Board of Publications Meeting Minutes: February 4, 2025

The Board of Publications Chairperson, Katie Frederick, welcomed those present and called the February 4, 2025, meeting to order at 9 p.m. Eastern time.

Board members present: Katie Frederick, Jeff Bishop, Cheryl Cumings, Bel Collins, and Zelda Gebhard.

Ex-Officio members present: Sharon Lovering, ACB Braille Forum Editor; Rick Morin, ACB Media and IT Manager, Deb Cook Lewis, ACB President and Scott Thornhill, ACB Executive Director.

Katie read the agenda. Jeff moved to approve the agenda. The motion was seconded by Cheryl. Motion passed. 

Cheryl questioned the spelling of Jamaica Miller’s name. Jeff moved to approve the minutes as corrected.  Bel seconded it. Motion carried.  

Sharon asked if we were planning to include the candidate’s page article in the April issue. She will send the 2024 article to the BOP list to be revised and included in the April issue.

In March, we will select themes for July, August-September, October and November-December issues.   

Editor’s Report - February 2025

Statistics

January 2025

Braille distributed: 451
Braille returned: 3
Braille return rate: 0.66%
Braille received: 448
Cartridge to be distributed: 0
Large print distributed: 1,039
Large print returned: 6
Large print return rate: 0.58%
Large print received: 1,033
Email distributed: 5,457
Email bounces: 26
Spam: 4
Unsubscribes: 1
Return rate: 0.47%
Email delivered: 5,431

February 2025

Braille distributed: 452
Cartridge distributed: 349
Large print distributed: 1,037
Email distributed: 5,501

March 2025

Braille to be distributed: 441
Cartridge to be distributed: TBA
Large print to be distributed: 1,044
Email to be distributed: TBA

Deadlines for the Next Issues

April – MCAC: How your cultural background, race, ethnicity, and/or vision loss affected your education; deadline: February 21, 2025

May – Older Americans, AAVL; deadline: March 21, 2025

June – All things Convention; deadline: April 23, 2025

February’s Table of Contents 

President’s Message: Is “No” Your Final Answer?, by Deb Cook Lewis

Big Dreams, Bold Ideas, by Janet Dickelman

Keep Advocating, by Claire Stanley

The ACB Constitution and Bylaws Committee Wants to Hear from You, by John McCann

Introducing the BADIE Blog!

Are You a Leader Searching for More? by Zelda Gebhard

Join Us in the March 29th Multi-State Auction!

What Is Love, by Larry Johnson

Meeting Ed, by Toni Eames

An Unexpected Love, by Abbie Taylor

A Conventional Couple, by Anthony Corona and Gabriel Lopez Kafati

I Found My True Love in a Newspaper Article, by Tammy Robbins

Ship Shaped or Ship Shocked: There Are None So Blind as Those Who Are at Sea!, by Janet Di Nola Parmerter

A Visionary for the Blind for 45 Years, Nun Taught Children to Have Faith in Themselves, by Annysa Johnson

Here and There, edited by Cynthia G. Hawkins

***

As I write this, I am working on the March issue.

I continue to put together the Dots and Dashes newsletter. The next two issues will go out February 3^rd and 17^th.

I’m still working with the archives/history committee on preserving and digitizing old recordings and documents from ACB events and identifying people in photos. Some of the work involves digitizing board minutes. In the old minutes, I have worked my way through the ‘80s and am working on the ‘90s.

Another part of the work includes cleaning up and modernizing old issues of the Forum to current large print standards and organizing them on our SharePoint drive. I’ve finished 1966, 1967, 1968 and 1969, and am about to start 1964 and 1965.

I continue to record the Washington Connection, and some of the other boxes on our phone system, such as the national convention box, the scholarship information, and the state convention box. I updated the Washington Connection on January 28th and updated one box on February 3^rd.

I have also updated the Job Connection; the new one posted on January 17^th. I am updating it as I type this, and it should be live on Friday, February 7th.

Sharon Lovering, Editor

_._,_._,_

Karyn Campbell asked us to address the “cross-posting” issue when we discuss the Conversation List. 

NFB has a new radio station on Amazon, NFBR. Open it on your Amazon device with “Open Nation’s Blind.”

The number of listeners we are reaching is basically the same number of people this year as the previous year. We had fewer podcast listens and more total listener hours. Rick will continue to monitor this. Grant proposal has been submitted to Consumer Trade Association to improve capacity. They plan to have Azure shut down by the end of March. This will save us money. There are questions concerning Ai created music – who owns the rights to the music, how was the music created, etc. They are looking into this very complicated issue. Live 365 has been consulted about Ai created music as they provide service managing licensing and royalty payments.

