Time and Location

• 9:20 PM approx, to 10:45 PM
• J.C. Penney Meeting Room 3rd Floor

Attendance

• President: Dan Kern-Ekins
• Vice President: Bob Byron
• Program Director: Billy Barron
• Promotions: Barbara DeVries
• Training Director: Jim Burke
• Webmaster: Pete Carapetyan
• Secretary: Irina Marchenko

General Business:

• Attendance:
• Attendance at the general meeting was agreed to be approximately 55 for the evening with 20% new attendees.
• Treasurer Report:
• The current balance is $8,676.83 minus expenses of $83 plus $100 in gift certificates.
• The paperwork on domain name registration is being prepared to settle the issue with Delphi Consultants.
• Programs:
• Given the enormous popularity of the May speaker, Martin Fowler, the Board have a reason to expect an unusually heavy attendance. The board considered the video camera arrangements to accomodate a larger number of people in another room. In retrospect, there were meetings held in a packed room, however overflow had never been a problem. There was a consensus that no effort above the usual should be made to advertise this talk and the seating should be on the first-come basis.
• Stuart made a motion seconded by Pete to keep the July slot open until May awaiting a confirmation from Eric S. Raymond (co-author of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"), who had tentatively agreed to give a presentation.
• Billy requests that NO plaque be made for his presentation in April 2002.
• Promotions:
• Barbara reported a steady interest from businesses in sponsoring the JavaMUG meetings and expected the trend to continue.
• Billy notified the Board about John Siggins' (Esoftsolutions, Inc) initiative to conduct a workshop on interviewing techniques. A common understanding was that this activity goes beyond the group's primary mission to promote knowledge of Java. No one volonteered to champion this networking initiative, hence no action took place.
• Training::
• 1/2 of the slides are ready, the classes are starting late spring.
• Communications::
• Pete informed the Board that he does updates to the Website on Sunday.

New Business:

• Minutes:
• Irina reminded the Board about Jim's proposal of December to link the book titles to Amazon.com. Billy moved to submitt an application to join the Amazon.com Associates. Dan assumed responsibility for it.
• Lone Star Software Symposium
• In keeping with an earlier decision to assist with the symposium, the JavaMUG will:
  1. send a Symposium ad to the list prior to the April general meeting;
  2. send congratulations to the winners of the free pass via the list;
  3. mount the Symposium ad on the JavaMUG Website;
  4. verify the links to the Symposium site.

Past Business:

• Web Presence:
• Billy's motion to give an implicit approval to individual initiatives regarding the JavaMUG site registration at other Websites was temporarily tabled.
• Barbara emphasized the importance of having a tracking mechanism in place for consistency and PR purposes. The current tracking items include: membership (attendance), finances, three listservs, meeting attendance.
• Barbara moved to include into the next month's agenda a discussion on metrics, what to track and why. The following were among the proposed questions: Should we track web hits, and from where? Where our site is listed? The motion was seconded by Dan.
• A printable JavaMUG "Mug-shot" flyer:
• Based on the general agreement that it would be desirable to disseminate information about the next month meeting at the current meeting, the Board continued to discuss ways to make the printable flyer a reality.
• Barbara and Billy will think how to get sponsor/speaker information to Pete sooner.
• Dan suggests that Metronet logo and the Lone Star Symposium could be on the flyer.
• Jim suggested to display a PowerPoint slide at the end of each meeting describing next meeting.
• Miscellaneous:
• A lengthy discussion on how to speed up the introductory part of the meeting concluded the session. Board members found necessary to adhere to the starting time and to pace announcements by President/facilitators. To this end all officers should be involved in gathering participants 5 minutes before the official starting time 7:00 PM. Dan should monitor SIGs announcements with the allocated time slot of 30 seconds per group. A PowerPoint slide with the events calendar, if displayed, will speed up the routine.