, that we can put our money, some of our money in so that we are earning more than 28 cents a month. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think we can do better than that. Yeah. And was there anything else I was going to report on? I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I think that was it. Great. Okay. Hey, Jeff. Yes. Renee is here and she has her hand raised. Oh, okay. You must be back from dinner. Renee, do you have a comment on your report? Yes. Tomorrow evening, I will be meeting with the publications committee to find out when they can meet with us. I’ll get some Monday night dates. Then they can meet with us to discuss what their idea of a logo is so that we can just get together on the same length of what we would like to see before we decide about how much money we’re going to be needing to raise. Okay. OK. All right. Thank you. Thank you, Renee. Hope your dinner was good. Yeah, it was. Thank you. Excellent. OK, so now we’re going to move to did someone have a comment? No, I did. I’m saying goodbye to our, you know, our house member. OK, OK, fine. I want to at least acknowledge her. All right. Let’s do this. Let’s let’s see. Debbie Armstrong, are you with us? Okay. So Brad, why don’t you go ahead and give your presentations and convention reports, and then we’ll call on Debbie when she’s here. I know she’s here, but she’s probably cooking or something. So we’ll go to Brad and he’ll give his presentations and convention report, and then we’ll call on Debbie. Okay. Go ahead, Brad. All right. Thank you. Let’s see. Reading from my notes here that I used to prepare the report the email Jeff sent out. Let’s see. We had presentations since the last board meeting we had, which was on what? February 7th, I believe. We did Apple Bytes. Hold it. Mac Bytes on February 13th. Debbie Armstrong did her taking control of your groups.io email. We did and then we did MacBytes. Okay, so we just had three this past month. Moving on to March. Okay, this is where it starts to get exciting. March 12th, we’ll have MacBytes. That’s our reoccurring one. It’s always on the second Tuesday. March 13th, the next night, Herbie’s going to do his introduction to Disclose. This was supposed to be in February, but it got rescheduled because Herbie wasn’t quite ready to go. So we got Debbie in in February on the 14th and Herbie’s going to or maybe it was the 24th. I can’t remember. Anyhow, so Herbie’s doing no, Herbie was going to the 20th. Never mind. So Herbie’s going to do his intro to Discord on what I say, March 13th. And then we’re going to do Apple ByteDome March 27th. We have CSUN in the middle of this month, and a lot of people attend CSUN, so we kind of didn’t want to schedule anything that week. So we have those three. But now here’s the exciting part. We are beginning a new twice-monthly presentation. This is a collaboration that Jeff mentioned with Presentations Committee and the Education Committee. where we are going to call this presentation Basics with Bits. And the intent of this is not only to get the Bits name out there even more than it already is, but it’s to provide technology. We’re going to call it a gentle helping hand to those who need it, getting more confident with their technology. So this is not going to be, you know, anything for intermediate or advanced. This is a beginner’s kind of thing. And there’s a lot of topics that can be covered. Our first presentation that will be this coming Saturday, March 9th, Debbie Armstrong is going to do a presentation on getting more confident in navigating the web using your JAWS and or NVDA screen readers. So it’s basic stuff, navigating web elements, things of that nature. But, you know, when you’re not familiar with it, basic stuff isn’t so basic. A lot of people struggle with this stuff. So that’s the intent of this call. Debbie and her education committee team Are going to be Handling the content Of this we are going To be like I said Saturdays every other second And fourth Saturday there’s already The basic iPhone classes On the first and third Saturday so I didn’t want to be on the same day As those guys they do a great job Handling basic stuff for You know the same kind of Target audience so I didn’t want to have two calls for that same target audience on the same day. So we’re going to be on the 2nd and 4th, 3 p.m. Eastern. We will be on ACB Media. I mean, ACB Community. I’m getting ahead of myself in my head. And we will be streamed on ACB Media, and we’re also going to have it on Clubhouse for those who’d like to join that way. It will also be put in podcast rotation, which is not something we do on other calls, but this one we are really trying to use this to get the exposure out there for bits and also to convey the message that this is not just for higher level, you know, technology users. You know, we want to be welcoming to users at all levels. So we’re really excited about it. Actually, Cindy came to Jeff with an idea for another call like this. They don’t, you know, that would help out this group. So anyways, that’s Basics with Bitch. Please look for it at the end of the day. And join us if you can. 3 p.m. Eastern, this Saturday, March 9th. We have, let me see, moving down my notes, moving down my notes. We are working on a couple of more, a couple of presentations for April. Don’t have dates for necessarily. Of course, we have MacBytes and AppleBytes as always. Herbie’s working on an overview of Audacity. A lot of people have expressed an interest in audio editing. So Herbie’s working on Audacity. I’m not sure the date on that one yet. I have to get with Herbie. And we are going to have also put on by Debbie. and the Education Committee, a panel discussion on, hold it, make sure I get it correct, learning screen readers and office products and learn independent resources for helping you learn these technologies. And we have scheduled that for April 17th. And Debbie has been working hard and has put together a panel. I can’t remember if it’s five or six people on the panel. This will probably be a longer than an hour, maybe like a two-hour presentation. By the time we go through each panel member, we’ll have a presentation. Then, of course, as always, there’ll be time for Q&A from, you know, members of the participants. So that’s my presentations committee report. And I did finally get me unmuted. It kept saying the host does not allow you to unmute, but finally the host did. So I’m able to give my education report now, if you’d like. Could you? Yeah, why don’t we do that, and then we’ll come back to convention. That’s fine. Yeah, that’d be great. That’s perfect. I have a comment related to events, but I can do that later. Okay, we’ll get there. I just want to say that Brad pretty much said everything I was going to say. Right now, the Education Committee is working hard to find a meeting time that can be regular and that works for all of our members. Joel has really worked hard putting together a forum for our committee that members can fill in meeting times that work best for them and I wanted to say that one of the things about