Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 20 April 1981 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by William M. York. In attendance were WMY, WOS, NAHA, RK, BIM, GMP, GCO, RDM, Steve LeBlanc, CAH, BARMAR, Penny, DCP. Late were: JAY, JIS, RLL The minutes of the meeting of 13 April were read and accepted as corrected. USER INTERRUPT: Steve Knox: had $200, wants $60. RK: are any of these papers in progress? Knox: no. RK: why is this application different from any other application? Move to reject. Knox: I can borrow someone's EECS account, but I need a Multics account to save files. BIM: I do not see that just saving his files is any more worthwhile than anyone else we have not funded. Penny: how about Coop? Knox: am I not entitled as an MIT student? The situation was explained. Motion passes. Knox: how about $10? BIM: this is still new work. I do not see why this is any different anyway. RK: move to reject. DCP: this involves us in greasy use of EECS. Steve LeBlanc: we have done the same thing [rejection] to many other people. Motion passes. Treasurer's Report: The treasurer is not here. GMP: spending month to date: $6514.20. This included a big spinwriter kickback for SIPB project usage. This leads to an 8K projection of spending for the month. Chairman's Report: The secretary has made no progress on the press release, due to having to bail the former secretary out of a problem. Elections are coming in 2 weeks. WMY read the duties of the officers, and commented about what they do. No campaigning. Think about it. Budget proposal was sent. Wes wants more documentation of what we did with the money. WMY has it almost finished. BIM: should the secretary take minutes, or write correspondance? In the past it was mostly the former. Perhaps the Vice Chairman should help corresponding. Office Report: There is a dead chair. It has not been called in. It is to be called into the metal shop. Coolie subreport: DCP: generally it wins, but the noncoolies should not dodge jobs. The job box has some very obscure things in it. Jobs should be signed, and should be detailed enough to let people do it. Some things should not just be left in the box, as they are too complicated for a coolie to do. If there is a note, it should tell the coolie to hassle the responsable person. Periodic things should be on a big list on the wall. The manual racks have been rationalized. We got a catalog of manual racks and other things. Someone hid it. That was not good. Answering calls from service men: BARMAR: I called in VT100, DEC claimed that noone here knew anything about it. BIM: please emphasize when calling in a problem that whomever answers our phone can respond to terminal problems. Sometimes individual names get attached to service calls, and the service men ask for them, confusing everyone else. Computer Services: RK: there are big Student mailboxes, often containing SF-Lovers or other such stuff. RK has been warning them and sometimes deleting extra stuff. CAH: don't delete member's mail without talking to them. JIS: watch out for Students receiving unsolicited mail from EECS and elsewhere, people do not always ask to be on mailing lists. JIS: we reserve the right to inspect what our users are doing. There is no guarantee of privacy. Others: but we do want to give privacy when we can, its morally better. When you add money to an account, make sure they do not already have a lot allocated and not used. If appropriate, reset the cutoff to the new allocation. This happens with allocations left over from the previous term or year. People taking applications should check the spending on the existing account. A compromise would be to throw the application back to the meeting if you see an irregularity in the application. There was a distinct lack of consensus on this issue. A 370 user with a low balance called in, she has $15, she cannot do her work for three weeks, what should she do? Tape movement costs money, and 370 charges for allocation not use. We told her to just leave the stuff lay. Grinnel dept: Leo seems enthusiastic about it. They may take it. Spinwriter kickback is now correctly computed in the weekly. RK: should we be trying to cover more users or let individual users get more use? Is it correct to get a user "hooked" and then take it away? JIS: there will be as much text spending as we have money for. We give should them some money, and then leave them to pay for themselves or do without. CAH: move to lower auto limit to $100 effective whenever we start auto-ing applications again. WMY: it is educational to give everyone a taste. Perhaps unkind, but it raises their consciousness as to what is available, and perhaps they will militate for it. JIS: remember, we were afraid of underspending this past year. BIM: if we are going to have a policy of just giving people a taste we should make that clear to them. RK: there are people who got $100, liked it well, and asked for $300 more to be sure they could do the rest of the papers for the term. This was wrong. RK: also, remember not to give more than $50 without good cause. The motion to reset the $100 limit when we resume auto passed. CAH: move that auto applications must have an explicit cutoff date. The default cutoff will be the end of the current term (or summer or IAP). If a user wants to have their account extended, it will require at least a continuation form. JIS: this scheme would require members to check spending to date for each application to verify that application is under auto limit. This is a lot of work. A per-term auto limit would be a lot simpler. BIM: