Association of Lisp Users, Inc. (ALU) 15 December 2005 Board Meeting 22:00 hours UTC Minutes Rev. 1 Meeting held telephonically with the following quorum of board members present: Officers present: (V) = Voting member of the Board (NV) = Non-Voting Ernst van Waning, Pres.(NV) John Adams, VP. (NV) Rusty Johnson, Treas.(NV) (proxy for Lindahl) Members present: Heow Eide-Goodman(V) Kuroda Hisao(V) Nick Levine(V) Duane Rettig(V) Peter Seibel(V) Jon L. White(V) President Ernst van Waning called the meeting to order at 22:14 GMT with a quorum of voting members present. Next meeting to be held 05 January, 2006 at 22:00 GMT. Approved without dissent. Discussions: Issue of Membership: JMAdams will be membership chair. JMAdams will find list on email and remind the membership of renewing membership. N. Levine suggests to go back to website. JMAdams will try it out to see if it works. Issue of Mission statement: Discussion ensued concerning past and potential activities of the ALU and SLUG, its predecessor. JonL White illuminated other activities including; e-zines, webpages, code-repositories, history pages, webmasters, and others. N. Levine asks, What can we do that commonlisp.net isn't doing for code repositories? JonL White replies, provide portals, links to other resources, eg commonlisp.net, Franz, EdiWeitz, etc. R. Johnson adds that Google gets you to cliki first rather than commonlisp.net. P. Seibel inquires, M. Batyani, I myself "cl-gardener", and there are other repositories coming. Who/what is the one true source for all things lisp? D. Rettig responds, Do we really want to do that? We still don't know what we are doing. We have no mission statement. If people want to contribiute or come to us as a repository, well, we don't say we do that. JonL: We don't need to be the "only" lisp repository; there is no need to exclude others. Pres: We should make the mission statement tonight. JonL White contends we achieved email consensus on JMA's version of statement. N. Levine reads JMA's proposal from August (See below) R. Johnson reminds us of LUV (Lisp Users & Vendors) fostering users vs. vendors D. Rettig rebutts, There are two vendors in ALU now on board. N. Levine asks do we truly represent the lisp community to vendors? JonL White replies, No, each vendor has its own groups. JonL White moves, JMA seconds, accept the email version of JMA's mission statement quoted below. Vote is unanimous in favor of the motion. Mission Statement: To serve the software community by providing high-quality information about Lisp to current and prospective users and to the software community at large; to support the Lisp community by hosting an annual conference and providing administrative support for Lisp-related projects and local user groups. from -- John M. Adams email: - The Mission of the ALU - sent 8/26/2005 10:32 AM EDT Issue of Erik Enge's statement and request: E. van Waning replied to Erik. What does the board think? During discussion, the following points were made: Since we have mission statement, including several parts, how do we balance these parts? E.g. How do we support Enge? We now have the authority to say, "yes" we want to support you, but there are some limitations. Providing administrative support is fine, we can help. What any organization does is provide continuity for a community. So often various other lisp projects go on for a few years, and then fizzle out. Let us start with something small and demonstrate that we can carry out such activities. For example, work with CL-GARDENERs. Can someone make an inventory of various groups needing help? We need to be careful. We have a mission. We don't have execution yet. We are not yet set up to execute our mission. What are our strengths? What weakneeses? What sort of things can we do and not do? We could go to comp.lang.lisp et.al. and say we have a new mission statement; we need your help. We are limited in our capacity to create new projects, and are in a position to help others with ideas. If they expect ALU to help them, they should have to come to us. We have loose coordination with local groups. For example, Heow is meeting coordinator for the LispNYC local group. We should not go looking for volunteers until we have something for them to do. By email, we can discuss various projects like ferret out pointers to lisp repositories, etc. P. Seibel has 180 subscribers to Lisp-Gardeners. If we have things for people to do, then we can ask them. We could help host common-lisp.net. Discussion ends without a motion. Other items: R. Johnson would like thank Dr. Wu for the financial information concerning Franz' assistance with the ILC-05 conference. He also thanks C. Shapiro for the small planning sheet from the conference. E. van Waning suggests if we have this for ILC05, then it could be a prototype annual financial document. Such a document would be a great help in future budgeting. N. Levine points out it has been hard work to separate out all fees from the conference, specifically, registration vs. housing vs. membership fees. R. Johnson will prepare a document with board contact information, along with typical ILC budget. Will work toward a yearly financial planning document to help with conference planning. Issue of ALU/ILC Republication policy. JonL White has sent lengthy email with links to ACM/SIGPLAN's policies, and some amount of excerpts. Also, I think we can form a policy for future ILC's that _requires_ authors/submittiors to grant us the right for publication in print media, and _requests_ for permission to republish in electronic form from the ALU website. We can live with an author refusing electronic rights, but still we should ask them. Aside: This question is independent of any profit we make from either avenue of publication. There was a movement to adjourn and approved unanimously at 23:04 UTC. Minutes were formed from notes taken by Jon L. White, and R. Johnson, with appreciation from the secretary. Peter Lindahl ALU Secretary