September ECTC Status Report
September was another sluggish month for the Electronic Communications
Technical Committee as activity levels slowly recovered from the summer
doldrums. The month was kicked off by a different kind of ECTC IRC meeting
on September 13, where we focused on brainstorming ideas for how the ECTC
can jumpstart activities in other parts of ASI. A summary of the
initiatives generated during the meeting was distributed to the ECTC
membership soon after the meeting for discussion. Turning those
initiatives into specific ECTC action items will be the focus of the
October ECTC IRC meeting, which will be held on Sunday, October 4 at 7:00
pm ET on the "#ectc" channel on irc.suprlink.net. Here is the list of
initiatives that was produced during the September meeting:
- 1) Assist ASI Membership Drive
- 2) Improve the motivation of ASI volunteers by increasing
responsiveness to volunteer questions
- 3) Publish an electronic ASI Accomplishments Newsletter
- 4) Maintain the high quality of the ASI web site
- 5) Establish a mentoring program
- 6) Promotions and Titles
- 7) Create a self-guided Tour of the ASI Web Site
- 8) Establish a Contributor of the Month Award
- 9) Hold a monthly "Intro to ASI/Guided Tour of the Web Site" IRC
conference
- 10) Document "Best Practices" for ASI volunteer activities
- 11) Recruit a new Administrator for the Office of Space Flight
If you would like to help out with any of those initiatives, you can
find out more information and volunteer at the October ECTC IRC meeting.
The ECTC membership count grew by 2 members in September, with three
new members offsetting one departing member. Robert Dahlquist and Wayne
Kullman joined the ECTC, while Tim Cadell returned to the committee with a
new e-mail address. Sam Nelson departed the committee last month. At the
end of September, the ECTC had 29 active members, with another 51 people in
the Observer or Rep categories. You can find the complete ECTC membership
listing, including ICQ numbers, 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:
Help Desk
Nanci Brasket continued manning the Comm and Info Center. Robert
Dahlquist joined Chris Verwey in responding to entries in the Guestbook.
Dana Carson updated the guestbook program to send entries directly to
Robert, Chris, and Nanci.
Listserver Mailing Lists
The main artemis-list mailing list continued a steady pace of traffic
and activity levels increased on several other ASI mailing lists. A minor
hiccup in digest processing for the artemis-list resulted in the failure of
several digests to be delivered around the middle of the month. Bobby Will
made several minor configuration changes to some of the ASI mailing lists.
World Wide Web Server
The ASI web site received a small number of updates this past month,
with most of the activity aimed at cleaning up the remaining broken links
on the site, an effort led by John Wertz. During September, a total of 16
updates were published to the ASI web site, including 15 modifications to
existing documents and 1 deleted document. The latest updates bring the
total number of documents on the ASI web site to 2290 HTML documents and
1054 GIF and JPEG images. Most of the work in editing and approving the
updates was done by Greg Bennett, John Wertz, Predrag Lezaic, Ian Randal
Strock, Simon Rowland, Luanne Jorewicz, Paul Blase, Bobby Will, Richard
Perry, John Peel, and Randall Severy. Additional document submissions were
made by Brad Reznick.
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.
WWW Conversation Pages
No progress to report this month.
Usenet newsgroups
No progress to report this month.
Online Services
No progress to report this month.
Real-time Meetings
The September ECTC IRC meeting was held on September 13, and had a good
attendance rate, with 9 people showing up for part or all of the meeting.
As mentioned above, the meeting was a brainstorming session to develop
ideas for new projects that the ECTC can undertake to help improve
activities throughout ASI. Due to the large number and high quality of the
initiatives discussed during the meeting, the meeting was a major success.
We hope to continue that progress in the next IRC meeting on October 4,
when those initiatives will be turned into specific ECTC projects.
Miscellaneous
No progress to report this month.
ASI W9800645r1.0.
Copyright © 2007 Artemis Society International, for the
contributors. All rights reserved.
This web site contains many trade names and copyrighted articles and images.
Refer to the copyright page for terms of use.
Author:
Randall Severy.
<severy@asi.org>
Maintained by
.
Submit update to this page.
Maintained with WebSite Director.
Updated Sun, Nov 8, 1998.