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Activity in the Electronic Communications Technical Committee began to
return to normal in October. As has been the case in recent months, much
of the progress during the month was a direct result of the October ECTC
IRC meeting, which was held on October 4. The meeting was devoted to
developing a list of new ECTC tasks to implement many of the ECTC
initiatives developed during the September ECTC IRC meeting. Several of
the new ECTC tasks were put in a new task category titled "Membership
Support", which will focus on supporting activities to increase the ASI
membership rolls. We were able to sign up volunteers for most of the new
tasks at the meeting. Here is the list of new ECTC tasks developed during
the meeting:
If you would like to help out with any of these new ECTC tasks, you
can find out more information and volunteer at the November ECTC IRC
meeting on Sunday, November 1 at 7:00 pm ET on the "#ectc" channel on
irc.superlink.net.
The ECTC membership count shrank by 2 members in October, as four members (Darrell Thompson, Greg Garber, Thomas Hernandez, and Johnny Smith) were removed from the mailing list when e-mail to them started bouncing. Mark Sumner, who is taking on the critical role of ASI Newsmonger, and Rob Winchester joined the ECTC in October. David Wetnight, Predrag Lezaic, and John Peel all changed their e-mail addresses during the month. At the end of October, the ECTC had 28 active members, with another 50 people in the Observer or Rep categories. You can find the complete ECTC membership listing at http://www.asi.org/adb/09/01/ectc.html . As always, there is still a lot of room for new volunteers for ECTC tasks. If you would like to join the ECTC and help with any of those tasks, you can use the form on the ECTC task list page at http://www.asi.org/adb/09/01/ectc_tasks.html .
Here is the latest status information from the individual work areas
within the ECTC:
The most important news in this new category is the addition of Mark Sumner to the ECTC as the new "Newsmonger". Mark will solicit news articles from across ASI for the ASI Online News pages and will look into producing a periodic ASI Newsletter. If you have any news items to submit, please send them to Mark at "newsmonger@asi.org". Candace Dicks and John Peel volunteered to work on the new "Advertise ASI Web Site in Internet Search Engines" task. Candace submitted a draft web site description and keywords list to the ASI Board of Directors for review. Bobby Will, Predrag Lezaic, and Candace Dicks volunteered to help maintain the ASI Membership Database System, which is based on the Team Director product from CyberTeams. Several new feature requests for Team Director were submitted during the past month to improve the ASI membership and dues processing. Bobby Will also volunteered to tackle the new "Write response and delegation of authority guidelines" task.
Nanci Brasket continued manning the Comm and Info Center. Scotty Gammenthaler volunteered to take on the new "Establish and administer a mentoring program" task. Scotty wrote up a first draft of a charter for that program and hopes to get it started in November.
Bobby Will created and configured a new mailing list for the new ASI Leadership Council, but there were some problems at IO in configuring the proper e-mail alias for the new list. Bobby continues to work with IO to resolve the problem.
The Missing Links project led by John Wertz continued producing a steady volume of updates to the ASI web site. During October, a total of 41 updates were published to the ASI web site, including 3 new documents, 34 modifications to existing documents, and 4 deleted documents. Despite the new additions, some cleanup in the private directories actually reduced the total number of documents on the ASI web site for the first time. The latest updates bring the total number of documents on the ASI web site to 2272 HTML documents and 1048 GIF and JPEG images. Most of the work in editing and approving the updates was done by John Wertz, John Peel, Luanne Jorewicz, Candace Dicks, Greg Bennett, Simon Rowland, Ian Randal Strock, Leah Simpson, Predrag Lezaic, Randall Severy, and Thomas Hopper.
For the second straight month, the mSQL database server on the ASI web site stopped working for several days near the end of the month. Since the WebSite Director software that is used to update documents on the ASI web site uses an mSQL database, this caused WSD to be unavailable during that time. IO's tech support staff restarted the database server at the end of the month and web site update processing is now back to normal. As a result of the problem, however, we have been informed that IO is no longer supporting the mSQL server and is only supporting the "MySQL" database server. Fortunately, recent updates to both the WebSite Director and Team Director products added support for MySQL databases. We will soon begin working with IO to transition the ASI systems that use the mSQL database server to the MySQL database server.
Robert Dahlquist, Bobby Will, and Scotty Gammenthaler volunteered to take on the new "Design and Maintain Web Site Tour" task. The self-guided tour of the ASI web site has been planned and discussed for a long time and with the new volunteers it should finally be on the road to being implemented.
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