the basics with bits is that our goal really is To show that bits can give back to the ACB community and that we are part of the larger community Regarding our premise panel presentation on the 17th of April That will be a BITS exclusive and that means it doesn’t have to be just an hour. ACB community calls are restricted to one hour. Our presentation, because it’s going to be a BITS exclusive, is going to go for two hours and we’re going to give members a chance to build all those foundation skills because we have a lot of plans in the works for more sophisticated classes, things like WordPress. And in order to be successful in the sophisticated classes, you do have to have those foundation skills. So that’s one of my goals with this upcoming presentation is to get members who are really serious about taking the advanced classes to be finding independent study resources for working on those foundation skills. So that’s all I have to say. And I’m going to go back on mute. David, you have a comment? Yes. I know people have been asking for it and it’s starting to come together. bits events recordings are showing up on the events list files area temporarily until we get the new website. Um, that was sent out over the events list. If you didn’t get that, uh, let us know. We’ll get you the details on how to access that. Good. Okay. And that would be in the files area of the events email group on groups.io website. Correct. all right so david you want to turn the convention no it’s me i mean proud i’m sorry yes that’s okay he can do it if he wants no no no no no i’m sorry i just i’ll share ignore the man behind the curtain all right convention uh we’ve been working hard the convention committee continues to meet every other week as we approach the deadlines for information gen at once getting ready. Let me see what I got here. I’m going to try and go down my notes because there’s a lot here. The dates of the, we are planning a six different presentations during the virtual portion of this summer’s convention. The dates of the virtual convention are, let me make sure, June 27, June 28, and June 29. That’s Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Okay, similar to what we did last year. We are planning a, okay, come on. We are still planning, as previously reported, it says here in the report, we are planning a three-part presentation on AI. Part one will be using AI ethically and responsibly. By the way, Jeff has taken the lead on all three of these presentations. Way to go, Jeff. First one is ethically and responsible use of AI in, I don’t know if that’s the workplace or just ethically responsibility. Day two, we’re going to look at AI platforms. And day three, Brian Hartchen has been confirmed. He’s going to do a presentation for us on AI in the workplace. So those three presentations, all those will be held at 11. 7 a.m. since the convention’s in Jacksonville. All times for convention are local. That means Eastern because we’re in Jacksonville this year. So that’s those three. We have three other presentations that will be at 2 p.m. each day. The first one, we have iBug, iBlind Users Group. Many of us are familiar with iBug. is going to do a presentation on productivity apps, stock productivity apps on your iPhone. This will be an expanded version of a presentation that was done during the recent Sagebrush Randolph Shepard Vendor Association meeting. It was very well received, and we thought that would be a good idea to expand on that a little bit because there’s more time in the virtual convention. There’s 75 minutes slots. So we’re going to take a look at some of those. Let’s see the second one. We are looking at implementation and maintenance of websites for affiliates and chapters. Michael Babcock is taking the lead on this presentation. And we are doing this in, we are partnering with the Leadership Institute on this presentation. And last but not least, we have Computers for the Blind. They have a presence at the convention in the vendor area. So we are going to get Computers for the Blind on there to talk about what they have to offer and how ACB members can take advantage of what is offered by Computers for the Blind. Marty Sobo and Marcy Doody are taking the lead on this presentation. The employment committee has asked us to partner with them on a technology in the workplace presentation. And we’re still there taking the lead on this one. And we are going to provide whatever assistance they would like us to provide in the presentation. So we’re still waiting to hear more about what they want to do. I’m sure we’ll get that soon. The Janet Dickelman’s convention committee, she wants us to have all participants to have turned in a, you know, descriptions of your events, paragraph description of it, and names of presenters. That’s her first goal post she wants us to meet. That’s coming up March 20th. So all this stuff will get put down in ink instead of pencil and sent to Janet by that date, hopefully before that date. So let’s see. Then the other thing, and Jeff may have alluded to this before, after listening to the last convention planning meeting, I realized that a lot of groups were planning receptions and mixers and other hospitality events. And I talked to Jeff and said, you know, with all of the growth that’s gone on with BITS, I thought it might be appropriate to see about planning a reception is what I called it. Or just an event for people to this would be at the in-person convention in Jacksonville in July. In event to, you know, possibly in a meeting room, possibly with food and other libations, there would be a cost associated with it. I know Jeff has reached out to Janet, and I think he may or may not have heard back from her by that. Not yet. Okay. She’s busy. We probably need to be a squeaky wheel on that. Yeah. I wanted to give her a day because I think she was at leadership. Yeah. No, she wasn’t. She was there virtually. oh really oh well then oh no she was not there she she did do a presentation um but she was um um on zoom she was at home in minneapolis so okay um yeah so anyhow uh we would like to have more information on that because i know that would probably if it involves some some dollars some dollars, we need board approval and we’d like to actually have numbers to present. You can’t approve anything if you don’t know what the numbers are. So hopefully we’ll know something more by the next board meeting. If not, we’re in trouble. If not, we’re not in any trouble. No, we should have something. Yeah, we should have something by then. Yeah. I will certainly. We have a, Janet has another meeting next Thursday. So hopefully we can even talk to her before that. So I believe that is my, the next convention committee meeting will be this Saturday, the 9th. It’ll be a busy Saturday. It will be after the basics with bits a little bit. So that’s my convention committee report for this time around. May I ask a question? Sure. Can you go over again? Because you may have been too fast for me. So which of these presentations would you expect to be virtual? And will any of them be in person