we should be checking spending anyway. Perhaps we should have a sorted usage report that could be routinely checked. JAY: this is confusing. Lets have a written proposal. WMY: the proposal is to cutoff at the end of terms. The problem is that in a second term of usage, a new request must be based on spending, not on allocation, because the allocation is now per-term. JIS proposed an amendment to change the auto-limit to a per-term basis. WMY: looking up actual spending is not all that hard. The per-term auto limit makes problems for people who are extended across terms. Various: people will be nailed by the low per-term auto limits. The term is very artificial in terms of our usage. Some people bias their usage toward one term or another. JIS: the limit could be different for the two terms. It could be $100 for the first term, but $150 for the year. This is a clarification to the proposal. CAH: if there is still a per-year limit then there is still need for the usage report, because an additional request in the second term is dependent on usage if the application is over the per-year limit. Budget is per-year, allocation limit should be. JIS: if the only purpose of this is to cutoff inactive applications, why then do we need to create all this paperwork? BIM: what is the problem here? you would just take an additional request. Am I just confused? General: yes. RK: we should vote on this now. There is a clear issue here. Either we are willing to look at status reports or we are not. Steve LeBlanc: table this, it is the proper problem of the next year's board. (there was a lot of discussion of varying technical proposals surrounding the issue of cutoffs and auto limits. The secretary did not follow much of it. The consensus, such as it was, was that the issue at hand was whether members could be depended upon to look at spending to date for applications taken in the second term.) JIS's amendment fails. People want to be sure this is reflected in the policy statement. The motion passed. RK: what do we do do about the overlarge PDT? This one is left for next week. RLL: If you accept cash or a check from a Coop user please record them in the petty cash book to avoid harassing the treasurer. This is especially true of cash $'s. You must record the Coop user name of the person for whom the money is taken. JIS: remember to ask people about access control. BIM: make it a question in the user section of the form B. Others: perhaps the policy statement is a better place. CAH: move to cutoff all accounts as of the 22 of May, or whatever the last day for credit for the term is. This will be publicised. Motion passes. CAH: we should start taking applications for the summer now. We need a new color of form B, and special care taken of applications. To process an extension, extend the cutoff through the summer. User meeting: who will show up? who will run it? NAHA and RK will work on it. Telecommunications: There are cards that identify the proper company to call for any broken device. They are in the job box. Fred Richardson: will anyone deal with him? Noone wants to think about it now. He should call back at the beginning of the summer to arrange it. RLL: we had a meeting about the telecommunications proposal. The proposal calls for: 13 Ann Arbor Ambassadors, appropriate black boxes, wiring, graphics, and terminal concentrator. For details see the proposal itself. S&S is now distributing Ambassadors, including maintenance. We will try to survey students as to the disposition of these terminals, if we get them. We will be sure to remind Wes that this stuff will be used with his systems. A teleray was not fixed because the screen would not frotz for the repairman. Publications Report: JAY: I started working on the MPM distribution project. DPC took new books to McCormick. The publications office still owes us some manuals from the original order, and we got some new addenda. Unfortunately, there was no rack in McCormick, so the manuals were left in a box there awaiting a rack. RLL: punt with the locking racks. Just get the books out there. Put up a sign reminding people that their house payed for the books. BIM: CAH has prepared some spinwriter doc, and a font catalog. It will be reproduced in a limited edition. Other: There is some progress about the ADB, there will be an ADB meeting soon. RDM: the office is always open after all, according to the survey. We need to look through the applications for interesting projects, to see what came of them. We want reports on them for the annual report. Applications: GDuffey's cutoff was G'dusted. He was allocated too much money. BIM took a Coop application for himself, and did not attach old applications. He was frowned on. EC $3 for Martin Shell to finish. $10 to meeting Mainiero to finish cover letters. He went to EC, who failed to pass it. He just needs to finish. Motion to give. Passes. Fernando Tusell, unspecified amount to meeting to learn emacs. rejected. Total Appropriations: Auto: 0 Student ; 0 370; EC: $3 Student; 0 370; To Meeting: $10 Student; 0 370; Coop: $395; Other Other: Star Wars was seen. Its sound effects were discussed. The former secretary dumped a nasty contract job on the current secretary. The shuttle landed. We tried to see it, with no success. There was a marathon. Gosper is here. There may be a trip to Cape Ann with the chairman tomorrow. People fell out of chairs. People saw randomness at off the wall. Three times a day there is a shuttle for students NY <-> Boston for $29. The meeting was adjourned at 2250. Minutes taken and submitted by Benson I. Margulies