Meeting Notes April 21, 2008
RAC Meeting Notes
Davis Community Network
Resource Allocation Committee
Regular Meeting Monday, April 21, 2008
Meeting Notes
Members present: Brattesani, Chiles, Hance, Meizel
Members absent: Chang, Crumley, Gonzalez, Yamagata
Visitor: Rita Martin
1. Chair Hance called the meeting to order at 6:35 PM
2. The agenda was approved as distributed on a vote by John
Chiles, seconded by Jan Meizel
3. Review of Projects:
a) The "New DQ University"
request by Rita Martin
Rita described her efforts to revive an educational
facility at the site of the present DQ university. She, as an
individual, is working on gathering support for an operation that
would serve Native American and Hispanic students with continuing
education.
We thanked Rita for her presentation and, according
to our stated policy, after she left we discussed the application. We
determined that because the effort does not yet have the organized
character required by DCN/RAC policies (evidence of an organized group
with identified leaders) we needed to defer any approval until such a
group has been created.
The request for the following resources will be kept
on file until we hear again from the project.
1 Simple Site
2 Mailman Lists
1 Calendar
Web Team Help
b) The Davis School Arts
Foundation
This was an anticipated request for more shell
storage space because the DCN system administrator has noted that their
web files have now filled the 10 MB shell. The issue was tabled
because Anne had not managed to contact anyone from the Foundation.
Several e-mails had no response and one phone call attempt was so far
unsuccessful. Anne raised the question of the how much effort should be
used to track down people responsible for the DCN resources when they
fail to inform DCN of their personnel changes.
c) The chair's approval of the
Davis Schools Foundation request by Kirk Alexander on 4/7/2008 for a
calendar was ratified by committee consensus.
4. Discussion of Simple Site reviews by each committee
member.
Using data provided by Web Team Chair Steve McMahon,
Anne had prepared a web page with links to all RAC approved SimpleSites
that have been set up by the Web Team. This web page assigned groups of
about 10 links to each committee member for review.
At this evening's meeting members reported on their
findings and we compared the web page links with the similar data
relating to simple sites printed out from the RAC FileMaker Pro
database that Anne has been maintaining since 1996.
The following initial information emerged:
a. Many - even 'most' - of the sites are very well
designed and maintained. Some are 'excellent. This is true of
both versions 1.0 and 2.0 Some groups remain very content
with their version 1.0 SimpleSites and use them well.
b. Not all of the authorized resources have been
activated
c. Some of the authorized resources were activated
and set up but no content has been entered by the applicant
d. Some of the applicants put content on their sites
when they first got them but after a short period did no further work
on them.
e. Some (few) SimpleSites are being use for a single
page with, for example, simply a mailman list sign up page.
f. The project name provided by an applicant on an
RAC application is not always the same as that use for the actual
set-up of the resources. This causes confusion for the sort of review
the committee is currently conducting.
g. Many sites show month and day of events but give
no year so it is impossible for visitors to know if the event slated
for April 30 is for this year, last year or even earlier! We
wonder if an automated "Last updated" could be added to the
templates.
Because the committee was not in full attendance we did not finish our
review and so will continue until our May meeting. At that time we will
finish comparing the web page information with Anne's database printout
and will draft a report.
We adjourned at 7:45PM
Next meeting: MONDAY May 19, 2008
--
-
Anne Hance <rahance@dcn.org>
RAC Chair