only? No, all of them are virtual. All six are virtual during the virtual portion of the convention, which is Thursday, Friday, Saturday, June 27, 28, and 29. The three AI sessions are at 11 a.m. each day. And the other three sessions are at 2 p.m. each day, all times Eastern. Each session is 75 minutes in length. We’ll provide material, be presented, and then there’s always is Q&A from participants. So the only thing that will be in person then maybe is going to be your social activity. Correct. The social event, yes. That would be it if that happens, which we hope it does. I think that would be great for BITS to – That would be good. I’d be sorry. I probably won’t be there. We’ll pack you in a suitcase and take you with us. Oh, okay. Okay. Everybody wants to go to Jacksonville in July, right? Yeah. I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s going to be very expensive to fly there from Tucson, but we’ll see. Okay. Any questions for Brad? All right. Excellent. Let’s move to IT and hear from Mr. Babcock. Michael. All right. Let’s go back to, we’ll come back to Michael. Hopefully you can get unmuted here a little bit later. And let’s move over to membership and have John give his report. John. Okay. Thank you very much, Jeff. I’m going to just do the highlights of the report. Do have some additional things to add. First of all, in typical fashion, the report as circulated indicated 720 members. We’re actually at 719. We’ll go into the specifics of that. Somebody who’s due payment is slightly problematic. And, Jeff, you’ll be apprised of this by communications I’ve had with you. I’m sure it’ll get straightened out. I’m not worried about it. As you know, we brought the moratorium to a close on January 31st, so things have mellowed out a little bit. I’m very happy about that. I was approached by Jeff because he was approached by Cindy who wanted data. So actually some of this report was at least the data for SAME was put in place, was prepared on February 22nd. And I’ve just updated that. So as you know, we’re going with 719 members. The international cadre is like 10.3%, give or take. And we have 74 members, and I’ll break them down. You can see this in the report, but we have 32 Canadians. That shouldn’t surprise anybody that that would be the highest group. Followed by the UK with 12, Australia with eight, South Africa with four, Ireland. Yeah, Ireland got three. And Germany has two. That brings us up to 61, and the remaining 13 is one from each country. Let me jump down. As I said in my report, it really is impossible for me to come up with an exact number of people who were not known to ACB beforehand. A lot of people indicated that they weren’t ACB members, and I don’t want to say they were members. Maybe they were at one time, but they weren’t aware of being an ACB member or went back so far. My practice was always to verify that with Sharon rather than create a new record where I don’t have to. But some people’s connection with ACB was sufficiently tenuous. Maybe they made an inquiry about something or applied for a scholarship for this, that. I mean, ACB never misses an opportunity, nor should it, to get somebody’s data and at least create an AMS record for them. So let me jump down. Okay, there are, well, this is a little bit outdated. We have 36 people since the close of the moratorium. That’s up a little bit. Probably, I mean, a little more than that now. Eight people have applications, but no dues payments. And I do want to reach out to them to encourage them to remit dues. And I’m working on that. Okay, about the three agenda items. I’m not going to cover those because you can see that in the report. Hang on. Oh, okay. As far as the certification goes, let me jump down to my addendum. I mentioned in my report rather obliquely that, well, let me say this first. I am extremely happy about and proud of the fact that the BITS-specific data, the ones I put in the BITS-specific fields, totally up-to-date, solid. There are five fields there. BIT certified, the classification of membership, when the year of, to which, you know, how, when their membership expires, PayPal and date of last payment or method of payment and date of last payment were applicable. Moratorium is tracked. All that data is rock solid. Now, something to say about that at the end. What I did say is about for 20% of the folks, we don’t really have good information about gender, ethnicity, and vision status. That was understated a bit. I did some analysis today, and it’s more like 28%. It was worse at the beginning of the day. In short, we have 202 folks who don’t have reliable data in this field, but I’ll whittle that down. Even at like 40 a day, that’s just going to take about five days or so. Frankly, I had not prioritized getting that data straightened out. And I don’t apologize for that because, well, I understand that ACB wants the data. And because ACB wants it, we need to care about it at some level. But the priority, unapologetically, needed to be the bit-specific data. I mean, that data could get fixed up in May or June. It doesn’t go to their voting rights and any of that stuff. But I will take care of it before the AMS goes offline on March 15. What that means is that we can’t add records, but that’s the time for certification. Now, speaking to certification, I set the default certification status for the 790 records, AMS records that we have. I set the default status to yes. Why did I do that? a heck of a lot easier to decertify 72 than it is to put everybody’s default at no and have to check marks next to what today would be 719 people, just a matter of it being easier. But I’ve got that well in hand. I’ve done certifications for the last maybe more than 10 years. I did it before we even had AIM. So not worried about anything there. Okay, I thought it would be nice to give you some data about membership expirations. We have 44 life members, so they expire, those memberships expire when they do. 44 there. We have seven people whose memberships will expire on 12-31-2026. We have 58 members whose memberships will expire on 12-31-2025, and all the rest would be at 2024. So that’s a lot of data, and I think that covers everything. John, can you tell us again the number that you think we have that are brand new to ACB? I think between 190 and 200, I think. So just to remind everyone here, because this is the number that just astonishes me. When we did our certification last year, we certified 179. And I think, at least in my math, 190 is larger than 179. I think it is. Yeah. And which means that we added more people that were brand new to ACB than we actually had as members a year ago. So I just find that fascinating. So very, very interesting. Great. Any questions for anyone? Can you restate the total number of memberships we have at this point in time? 719. 