Minutes of Board Meeting of November 17, 1999

Location: IRC server irc.chatnet.org, channel #asfar

Time: 8:30 pm central time

Board Members Present: Eric Anderson, Matthew Havens, Justin Mallone, Larissa Price, Susan Wishnetsky

Members Present: Al B., Alex K.P., Ed L.

Visitors Present: None

Reports of Officers: The President, Eric Anderson, had no official report. The Vice-President, Justin Mallone, had no official report.
The Secretary, Susan Wishnetsky, reported that she had been unable to obtain a bulk mailing permit for ASFAR yet because she did not have all the necessary documents.

Reports of Committees: For the 'zine committee, Justin Mallone reported that the online version of ASFAR's 'zine, Youth Truth, had been made available to the public.
Susan Wishnetsky reported that the first 52 copies of 1000 had been sent to members and U.S. libraries, and 100 more were ready to be sent the next morning. Some pages had been taken to a print shop for rapid reproduction, but it would have proved too expensive to have the pages with graphics professionally reproduced, so the slow process of in-house production was continuing.
About 740 e-mail addresses of U.S. libraries were already entered in a special "subscription" list, for mass mailing of an announcement; these e-mail addresses belonged only to libraries in states from Alabama through Montana (alphabetically). The listing of library addresses and e-mail addresses was also continuing. Susan reported that the announcement and all of the copies to be mailed should be out by the end of the month. Finally, she reported that an ISSN (International Standard Serial Number) had been assigned by the Library of Congress and a record for Youth Truth now existed on OCLC, a large shared bibliographic database. (See http://lcweb.loc.gov/issn/).
Justin Mallone asked that the files of the print version of the zine be sent to him; Susan responded that this might be difficult, due to the fact that the zine was produced on a Mac, and the owner of the Mac (the designer of the zine) had no email at the moment. She promised to try to work this out as soon as the major work of preparing and mailing the zines was complete.

Old Business
Regarding promotional items, Susan Wishnetsky reported that the 500 ball-point pens had arrived, although the color was not what she had hoped for. ASFAR buttons were also still available. Eric Anderson suggested that she send an announcement to members about the availability of these items.

The position papers on emancipation and free speech were presented. After some comments and discussion, it was agreed to table the approval of both papers.

Eric Anderson announced that Board member Alex Thiele had vacated his position on the Board, leaving two Board vacancies. A motion was made to appoint Matthew Havens and Larissa Price as ASFAR's two new board members. The motion carried. After some discussion of the new members' schedules, it was decided to hold future board meetings on Monday nights at 8:30 pm central time.

Due to the pressing need to establish a bank account, Susan Wishnetsky suggested that ASFAR consider even a non-online bank, if minimum deposits and fees were more reasonable that way. A motion was made to appoint Eric Anderson as Treasurer of ASFAR. After discussion with the two new board members to see if either of them would be able to serve as Treasurer, the motion was voted on and carried.

New Business

The issue of Section 4 of ASFAR's Bylaws, requiring all members to supply a full name and state of residence, was discussed. Eric Anderson said that he would update the script of the membership form on the web to require that these fields be filled in, and suggested that Susan Wishnetsky compose a message to send to the announce list to encourage long-time members, who had not already supplied this information, to do so.

Eric Anderson presented a response from iGive to his message objecting to their "champion giver" program which excludes people younger than 14. Since iGive is a source of funding for ASFAR, the board debated how vigorously we should pursue this issue. No final decision was reached on this matter.

The meeting was adjourned at 11:10 pm central time.

Respectfully submitted, Susan Wishnetsky ASFAR Secretary