The conference call meeting of the BOP was called to order at 8:40pm Eastern time on Monday, October 24, 2005.
Present were: Chair, Mike Duke; members, DeAnna Noriega, Cindy Burgett, Chelle Hart & Charlie Hodge; ex-officio member, Janelle Edwards,; staff, Sharon Lovering, and guests, Chris Gray and Earlene Hughes.
The agenda was adopted.
Chelle Hart was welcomed as our newly elected BOP member.
Earlene gave a report as our Webmaster. She mentioned that Day has been very good about sending her legislative material. She talked about the updating of the "affiliate" and "membership" pages and that affiliates are showing interest in paying online. Resources are updated as often as she receives them. She started the Calendar of Events page in February, 2004, posting affiliate dates of conventions. The "meeting" page is new and hosts the ACB board and BOP minutes. She puts them up as soon as she receives them. The convention page is updated as new information is received. During the month of June, this page is the highest accessed page on our site. She maintains the ACB store and some of the email lists. She hasn't received the 2005 Resolutions, Constitutional amendments or the 2006 Scholarship application as of yet. She has placed a "printer friendly" link for many of the pages on the site. The "email to a friend" link had become a problem for a time, but has been fixed so that no one can send spam from ACB.org via this link and keeps us secure. This feature is often used. Effective the Winter issue, 2005, the Braille Forum on the site is now broken into articles which makes navigating between articles easier. This has also been done with the Job Bank. Another new addition to the site is the Braille Forum via a podcast. She then brought up the Candidates page and the discussion that took place on ACB-L prior to the convention. A couple of ideas she mentioned which had been written to her were the word count being raised for responses, and the candidates having an opportunity to give an open statement. Mike requested Earlene write the ideas received so that we could give them consideration beginning in February. In June we had 53,164 hits on our site. This year, we had just over 50 percent of convention registrations done online. She explained more in detail about the online registration form and that the separate pages were often confusing for people not familiar with online shopping. It was suggested that Earlene write an article for the Braille Forum explaining how to navigate this form.
Chelle moved and DeAnna seconded to accept Earlene's report and this motion passed.
Chelle moved to accept the minutes of our board meeting from September 7, 2005. This was seconded by DeAnna. The motion passed.
We will not be able to publish a tenth issue of the Braille Forum because our expenses were up because our subscriptions have increased. Mike invited Chris to talk about the ACB budget. Chris recapped where the financial decline with ACBES began in 2002. And although ACBES committed to a $450,000 contribution to ACB in 2005. But unfortunately, it is looking like this amount will be down $150,000, creating a very large shortfall for ACB. This makes it difficult to project the ACBES contribution in 2006. Late December is when we should have a clearer picture of the 2005 activity. The new ACBES Temporary Controller is helping the board gain a better understanding of the big picture, going back through numbers in 2004 and how our reserve has been effected.
Charlie raised a concern about whether or not we could get approved for 10 issues at the current cost of $16,000 per issue.
Chris suggested we consider sending out subscription confirmation cards.
The number of pages was discussed, whether to have less issues at 48 pages, or more issues at 32 pages.
Mike brought up the idea of discontinuing the floppy disc version of the Braille Forum which will not only save about $2500, but also staff time and frustration.
Chris spoke to the fact that CD's are easier to produce and the floppy disc duplicator is very temperamental.
Cindy suggested that we create a note on the next disc to the reader about the impact of the change to the reader.
Sharon spoke to the duplicator, and it needs some work done to it if it were going to keep running. We produce 800 discs per issue.
Charlie raised the question of the cost of a CD duplicator and whether it would come out of the Braille Forum budget. Chris said it would be charged as part of ACB equipment.
DeAnna mentioned that GDUI has changed their 2-track taped version to a CD version.
Cindy made a motion that a note would go out on the disc format on the Winter issue saying that this may be the final issue on the disc and that a CD-Rom version would take it's place as soon as the transition can take place. The motion was seconded by Charlie and it passed.
Janelle asked for clarification on the Temporary Controller position. Chris explained that Don Gardner has been hired for 6 months, and that this position has been created as a temporary position to keep us moving forward and to look at the big picture of where we might go with this.
The discussion then turned to the topic of paying for the mailings of the Braille Forum for sighted members. This is being done, based on the membership lists submitted by affiliates and members at large. Sharon will help us track the number of mailing which go out to sighted members throughout 2006, which we are paying for.
We then talked about the budget, revisiting the number of pages and issues. Mike will work with Sharon and Charlie on numbers, and we will meet again to strictly discuss the budget.
Charlie brought up the need for us to have the large print issues of the Forum bound. Sharon said that the last year this was done was in 1998. Sharon will check on the cost for this to be done and will bring numbers to be included in our budget.
The next conference call will be to discuss the budget and will be set when appropriate. Mike requested that BOP members post to the BOP list dates which would not be good for them. Mike will get in touch with Brian as chair of the Budget committee to find out the timeline for doing the budget.
Mike reported that the last day for Laura producing ACB Reports will be December. He will take over in January, and he has gotten permission from his employer to use their studio, which will save studio time costs. He sent out a survey to those who receive ACB Reports via tape and has received 38 responses so far out of 90 sent out. He will send out a report of the responses to the BOP list. Mike is working with Dave Williams on ways to make ACB Reports closer affiliated with ACBRadio. He is desiring to conduct a similar survey for the Braille Forum readers who listen to it on side 4 of the cassette version. He has created an email address, reports@acbradio.org. This email address will be given at the end of each report and is automatically forwarded to his personal email account. An email will also be created for reports@acb.org, in case anyone writes it incorrectly.
We discussed when to hold our face-to-face meeting with the consensus being that we hold it in conjunction with the President's meeting. We were given information that the Midyear meeting date and location is still up in the air do to it not being included in the convention contract.
The meeting adjourned at 10:45pm Eastern.