719, like the Colorado area code. and I suspect we’re going to get at least one or two more before we’re done here. Oh, I’m sure of that. We can straighten out this, you know, just in a nutshell, the person believed themselves to have been an ACB life member. Yeah. And they, they weren’t, and they think they are. So straighten it out with Nancy and one of the other of you get back to me. Yep. Okay. Uh, Michael Babcock, are you back with us? I am apparently I can’t unmute on my phone. And, uh, so yeah, I appreciate it. So I will probably be the shortest report. Long story ish short is I wanted to make our new website have all these amazing features and all these amazing things that members can log in and update all their data and verify their expiration date of their membership and get access to the material. And I became overwhelmed. And kind of, I guess the best word is analysis paralysis. And so when I couldn’t figure that out, I reached out to a couple of individuals and here’s the problem that I’m facing. What would you suggest doing? And it was brought to my attention. Well, why don’t we just get the basics in place for members to be able to log in and is the process we’re taking right now. And then we will grow the membership back end and provide additional functionality and features after we get the basics in and members have access. My goal by the end of March is to have our committee, the IT committee, access to the membership site, which means that the data will have been moved over from bits-acb.org, restricted to those specific membership levels that are available. And as I said, the IT committee will then be testing the website process. At that point, we’ll have some feedback based on what individual state and let us know, hey, you know, maybe we should have a heading here, or maybe we should have this type of menu here, or where’s this feature. Once that feedback is provided, then my goal is early to mid-April, the rest of the membership will start to receive their invitations to the website, which will then inquire you of clicking a link, setting a password, and then being able to sign in and access it. So that’s what we have in relation to the website. And really appreciate everyone’s patience and the creativity of other committees within the organization for being able to provide information to members that they ask for, and that is specifically access to recordings of events. So if you need any assistance with that, there definitely is plenty of individuals you can reach out to in order to get assistance with accessing those files. But for the interim, the groups.io file system seems to be working fairly well for access to that. Do we want to talk about Bob, Jeff, or not yet? We’ll wait on Bob because we’ve got to get Bob going and then we’ll talk about Bob. So next board meeting, we’ll have some awesome stuff to announce. And then the last thing that I’ll mention in this interim is we have set up a tool and system in place for password sharing. Because password sharing is not something we want anyone doing. Emailing passwords back and forth is probably one of the most insecure things that an organization of any size could be doing. So we’ve set up an encrypted database and access to that is available for individuals who need access to it. And that has primary passwords for all of our tools and services. I said that was the last thing I’d see. This is getting a little longer than I anticipated. Actually, you have one more of this you haven’t mentioned yet. So, yeah, go on. OK, I’m sure Jeff’s going to prompt me with something else. I will. I will. If you don’t mention it, I’ll mention it. OK, because it’s going to impact Diane. See, so. Oh, oh, yeah. Well, it’s in your report. It is in my report, and that’s probably what I’m getting to here. One last thing that we wanted to mention is our GoDaddy. There you go. There you go. See, I knew I had more to get there. There you go. We’re on the same page. Shared hosting account for GoDaddy does expire in June. So we, for those who may not have been aware, we did set up a nonprofit shared hosting account with DreamHost. And so in June, the web hosting will expire. And the only paid products that we will have through GoDaddy at that point will be bits-acb.org and joinbits.org, which are both domain registrations. And those will be the only two things. And we should actually just transfer those over to DreamHost and be done. Yes. That way it’s all in that one. Yeah, frankly. Okay. That’s something I’d have to go into the GoDaddy account to do. well we’ll we’ll we’ll we’ll discuss that with you later okay yeah that’s complicated you gotta yeah that’s okay yeah yeah let’s not get into that here i recommend uh doing it before definitely before june may i would do may actually yeah may i ask another question yes something something i heard at the leadership conference. And they said that ACB National was using Drupal? Yes. So I guess my question is, I guess I’m wondering why they would be using it and why we decided not to? If you can give me a question. So I will give you my answer. And I suspect Jeff may have much more expertise across the internet in WordPress than there is in Drupal. Unless you get into, Drupal is really meant for enterprises. And for example, where I work at the University of Arizona, they’re a really large Drupal shop. But I mean, you have literally, you know, hundreds and hundreds of people that work on Drupal there. And they’re, you know, like it’s meant for humongous websites. You know what I mean? It’s not meant for sites like ours, right? So it’s better for us to be very nimble and be able to use tools that anybody can really manage, as opposed to Drupal, which is a bit more technically involved. Okay. Okay. All right. Thanks. I also echo the same thing. I know more people that know WordPress. I use WordPress. We all know the tools that we use and can implement those in there much easier than something new. Great. Anything else, Mr. Babcock? No, I think that’s it. All right. I want to ask one question or make one point. I know, and in my report, I spoke about getting together with the IT committee. I know they’re, I think one of the hopes that we share is that members can log in and see when their membership expires. Yeah, we will get that there. in my report is that I want to get to those numbers that I gave in my, the end of my report should be considered as soft until I confirm them with Diane. I mean, I think, you know, I think they’re accurate, but Diane is tracking the money and I’m, I have good historical data as you know, there’s a lot of people prepaid so they get extended. That’s why it’s not simple, but I’ve spent a lot of time on it. I have reasonable confidence, a reasonable level of confidence in that data, but I’m going to confirm it with Diane. which we’ll get together at some point, very comparatively near future. And then we can put that, you know, it can be part of a member can go in and say, because I hear members say, when the heck does my membership expire? We get prepayments because they don’t know. And they say, how the heck would they hear? Give $20. You worry about where I wind up. Yeah. And John, I think you would appreciate the, as you just stated, the complicatedness that having a lot of data in a lot of places can be. And ultimately, that is the goal of being able to let a member log in and say, oh, John sees he’s a lifetime member. He never needs to renew. And Diane sees that her membership expires in January of 2027. So, you know, that’s information we can get to the members. But we want to get something in place right now and then build on that platform. you know, okay, I just wanted to get a sense of when you thought you needed the information. I’m going to keep that. I mean, the information’s there now. You can take it in May, you can take So, you know, so one last thing that I also wanted to bring up, Jeff, that I forgot about they wish their website was more useful for their members. Yeah. Yeah. We’ve been talking about this for a while. Yeah. Yeah. And I think us as bits, yes, it’s taking a little longer than I know I personally anticipated. And it’s not done as quickly and whatnot. But I think us building this foundation is a good opportunity to partner with education to help teach affiliates. Do it right, not fast. Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. And so, yeah, very good. Okay. Real quick, because I just want to try to eliminate stuff off my agenda here. I don’t think we have anything to talk about tonight from the Constitution bylaws credentials. And I know that Marie from nominating didn’t have anything at this point. Is that true from everyone here tonight? Jeff, the only thing I want to say is that I plan to have the first meeting with Con and it’s kind of by was by April. OK, perfect. OK, so, you know, it might not be by the board meeting, but it’ll be by the middle of April. No, that’s fine. I just wanted to make sure it was just. Yeah, that’s good. OK, good. So I just wanted to eliminate that from my I’m just trying to just kill things off the agenda here. Okay, we are down to communication. And we have a guest chair of the publications committee, that being our secretary. So she’s going to play Rosanna, because Rosanna is at a Toto concert. So take it away. Good evening, everybody. This is so trippy. You know, they say when you learn how to ride a bike, you never forget it. I haven’t done one of these types of reports in over a year. So if this goes sideways, charge it to me and not Rosanna. But hopefully I am now in competition with both Brad and Michael. I am going to win shortest report. I don’t know. David might beat you. We’ll see. That’s true. He might. Well, all right. We can tie. How’s that? I just have four quick takeaways from Rosanna’s report, which, of course, appears in full in your packet. The publications committee meets on the second Thursday of every month. So our last meeting was the 8th of February, at which time we began preliminary brainstorming and discussion of the elements that may end up in our BITS logo, which would be the visual representation symbolizing all that BITS is and does and may do in the future. The Publications Committee will work in tandem with the Fundraising Committee Chair and her committee members, along with the President and, of course, ultimately the Board, who I believe have to approve the logo that will be realized. So stay tuned for more on that in the coming weeks. Secondly, the Publications Committee welcomed our newest member, Debbie Armstrong, who has agreed to become the able captain of the ship of our forthcoming Bits newsletter. Stay tuned for more information coming in the near future about how Bits members can participate in its creation through the submission of articles, ideas, and other things. Thirdly, Herbie and Marianne are still looking after all of our friends on Facebook. There may be some changes forthcoming to our Facebook page necessitated by some IT-related concerns. If those changes are realized, we will certainly be making you more aware of that in the future. And finally, Bits just celebrated its first birthday on Mastodon a few days back. Yay, us! We’ve been there a year, and I just think it’s so cool that we were there before a lot of other entities even showed up on the scene. We have 93 lovely people who followed us and who are engaging with us over there. And we, just in case any of our newly arrived members didn’t know, we are there on Mastodon. I will tell you that our username is at sign bits ACB at Mastodon dot social. That’s at sign bits ACB at Mastodon dot social, all lowercase. And I can certainly, after the meeting, post that to the main discussion list so everybody can see it in writing and copy and paste it wherever it needs to go. We need to get to 100 by the weekend. That would be good. That would be very cool. That would be marvelous, right? That would be fun. Okay, let’s do that. Tell everybody. Please come and join us. Go do it now. I will do that. And I will post it, as I said, on the discussion list. Our next meeting is March 14th, I believe. It’s a week from tomorrow, whatever that is. And Rosanna will be back next month with much more enlightenment and fun for everybody. And with that, I have done it. I can return to my little birdie perch in the corner. Okay. I would put it on the social list, I think. Oh, okay. Or both. Or both. Oh, okay. How about I put it on the main list and the Elven magic people who move these things? There you go. It’s not my province. I will happily let him do that. Thanks, everybody. Have a good night. Take care. Okay. Well, you’re not going away, are you? I am not. I’m just going back to my little perch in the corner. All right. Tweet, tweet, tweet. Tweet. All right. Let’s go ahead and see if David can beat your report time here. Did I hear Brad? I didn’t know if Brad had a question or something. Okay. I’m just going to talk about that photo concert. Okay. David, do you want to give your Zoom committee report, and then we’ll go to Ms. Hazleton on her email management committee report? Yeah, I can do that real quick. Okay. The chat’s been going well, really well attended, 30, 40 people or more at times. We have the typical Zoom room, but we have a few breakout rooms. So if you get into a situation where you need help, you got that. If you want to do a side conversation, you got that. And so that’s been going well. If you haven’t joined us yet, please consider joining. I’ve updated the chat announcement to make it more friendly and welcoming, and that’s been getting out there, and I’ve heard a couple of responses that people like it. I’ve reached out for new chat hosts, and I’ve been talking with a few of them, and if you haven’t heard from me, I will be getting to you. If you want to reach out again, you can, but I will be getting back to you. I would like to see about starting a chat on Friday where new hosts can co-host with myself or somebody else. So they can try out their wings if they feel they’re ready, if we feel they’re ready. If you want to consider hosting with us, we’ll meet you where you’re at. Either help you learn things to get on board or touch up or, you know, we’ll be ready to go. That’s my report. Great. All right. Thank you, David. Any questions for David? All right. Debbie. Thanks so much to the committee. I’ll tell you what. I have just really appreciated the group conscience of the committee. That’s