Minutes of Board Meeting of December 6, 1999

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

Time: 8:30 pm central time Board Members Present: Eric Anderson, Matthew Havens, Justin Mallone, Susan Wishnetsky

Members Present: Al B., Woty C., Alex K.P.

Visitors Present: None

Approval of minutes. A motion was made to approve the minutes of the meeting of November 17, 1999. The motion carried.

Reports of Officers: The President, Eric Anderson, reported that he had received no response from i-Give regarding our concerns about their age-restrictive policies. He had, however, received another check from them.

The Vice-President, Justin Mallone, reported that he had been asked to appear on a television show, to discuss the topic of the drinking age, on the Oxygen Network, a new network that will begin broadcasting in February. Various sources for statistics and other information were suggested.

The Secretary, Susan Wishnetsky, reported that response to the offer of free ASFAR items had been pretty good, and she was starting to mail out these items. She had still not read the booklets on bulk mailing applications.

Eric Anderson asked that a note on listserv use and safety be included in the "welcome" message to new members.

Reports of Committees: For the zine committee, Justin Mallone reported that he had received one letter and one editorial piece so far for the January/February issue of Youth Truth. Other items to be included, including a research piece, were discussed.

Susan Wishnetsky reported that the 1000 sample issues of Youth Truth had all been sent to libraries, as well as single copies to all members who had requested them. She had at last obtained the copy of the zip disk to send to Matthew Havens, who had offered to try to put this in a format which could be placed on the web, and perhaps print additional copies.
The e-mail announcement and offer of a free print copy, to be sent to over 1600 libraries for which e-mail addresses could be found, had been sent on November 30, but this message probably caused much more harm than good, because the listserv on which the e-mail addresses were placed permitted recipients using the "reply" function to respond to the entire list. Although the announcement said not to use "reply" (once at the top of the message and again in the body of the message), enough librarians ignored this part of the message to cause a disturbance to all of them. The problem was fixed the same day, and one librarian had already expressed interest and requested a copy, but the general response was negative and angry. Susan Wishnetsky expressed her personal regrets that she allowed this to happen.

Old Business

Eric Anderson had checked with one bank which had online access, but which turned out not to provide accounts for non-profit organizations. The pros and cons of online banking were discussed. The issue of i-Give's age restrictive policies was discussed. Eric Anderson proposed that mention of i-Give be removed from ASFAR's leaflet. No other motion was made.
On the position paper on free speech, Susan Wishnetsky presented some comments, and Justin Mallone said that all of his copies of position papers had been lost due to recent computer problems. Consideration of the papers was postponed until the next meeting.

The meeting was adjourned at 10:44 pm central time.

Respectfully submitted, Susan Wishnetsky ASFAR Secretary