ROCKNET MEETING MINUTES
October 13, 2005Meeting opened at 7:40 pm in the City Manager's Conference room.
In attendance were: Mary Alice McDonough, Pat Nucci, Betsy Robbins, Mike Cannon, Bob Ekman, Jim Beller, Jonathan Walker, Brian Pierce, and Clifford Lanham.
1. Minutes of September 8th were accepted with minor change.
2. Betsy reported that the Rockville website received 3075 visits/day in September and that RockNet received 606 visits/day. The swim center virtual tour is now on-line. New election material has been posted. The annual car show is this Saturday.
3. Bob Ekman reported on RockNet related events. Most of the problems with Lyris have been resolved. Recent mailings have been very near 100%. Bob committed to moving off the old NTList to the Lyris server soon. The Rockville Housing Enterprise website is now reachable by the RHE office -- they worked on their network switch.
4. Cliff Lanham, chair of the Alliance of Rockville Neighborhood Associations (ARNA), asked for help in updating their web pages.
5. Jonathan Walker reported on the Wi-Fi subcommittee activities and the free Internet wireless access hotspot.
a. The D-Link access point was causing problems, so we switched to a Cisco access point.
b. Jonathan along with REDI met with several shop owners and discussed operations and issues.
c. From 9/3 to 10/13 we had 29 new users.
d. On October 5, the subcommittee had a public launching of the Wi-Fi Hotspot, "unplugging the Ethernet wire". Pictures and notes will be published on the RockNet web site.
e. Additional announcements are planned, but generally going slow with advertisements.
f. The committee is looking on establishing community wireless Internet access. Jonathan is planning to meet with the American Center, King Farm and Rockshire citizens.
6. There was no reported change in the camera on the Victoria roof, except the roof construction is closing in on it's mounting. Bob Ekman reported that we now have a full year of hourly images. We may miss an image when we go off daylight savings.
7. Mary Alice McDonough reported on her efforts to understand a community calendar. She presented that the current citizen web sites had very little to offer in the area of calendars. This implies there is a possible need. She will be looking into possible applications, such as the calendar on the King Farm Home Owners web site.
8. Mike Cannon asked if RockNet would be interested in hosting a community blog application. He has been approached by a software provider. Bob Ekman replied we might be interested if we could be sure it would be used and not abused.
The meeting closed at 9:10 PM
Report submitted by:
Robert W. Ekman