helped enormously. Jason Castonguay, Mike Hartwig, David Edick, Jeff Yu, and Merv Keck. Each of them, and I have to say, not to play down anyone else, but especially Merv, because many of you, even Robin just said, Merv can move, or Jeff said, Merv can move a message. Merv is great at this. We both were doing it for a while, and I realized that we were starting to duplicate things. So I have deferred to Merv, and it’s been going really well. Merv has been moving messages and notifying people privately and writing on the list that have moved to the topic lists. And it’s like the discussion, well, the discussion list has become kind of like an intersecting lobby. And he’s been posting three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, the lists, the moderators, the subscription info, and highlights from various lists to bring more content to those lists, and really wishing that moderators would do this for your lists. We have written to the moderators list, and some moderators are doing this, and some moderators are not. So we’re looking at that. And we have, well, we both have private conversation with people, emails, but Merv especially has lots of private correspondence. I don’t have as much as I was getting because, fortunately, there aren’t anywhere near as many complaints. We have changed the reply function based on the member polling that we did. And most, I started getting thank yous immediately. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you for the traffic calming down. Thank you for the places where the people have been replying so often are not coming across like that on really any of the lists because more people are writing privately and we’re moving them or Merv is moving them to other lists. So that’s been seeming to help quite a bit. We did start a tech chat list and I have debated a little bit about whether this would be a tech chat list or just a chat list, but we have WhatsApp and Discord, and we also have an conversation list. So we want to keep bits as tech-oriented. And so conversation threads so far have been restarting in 24 hours. Merv and I were chatting tonight about maybe making that a little bit longer. We’ll see. But the ground rules did mention WhatsApp and Discord and Zoom. And those are really not under our email committee or management team’s jurisdiction, but we mentioned them at least for now to try to remind everyone that we want the across bits. We want the atmosphere to be safe, welcoming, and respectful. And we have heard complaints of at least one person who has gotten on WhatsApp and been reaming people out or at reaming someone out about the length of their message and just, I guess, attempting to act like they are a leader. And so whoever is in charge of those channels, and I think with WhatsApp, It’s Herbie, but maybe there are moderators who could be appointed. I don’t know how that could happen, but we just don’t want that to get out of hand. We’re trying to hope that that could be kept consistent. And I don’t know about Discord, if there’s someone who’s overseeing maybe the social. Same, you know, Herbie, if it’s you. And Zoom, we know with David, he was part of our conversation and we talked a lot about the first room that you come into on the chat being kind of like a lobby as well. And so if there gets to be an over dominance of people or a specific conversation that doesn’t leave room for new people to get involved. And I still think that there are new people who come in who don’t always know how to raise their hand. I remember getting a message from somebody who was new. I think it was a couple months ago. They were new and they didn’t know how. So we may need to remind people how to raise their hands, how to speak up. But, you know, we want people to not just be overly dominated on our lists or in chat. So that’s been important. You know, we’ve talked about that in our management team as well. Most people are really, I mean, I commend our people on lists doing so well thinking, oh, let’s see, I need to bring this mention of Braille to the Braille list. And I need to bring this Microsoft over here to the Microsoft list. That’s a lot. And yet I really commend everyone who’s doing it because it’s really giving everyone on those lists a chance to go deeper into those topics. And at the same time, it’s giving everyone the opportunity to not feel so deluged with email and trying to get more work done, more life happening. And so we really appreciate everyone’s goodwill in working with us. And we’re just doing our best. I think we have, what is it, 16 lists now? Oh, my heavens. So, and you can always subscribe and unsubscribe from different lists, but some people say, oh, I don’t, you know, I’m not subscribed to that list. Well, it’s really easy to subscribe and it’s easy to unsubscribe. It’s easy to get digest if you want. So, you know, but we’re here to help all of us on this, our management team, but in bits, you know, there’s just so much goodwill and good support. So I think that concludes what I have to say. Any questions? Okay. Thank you, Debbie. Yeah. All right. Let’s try to get through these really quickly. Under old business, it’s kind of old slash new, but I put it under old because it has to do with our Python course. This has not become a problem at the moment, but I foresee it becoming one as we progress into actually coding. So we have people on the Mac and we have people on that are using NVDA exclusively. For JAWS users, we’re using Tandem and that’s working out well. We still have our RIM offer, which is that, you know, people have an hour to use and that includes us as well. So in other words, we could use up to an hour and then that hour goes away for 24 hours and you have to wait until the next day to get, you know, to provide support. So we are finding, though, that, for example, Joel, who’s one of the volunteers that’s helping us in the Python course, spent, I don’t know, almost three hours today with students. And so if no, I don’t believe he required the use of RIM today, although I think it would have been helpful if he had it. So I would like to see what the board would allow as a monthly monetary cost. I don’t have the pricing sheets up right here in reference to what that would look like. I don’t think that we want to do the unlimited price, which is $99 a month or $1,200 a year. I think that would be a bit much for us to afford. The plan that I’m thinking about is the plan where you can have unlimited time from Friday evening through Sunday evening. Basically, it’s a weekend type plan. Now, that does have a situation where if someone needed help on a Wednesday, that would be a bit of a problem. But I also think we need to be judicial here about, well, at least we need to be careful with our funds, right? So, I would like to at least have Diane take a look at this and then maybe we can say, you know, maybe the board can allocate, you know, $20 a month. It’s definitely less than $20. And maybe start with that and see if that would work out for us as far as, you know, what that would look like. We would want to use, we