Summary from April 19, 1994

This is Dan York's summary as posted to efnh-announce April 21

EFNH folks,

Here's *my* summary of what happened last Tuesday night. I've used real names throughout the text, and included the list Fred Iannelli sent out at the bottom, so that folks could identify names with email addresses. Others are welcome to add their comments, but this is what I remember...

*IF YOU HAVE COMMENTS ON THIS*, I would ask that you please do NOT send them to "efnh-announce" (if you just "reply" please check where it is going). Rather, either send them to me directly, or send them to "efnh-discuss@mv.com". I would like to keep "efnh-announce" from becoming a discussion list. Thank you.

SUMMARY OF 4/19/94 EFNH MEETING

Eighteen people gathered at Shorty's Mexican Roadhouse in Litchfield, (where some of us consumed far too many nacho chips :-) and just had discussions among ourselves at the tables. Dinner ran a bit late, and everyone didn't get back to MV until about 8pm, where another 5 people were waiting.

After introductions and a brief comment from Dan about why Mark, Marta, and he first got interested in starting up EFNH, the group began discussing ideas of things EFNH could/should do. Discussion continued for some time, and covered a range of subjects. Eventually, three main activities/working groups emerged: (I would expect that a mailing-list will be set up for each.)

Federal Legislation (efnh-congress?)

This group will be concerned with Federal legislation (like Clipper and Digital Telephony). Activities might include communicating our opinions on these to all of our Congressional offices, meeting with Congressional staff, etc. Also might include developing alerts to send to the broader NH online community on these issues. Also might include working with the Congressional offices to help make them more accessible to the online community. And just continuing to educate ourselves on these federal issues. Initial interest included: Fred, Cory, Dan, and Keith

NH State Legislation (efnh-state?)

This group will address what legislation is happening on the state level and/or what legislation *could* happen on the state level. It might research who should be contacted on issues and send out alerts about that. Might meet/talk with state legislators. Initial interest included: Cathy, John, David, Eric Poole, and Alice

Public Outreach (efnh-speakers?)

This group would handle the occasional requests for speakers we have been receiving, and might initiate contact with community groups (Rotaries, etc.) letting them know we have speakers available. Initial interest included: Bruce, Dan, Doug, Reed, and Keith.

These descriptions will need to be refined, but this was essentially how the group divided. Stay tuned for info on how to subscribe to whatever lists are set up.

There were other ideas about outreach to education and media, but for the sake of simplicity and focusing on only a few things, these were put aside for the moment.

NETWORKING

As far as how to tie this all together, Bruce Dawson volunteered his system at Virgin to be a repository of documents, Mark continued to offer MV.COM to host mailing lists, Eric Poole offered his BBS (NETIS) to house documents for non-Internet folks, and Dan already put together some EFNH WWW pages for those who have full Internet access (they'll be available soon.)

The list "efnh-announce" will continue to exist for general announcements, alerts, etc., but "efnh-discuss" will go away and be replaced with individual lists for each of these actions outlined above.

A group was formed to help figure out how to coordinate all these lists, link them to newsgroups and possibly FidoNet, develop gopher/WWW info, and generally find ways to make more EFNH-related info available to people online. People at the meeting who expressed interest in helping with this were: Doug, Fred, Mark, Marta, Eric Poole, Bruce, Reed, John, Steve, and Dan.

A separate list (efnh-network?) will be set up for those who want to help with this or stay informed about it.

Administration

Dan expressed his concern that the core of the group that organized the meetings, answered questions, etc., needed to be expanded beyond the original group of Dan/Mark/Marta. However, since he couldn't describe what all he was really looking for, nor how much time would be involved, no one could really volunteer. Doug and John said they might be willing to help. Comments were made that as the organization eventually evolves, it will probably be necessary to establish a formal "Board", etc. For right now, we'll continue as we are.

Internet Info

Some expressed interest in having Dan continue the service he has been providing to forward interesting EFF-related stuff from various lists he subscribes to. This will set up as a separate list, probably "efnh-netinfo". Stay tuned.

Future Meetings

People felt that a face-to-face meeting was good to have every few months, although the definition of a "few" varied from 2 to 4. Eric Poole raised the point that he may have some NH legislators who could meet with us, but it would need to be relatively soon. It was suggested that when we could pull an event together, we could just announce it to the group. We didn't need, at this point, to get more formal than that.

The meeting concluded a bit after 9pm, when some people checked out MV's equipment, some looked at the Mosaic demo I'd brought, others discussed various issues, and a few disappeared with Mark into a back room to check out the hardware for his new T1 connection that was just installed.

4/19 EFNH meeting attendees

(from Fred Iannelli)