EFNH Meeting, Feb. 28, 1995

Subject: Notes on 2/28/95 EFNH meeting

EFNH folks,

Eight of us were able to gather on Tuesday, 2/28/95, at the Granite Street Bar & Grill in Manchester. Those attending were:

Gary McGath
Fred Ianelli
Mark Mallett
George Metes
Dan York
Marta Greenberg
Jim Isaak
Stuart Hollander

Before/during/after dinner, a number of very different discussions took place. These notes attempt to cover what occurred.

Regards,

Dan

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Notes on 2/28/95 EFNH meeting

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

>From Dan York (ldy@edserv.cicc.com)

Items where someone said they would take some action are indicated by

a "->" at the beginning of the line.

ORGANIZATIONAL ACTION

There was extensive discussion about how "formal" an organization EFNH should be. Do we need to go through all the hoops to formally establish ourselves... are we ready to go through all that that entails... do we even know what all is technically involved... should that be a longer-term item......

In the end, it was decided to get a P.O. Box and to just use individual donations for money for the moment (thus making it so that we don't need to establish a bank account immediately). As we move forward, we'll look to more formally establish the organization.

-> Gary McGath was charged with getting a P.O. Box, and has already done so.

Our snail-mail address is now:

Electronic Frontiers New Hampshire

P.O. Box 931

Manchester, NH 03105-0931

Gary will check it on a regular basis.

-> Dan York will develop some letterhead for "official" communication purposes and for news releases, etc.

ACTION - Senate Bill 314

Discussion turned to the impending Senate Bill 314 ("The Communications Decency Act of 1995", I believe) and what terrible censorship consequences it could have.

-> Gary and Fred Ianelli will develop a position paper on S.314 and circulate it to the "efnh-discuss" mailing list by 3/15/94.

It was decided that S.314 should be the focus of our next meeting on 3/21 (details below). We need to plan a campaign to inform our Congressional delegation and their staff about this bill, as well as the media and public.

Telecommunications Reform Bill

The group then briefly discussed that the telecommunications reform bill should be the next legislative item we should be concerned with.

PUBLIC EDUCATION CAMPAIGN

At some point, we began discussing the need for a public education campaign to really reach out to the general public and educate them about online issues. The areas of concern were divided into three categories:

General information about the Internet and what it really is success stories, anecdotes, why should the public care?
Issues relating to civil liberties in the online world freedom of speech, freedom of access, privacy, encryption, etc.
Government regulations and how this is a different medium from others such as the broadcast TV/radio world.

The first step with this campaign will be to define what is the message we want to get out in each area. What do we want to specifically say? How do we link it in then to New Hampshire? etc., etc.

The distribution of the message would be through general media work (news releases, letters, etc.), talk radio, and through speaking with civic groups (political, Rotary Clubs, Chambers of Commerce, other community groups).

Dan and George Metes both expressed interest in working on item #1. Fred clearly demonstrated that item #3 is his arena! :-)

This all will be discussed online and in further meetings.

NEXT MEETING

------------

The next meeting will be on Tuesday, March 21, beginning at 7pm at Shorty's Mexican Roadhouse on Route 3A in Litchfield. To avoid the "glaring waitress syndrome", after dinner and discussion, we'll move just up the street to MV Communications' office to continue discussion. The primary purpose of the meeting will be to discuss S.314 and how we can take action against the bill. Details and directions will follow as the date gets closer.

OTHER ACTION ITEMS

------------------

-> Mark Mallett will set up a web server specifically for EFNH. currently "www.efnh.org" points to MV's Web server (which is why our address (http://www.efnh.org/efnh/) has the extra "efnh/" on the end of it.).
-> Jim Isaak will put together his notes as a series of Web pages and mail those to Dan.
-> Dan will hang Jim's pages off the EFNH web server.
-> Dan will write up his notes and send them out. (which you are reading)

FURTHER DISCUSSION

Further discussion/planning will take place on the "efnh-discuss" mailing list. If you are not subscribed to that list, send a message to:

majordomo@mv.mv.com

with the message body of:

subscribe efnh-discuss

How would you know if you are already subscribed? The only messages that have gone to efnh-announce recently have been the notices of the meeting and the announcement of the P.O. Box. If you received other EFNH information, like Gary's discussion of S.314, then you are on efnh-discuss.

The "majordomo" program is smart enough that it will not subscribe you twice,

so if you are in doubt, send a message.

EFNH LISTS NOW ON WEB PAGES

For those of you who would like to read messages to this list from the Web (rather than from your e-mail inbox), I have set up mail archives using "hypermail" for both "efnh-announce" and "efnh-discuss". You can get to them at the URL:

http://www.cicc.com/archives/efnh/

And that's about it...