would probably want to create an email address for this, Michael. such that we could control what account it’s tied to. Maybe we use the class email address or something. I don’t know. We can figure that out later. But can I get someone to move a motion on this, or does anyone have any questions or concerns on this? I have a thought. Yeah. I like the idea, but I’m wondering if it’s worth it to reach out to Mike Calvo and RIM and ask if there’s any suggestions they would have for a support plan that we could… I’ve spoken to him about it, and it really comes down to they’re already being pretty generous with the offer that’s been given to Bits. So I don’t know that we can ask for more of like discounts or anything at this point. Right. If they’re fine with multiple people potentially logging in with that same account, then… I think it’s fine. I think it’s a shared, I think it would be a shared mailbox as far as it’s understood that this would be, in other words, only one person at a time can use it. In other words, if you had a student that was getting help, if there was another instructor that was also helping another student and someone was already using RIM, then they couldn’t do it. Right. So that restriction would remain in place. So I’d like to make a motion that I’m in favor of looking into what it would cost to get the plan that we would need during the time that we need to have class and recommend the board go ahead and purchase. What would be the top dollar amount you would like to? It’s 50 a month reasonable? Because we’re only talking a few months while the class is going on. I think you can do $50 will get you 15 hours, a bucket of 15 hours that you can use until it’s gone. I don’t know how long it’ll last. Yeah, so let’s look into it. So maybe what we do is we say- Do we need a motion just to look into it? No, that was going to be my point. I shouldn’t think we need a motion. Can we agree by consensus that- Whoever you designate, Jeff, will look into this and bring back something solid for us to consider in April. I would think that like what the idea Brad was suggesting, if we get the bucket of minutes for 50 bucks, if we can do that. Yeah, you already have those. Let’s just go ahead and do that because some of this. Yeah, because we may need it over the next few weeks. Yeah, just go ahead and. Is it 50 for 15 hours? Is that what it is, Brad? Yeah, that’s what I have. yeah okay so let’s let’s start with that and if we need another 15 hours and we’ll get it right i think that’s the right thing to do this is going to be part of our budget then is are you giving this you don’t know how long it lasts and you know if it how quickly we go through it before we would need to purchase another right it might last three months i don’t know it might it might last two weeks you know it might last a week i don’t know i don’t know I say if it’s around 50 or to 100 or whatever it is, that we get a bucket of minutes like that and go with that. I think we start with 50 and we start there. Yeah. $50 for 15 hours. Yes, John? I was distracted at the beginning of the conversation. How would this even work? If $50 for 15 hours, who would get to use it? How would they use it? Instructors would use it because it has to be, it’s controlled based on who controls the call. Oh, instructors, meaning people who are doing the classes? Correct. So that would be like Ken Perry or Joel or me or like someone who’s actually teaching the course, not BIF members. It would be someone with authority that could act on, you know, to actually work on their machine. I understand. Okay, perfect. Well, you know what? Under that, and, you know, I would, we can do this by consensus, or I make a motion that we make an initial outlay expenditure of $50.50 to get one five hours to be used by instructors. I’ll make that motion. One second. All right. Any discussion? I think we just discussed it. Okay. So I would, okay, all those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay. So Diane, before you do this, we need to figure out what we’re going to do. I’ll make a phone call to Mike and find out how he wants to handle this from what email address and those types of things so that we make sure we’re tying it to the right email address. Okay. Cause it’s going to have to be one that we tell the instructors when you’re logging in the rim, use this. Okay. So I’ll get back to you tomorrow on that. Okay. Okay. Real quick. I need some volunteers to work with me on the blind IT partnership discussion that we’re potentially going to be having with them. I don’t know that I need to have names right now, but if you’re interested, get in touch with me and we will form that subcommittee and we’ll go from there. I would like to see Michael and John, but that’s my own personal. If there are others, fine. Can you do a one or two sentence blurb on what it’s about? I don’t know what’s involved. So Blind IT is a, and Michael Babcock has some knowledge on this too. They do digital accessibility and Salesforce training. They’re also highly interested in our programming training that we are doing. And they are looking at doing some partnerships with us in reference to us sending students to them, them sending students to us. them sharing some, some, um, knowledge of some process things that they, that they’re doing, uh, that’s still being negotiated, but, uh, it’s, it’s more of just, again, a continued partnership. Um, they have, they literally have hundreds of, of positions available and open for blind, specifically blind developers and blind IT professionals that they’re wanting to hire. And so they would love to be able to tap into us and we would love to be able to tap into them. So, and it, go ahead. Jeff, because I know people don’t necessarily like acronyms for references, blind institute of technology.org is their website. And they, I took one of their Salesforce classes and they treat it like we’re treating the Python class. It is, it is expected that you will behave and be professional. Yes, sir. Okay. So I don’t need those names tonight, but if you’re interested, shoot me an email and we’ll get that process started. Any other old business before we move to new business? We’re almost done. I’m going to hold off the bitch chapters thing because it’s getting late because that’s going to be a lengthy discussion. Hearing none, we’ll go to new business. Does anyone have any objections to us starting to stream the BITS board meeting starting in April? Where would we stream it? Media 6. Media 6. I don’t think we would podcast it. It would just be live, and then we would do the recordings like we always have. It’s just another way for people to listen. Well, it will be podcasted, but we’ll talk more about that later. Yes. Okay. It will be on BITS. I don’t think so. Oh yeah. Yeah. That’s something else. Which is, which is the Bob is the business. Oh yeah. Right. The Bob is the new podcast and it’s called the business of fits. Yeah. Well, I’m sorry. I was thinking ACB media podcast. No, no, no. Well, it is on the ACB media network, but it’s a separate, okay. Nevermind. And