Computer Club meeting : March 20, 1997 </p><p>

1. Members present : steve, tim, darron, terrance, steve fox, martin, mike, ian, jay, james (proxy for donald), craig, darron, kim </p><p>
2. The scoop about our web space : -Monday, yakko was booted off the network for 5 hours some time in the morning. Dr. Nelson later informed Ken Theis to remove our web pages per order of Richard Wright. Apparently, a directive was issued 5 years ago stating that student web pages are restricted due to bandwidth problems. However, finding this documentation seems to be a problem. -The k-12 parent : Basically, all this was started by a parent searching the web (we think key-wording sex or nudity whatever) and running across a C-Club members OWN home page in which a tasteful black and white photo of THEMSELF was posted. She became irate and called Richard Wright. From here, he passed judgment, claiming that he hadn’t known about our web page activities, and issued a disable command through to Dr. Nelson. -Bandwidth issues : The university is currently connected to a T1 line that connects us to the internet and has a trans rate of 1.544 million bits per second. The word is that this line is operating at only about 30%. -Wright’s decision : He seems to think that all the traffic goes through tigger, slowing it down, slowing the modems down and taking up too much disk space on tigger. He wants to moves us to the DOSAWEB server in the office of student services if we are to even have a web page. Basically he doesn’t want us to have our own web space for student accounts. We can keep Yakko’s web page, but that is it for right now. He doesn’t think it is fair for us to have pages and not everyone else. So for 6 months until the University can offer student web pages, we won’t be able to activate ours, maybe not at all, since the university won’t have control over our pages. -Our immediate response : Tim, jay and others within the C-Club immediately got on the phone trying to get in touch with Wright. When contact was finally reached a day and 1/2 later, Wright was not too friendly, nor willing to talk reasonably to either jay or tim. We are also in touch with channel 3, the Western Herald, soon the Kalamazoo Gazette, students from various Universities, and CS faculty. Letters have been written and delivered to Diether Haenicke and various others concerning this matter. Yakko’s web pages has gotten a complete overhaul, </p><p> -What else is being done : Tomorrow, a meeting between Wright, Dr. Nelson and Dr. Trenary is arranged to talk this out. More information will come out of this meeting. </p><p> -What you can do about this : Write letters, talk to people. But do it in reference to you personally. Talk about how this effects you and how angry you are. Don’t make it about the Computer Club specifically. </p><p> PLEASE DO NOT DO ANYTHING MALICIOUS (you know what I mean). WE ARE TRYING TO HANDLE THIS IN A PROFESSIONAL MANNER. WE ARE GOING TO KEEP THE PRESSURE ON UNTIL THIS SITUATION IS RESOLVED. </p><p> Copy the disclaimers other universities put on their web pages to warm them of the content within. Mail them to us. </p><p> Get a list of Doctoral 1 colleges who offer student pages. </p><p> -Tim wants bio-records for everyone in the club (phone numbers addresses ) just in case we are yanked off the system so that we will be able to get in touch with everyone. -The bottom line : This week, we got about 40,000 web hits. But since you really can’t count on campus hits, we may have had only really 10,000. So bandwidth doesn’t seem the real issue. The real issue is control. They want control over the computer club. </p><p> We are handling this situation as tackfully as possible, we want it resolved as soon as possible. If the time comes where talks are getting no where, we will take more drastic action. </p><p>
3. Future projections for the Computer Club -IN the next two years, we will need to spend about $200-300 on network stuff (is. a hub, network cards, etc), so we need to put away some reserve funds now. </p><p>
4. An idea was raised about the Club volunteering to do all the web server stuff for the University. We would set up the accounts for free. We could get the initial money from the university to set this up and then pay it back later. </p><p>
5. A word about Alt-groups : Someone at the meeting brought up the question as to why the computer club doesn’t offer Alt-groups. Basically, they use up more traffic, more messages, and more bandwidth. Alt-groups need extremely fast hard drives, and that is something we don’t have. Maybe sometime in the future we will have the resources to operate a few groups, but right now, our systems can’t handle it. </p><p>
6. Meeting ended 7:28 pm. “So let it be written, so let it be done.” </p>