= Membership Meeting on Tech Challanges of 2011 and Better Communications with Membership = July 7, 2011 Approximately 20 members attended a 2 hour meeting (which closed with a field trip to our colocation center). Following is a very brief summary that focuses on action points. Alfredo introduced the meeting, Jamie presented a report on the major tech challenges of 2011. We then had a discussion from the membership. The discussion touched on the quality of the service advisories and how to improve them, the difficulty of providing tech information to groups and individuals that cannot understand it, the pain our members went through on account of the php 5.2 to 5.3 transistion, which could have been avoided with better communication, need for paid tech staff, treatment of MFPL as a "host" rather than membership organization, need more inter-changes with techies. == Action steps == * Add tech contact as well as billing contact to the new membership form and to the control panel * Create a second service list (in addition to service-advisories). service-advisories is a frequent announcement list of all changes happening to the technology at MF/PL. The second list (service-alerts? name to be decided) will be an in-frequent list of announcements that are particularly impactful. * Auto subscribe the current billing contact of all members to both lists * Send a friendly explanation to each list about the purpose of the list * Subscribe all new member tech contacts to both lists * Members other than Jamie should write future service advisories and alerts * Write templates for service advisories to ensure better non-tech readability. The templates should included more structured information (e.g. a header at the top that indicates the time range for any outage)