TC meeting minutes
September 25, 2012 Room 3902, noon to 1 pm..
Members in attendance: Gordon Watt, Kurt Shadbolt, Scott Hildreth, Norman
Buchwald, Nancy Cheung, Lisa Ulibarri, Minta Winsor, Rachael Ugale, Jeannine
Methe, Chasity Whiteside, Carlos Enriquez and Zarir Marawala (Chair).
The meeting was called to order at 12:05 pm.
PRBC update was given to us by one of our members who also attends PRBC. Kurt?
(Sorry I did not write down who it was). The meeting was apparently focused on
issues pertaining to possible cutting of classes etc. should there be a need post
November 6, 2012.
Scott provided us an explanation to the flow chart which has been sent to Ming and
Dr. Railey for the Accreditation Report.
Gordon updated us on the 2 week trial of using “thin clients”. These are computer
stations that have no hard drive and can be used as computers but will not hold any
long term changes. So should someone put material on the computer that is
objectionable, a simple restart would wipe the slate clean so to speak and the
computer can be made available for use again, without having to format any hard
disks, etc. We look forward to an update on that in the upcoming weeks.
The idea of web update was discussed and key points were made. The general
request from VP George Railey has been to see if we can identify faculty/staff that
would be willing to help update the website by way of broken links, i.e. removal or
fixing of broken links, updating webpages and taking down outdated ones, etc. The
40,000 + pages on the web are a daunting project and as part of the discussion,
members recognized that a makeshift task force of “volunteers” cannot possibly be
expected to do web designing, but rather simple content management within there
area.
The idea of using any funding available for paying those who would provide a spoton workshop to train volunteers to do such tasks was also discussed, along with a
modest stipend or honorarium being given to those who are willing to attend such a
seminar outside of FLEX days and commit to X amount of webwork.
The idea of using any funding also brought up the suggestion that perhaps the web
platform (currently Cold Fusion) can be switched to Microsoft or Apache with an
eye down the line for hiring specialists who are much easier to come by in the latter
two platforms than those who are “fluent” in Cold Fusion.
The Chair will send out a suggestion to the President re: the webpages update issue
with a request for an appropriate honorarium to help incentivize and give
momentum to the process. Alternately, if more funding is made available, we may
also want to look into changing the web platform as discussed above. This move for
a preliminary request was approved by the Tech Comm members with no
objections.
Meeting adjourned at 1 pm.
Next meeting 9/25/2012.