Cheryl asked about the project of podcast organization. Deb said that podcasts will likely be sorted by committees. The committees will be asked to sort podcasts by content quality and the best audience to utilize them.

Blog posts may be submitted to voices@acb.org. There are currently 176 subscribers. There is data available about opens and clicks. For instance, the Roger Peterson member on the mic received 98 clicks, the Lindberg was 102, Regina Brink was 52, and a recent post One Small Voice Can Make the Chorus was 64 clicks. We will see what happens with the blog over the next few months.

Monthly Blog Editors:

February - Bel and Cheryl
March – Bel and Jeff

Penny Reeder reported she is a subscriber but sometimes doesn’t receive a notification email. She also misses the Member on the Mic blog posts. Katie assured her that we are working on that.

BITS is going to do AI-centered training during the ACB convention and will be working on the curriculum for it soon. The training will be held Wednesday through Saturday and will be affiliate focused – how they can be more focused and achieve more with less. There will be a working session on Saturday for affiliates. They welcome BOP involvement.

Zelda asked if this is something we should talk about during the Communicator’s workshop in April. Jeff agreed that it should be as well as the Affiliate Presidents meeting as affiliates will need time to plan and budget to allow for in-person attendance.

BITS will soon know what the affiliates want and that will determine if help from the BOP might be useful.

Leadership List

Deb shared information about the Leadership email list. When it was created, we committed to update it annually and it hasn’t happened. Dan Spoone and others set up the list to include the ACB Board, the ACB Board of Publications, Committee Chairs and Co-Chairs, others designated by the president like some DKM recipients or other people plus three representatives chosen by each affiliate. They are all in one spreadsheet listed alphabetically with the indicators not consistently applied. She is requesting the presidents who they would like to represent their affiliate.

Deb is revising the Leadership Guidelines to be specific.

• There will be no posts about events except one post per affiliate or committee sponsored event.
• No individual event posts will be allowed as they should appear on the ACB Community daily schedule, which is working very well.
• There is not much we can do about the cross-posting issue except that groups.io may have a feature that will not allow posts to go to cc’s and we may need to implement it. The problem with cross posting is that not everyone sees everything in the thread and those who do subscribe to both lists see it multiple times.
• Tighten guidelines about forwarding posts from other lists.

Deb is very close to completing the guidelines. When they are complete, she will email them to the BOP list and also share it with the ACB Board.

Conversation List

The BOP received a letter from Anthony Corona addressing many of the concerns that we have already heard about — repetitive content, the reposting, the cross-posting, limiting of posts from external sources and avoiding some of the redundancies on the lists. She hopes the guidelines we have been working on will address these concerns.

Currently, guidelines from many groups.io lists are shared with the subscribers on the 1^st of the month. Katie asked if there is a way we could schedule the guideline sharing at another time such as the 15^th of the month to avoid the group of guidelines and get more focused attention. Jeff thinks this can be done.

Scott asked how to switch to the digest mode and was told he could do this by using the option in the footer of the email.

Cheryl asked if there is a way we could make the guidelines available to the subscribers at amu time. Jeff said BITS uses a link in the footer to allow this option.

Rick will be asked to switch the automatic email of the guidelines to list subscribers on the 15^th instead of the 1^st and to add a link to the guidelines on the footer.

It was also noted that the Conversation list is currently set up differently than the other lists in that when you reply to an email it goes to the list. To send a reply only to the sender, you can use the reply to sender option in the footer without being logged into groups.io. We will ask Rick to change this setting, so it is like the other lists in that Reply goes to the sender and Reply All goes to the list.  

The leadership guidelines have not been sent out on a routine basis. Once they have been revised, they will be set up to be shared on a monthly basis.

Deb would like to encourage the use of the Announce list.

Jamaica Miller asked if the BOP meetings would be posted to the Announce list as she would like to unsubscribe from the Conversation list. She was told that the notice of the BOP meetings would be posted to the Announce list.

Penny Reeder pointed out that due process is not arbitrary, and she thinks that everyone deserves due process and that warning the whole group qualifies as due process.

An email address will be created for those wanting to appeal a suspension to contact such as bop@mail@acb.org

The guidelines were reviewed line by line, with revisions being made by consensus. The edited written guidelines will be shared by email on the BOP list for review prior to the March meeting. 

The meeting was adjourned.

Next BOP meeting is scheduled for March 4, 2025, at 9 p.m. Eastern time.

Respectfully submitted,
Zelda Gebhard, Director
ACB Board of Publications