we affectionately call it to Bob or unless you flip them, the B upside. Oh, nevermind. Anyway, um, yeah, it is. I was thinking mom and not Bob. I’m messing myself up here. Okay. That would be wow. Wow. Mom would be up. Mom upside down as well. Yeah. Okay. Okay. You know, that’s how mom. Yeah. Okay. All right. If I could, I, you know, I just, I brought this up last time. I just, BITS has gotten big and I thought we had a long time that the fact that our meetings were only open to members wasn’t the way it should be. So, and I thought, what better way to do it than media? Well, Media6 or something like that. Yeah. Okay. So are there any objections to this? I just, one question, one more question. Who would host that meeting then? I don’t know. That’s for us to figure out. I could still host for it, but because I’m. It doesn’t need to be. It’s just streamed. Yeah. I’m just. Yeah. Well, whatever. I mean, there has to be a host. I mean, community. We have streamers. We have a number of people of the community streaming team who are members of. Yes, I understand. And all we need to do is just one of them. Yeah. Can you get it out into the schedule, Brad? Yeah, that’s easy. It’s still in there for. Great. Okay. We don’t want to. We’re not looking at putting it on community where you listen on the Zoom. It’s just streamed. I’ll figure it out. Yeah, that’s fine. Okay. We just need somebody to be a streamer. We wouldn’t need to have it on Zoom because we’re giving the Zoom information here. Correct. Right. Correct. All we have to do is connect to the stream and hit the button. There we go. Okay. So unless anyone has objections, we’re streaming the board meeting starting in April. Okay. Guess what? We’re down to, because we’re going to postpone this discussion about chapters, because I think that’s going to be a lengthy discussion. I suspect that’s going to happen. So, and it’s not urgent, but if you have thoughts about it, send it to the board list. and we’ll start chewing on it and figure it out and yada, yada, yada, yada. Okay. It’s now time for the public to ask any questions of the board or to raise any concerns, provide constructive feedback. So if any of you in the audience have a question, now is your opportunity and you can raise your hand. Are you ready for me to speak? Yes. Okay. Is that Jamaica? No. It is now Jamaica. There you go, Jamaica. one in there it was it was someone else um but my sorry jamaica my question is about the uh the for the um for the delicate and alternate delegate is that is that supposed to happen for bits bits stuff as well uh that and and and and how is that supposed to um how is that supposed to operate of us sending sending our votes to to to how is that supposed and if it’s a totally different way of doing it that everybody else is doing it i i will need some I will need some instruction of how to how to do that if there if there is a totally new way of doing yeah there is a totally new way of doing voting for that that’s a very that’s a quickly because uh uh the well the the delegate and the alternate will be determined by the board um uh so that we you know i as president we can we can appoint that um as far as your votes though on constitutional amendments and changes in um things that will happen at national you raise a a valid concern here that we need to make sure that we that we um provide ample opportunity for This is tremendous. This is impeccable, actually. So thank you. Because the last time that there was a poll, I had to actually send my email. Yeah, we’re not going to do that. Because I don’t know how to do any polls with JAWS. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’re going to make this relatively easy. So we’ll figure that out. More than likely, what we’re going to do is we’re going to probably have caucuses. That’s what most of the affiliates do is they invite the members to come and we hold a caucus and people come and they and we’ll treat it as it will probably do it in the webinar room so that we can’t see people’s hands. You know, in other words, members can’t see their hands and we’ll allow people to vote there. That’s probably going to be the easiest way unless we can figure out a way to do it with a replacement ballot. So we will ponder this. Give us a month to figure that out. We’ll come back to you in April with a solution to this or at least a thought around it. So, okay. And just if there needs to be any help, I’m going to need some help. Don’t worry. We’ll help every single member through that process. Absolutely, Jamaica. Thank you. Again, thank you for raising this. This is tremendous. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Was Debbie next? Yeah, Deborah Armstrong is next. Yes, Debbie? All right. You can hear me okay? Yes. All right. Excellent. So I’m ready to get going on this newsletter. Do you want me to put out a request to solicit articles now on the conversation list, on the members list? Do you want me to wait for the publications committee? I would talk to the publications committee on how they want to handle that. All right. Excellent. Thank you. and somebody else too okay donna nikki first go ahead and unmute let’s see there is a hey nikki song that’s mikki oh that’s right that’s right you’re right you’re right i’m sorry okay it’s late sorry yeah oh well anyway um i just really quickly i understand exactly what brad is saying about the streaming and how that’s going to work. And I just wanted to let you all know that I at least, I know there’s okay donna very much hey there i just want to say uh the meeting was awesome very good and i’m back in bits and i wanted to offer you my services for hosting if you ever need me well thank you donna i think david should call you tomorrow all right so i’ll look okay make it so david okay anyone else i don’t see anybody else okay so i think the rule of thumb when i worked at microsoft was we do an eight second count if nobody raises their hand in eight we’re done right is that how way this works i don’t know okay she is now wrestling it’s three yeah well yeah yeah you kind of give people time to raise their hand or push the button or find the raise hand button or whatever. Okay. Well, thank you everyone so much for attending. The next board meeting will be April 3rd. Yeah. April 3rd. So put that on your calendar and we will have a lot more to talk about. We’ll probably have the date of the town hall event by So we’ll tell you more about that coming up. And we actually gave them two dates. So they’re going to pick one. And I think we’re good. All right. I don’t think we need a motion to adjourn, do we? That’s customary. I move adjournment. All right. It’s non-debatable, non-amenable. So you don’t even have to call a question. All right. Good night, everybody. Do it. Good night. DTFN. Yep. DTFN. Ta-ta for now. go tigger as one of my friends used to say in college i still a bye-bye yeah that’s right come on good night everybody song sing the tigger song no no no we’re not doing that goodbye you guys are doing great thank you for what you’re doing bye yes bye you Thank you. Thank you.