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Board of Publications Meeting Minutes for January 3, 2017

Call to Order/Introductions

The meeting was called to order by Chair Ron Brooks at 9:04 PM on January 3, 2017.
Members Present: Ron Brooks, Chair; Susan Glass; Deb Lewis; Doug Powell; Paul Edwards.
ACB Employees and Contractors Present: Sharon Lovering; Larry Turnbull.
Ex Officio members present: Kim Charlson, President; Carla Ruschival, Goal One Chair.
Other Participants: Sue Ammeter; Ken Stewart.

Adoption of Agenda:

  • Ron reviewed the Agenda.
  • Motion: Susan moved and Doug seconded adoption of the Agenda. Motion passed.

Approval of December 6 Minutes:

  • Paul requested that his absence in November be noted as excused.
  • Paul and Ron commented on the high quality and detail of the Minutes.
  • Deb said that past Minutes are now formatted in the manner agreed upon in a previous meeting and she will submit them to Ron, Sharon and Larry for filing and for uploading to the web.
  • Motion: Paul moved and Doug seconded adoption of the December 6, 2016 Minutes. Motion passed.

Public Comment:

  • Paul said that Oral Miller asked him to convey that ACB past presidents should occasionally be listed in the Braille Forum, and it is Oral’s recommendation to do this twice annually. Paul suggested that once a year might be more appropriate.
  • Deb noted that this recommendation is similar to one brought by Michael Malver regarding recognition of past award winners.
  • Doug expressed concern that space was limited in the Braille Forum and that such historical content should be placed on the web site.
  • Sue Ammeter noted that Braille Forum readers include both members and the general public, and lists of names without significant background would be meaningless to many readers.
  • Paul and Larry suggested that this content should become part of the About Us section of the site.
  • Carla thought that a plan for content could be developed for a specific history section.
  • Kim said that the History Committee is being reestablished with Berl Colley as Chair.
  • Motion: Paul moved and Doug seconded to refer the recommendation made by Oral Miller regarding publication of a list of past presidents to both the History Committee and to Goal One, and request that these committees report to the BOP on decisions, progress and outcomes regarding inclusion of this information on the web site or other appropriate media.
  • Ken Stewart commented that he appreciated the ACB Board meeting Summary written by the BOP Chair which was recently published in the Braille Forum, and asked if this would happen regularly.
  • Ron confirmed that it is the expectation that the BOP will prepare a summary of all ACB Board meetings within 30 days of the meeting, but sometimes publication is delayed because this submission deadline does not always coincide with the Braille Forum publication schedule.

Reports:

BOP Chair: Ron Brooks

  • Appointed Susan Glass and Doug Powell to take the lead on compiling comments for potential revisions to the Editorial Policy Manual.
  • Contacted Tom Mitchell by email to obtain either draft minutes for July BOP meeting or a recording of the meeting.
  • Contacted Eric Bridges to request discussion at a future BOP meeting dealing with the use of Donor Perfect for distribution of the ACB E-Forum and to discuss format and approach for website administration updates to the BOP. Eric plans to attend the February BOP meeting for this discussion.
  • Shared information distributed by ACB regarding the negative piece on the ADA broadcast by 60 Minutes and provided personal comments to 60 Minutes via Facebook and the 60 Minutes on-line comment form.
  • Contacted Erik Deckers, a personal branding and blogging expert, to assist with identification of potential speakers for the BOP Editor’s Workshop to take place in Reno.
  • Submitted Awards article to Sharon for inclusion in the Braille Forum. This article will also be distributed to ACB leaders and members on-line.
  • Distributed the KPI Report with names indicating who is responsible for each data element. We will begin capturing data in January.

Editor: Sharon Lovering

  • Sharon is working on the February Braille Forum issue, hopes to have it done by Friday, and will send the Table of Contents when it is completed. She did most of the proofreading over the holidays. She is hampered by a broken finger for the next 4-6 weeks.
  • Sharon continues to receive information about new members, deletions, people who have passed away, format changes, address changes and name changes. She explained the logistics of adding the names from Donor Perfect--it took 32 emails, due to distribution limits, to incorporate the entire database. She noted that very long email addresses are often rejected or bounced back and she encourages affiliates to inform the national office of member email address changes.
  • Sharon  sent out most of the affiliates’ certification memos and deadline information between December 13-21. A number of affiliates were quite busy while she was out of the office: Florida, Georgia, Kansas, D.C., CCLVI, Nevada, and South Dakota, among many others. Keep up the good work! However, she is still waiting to hear back from a few affiliates and particularly needs information from Alaska.

December, 2016: Issue type: electronic; Print Page Count: 64

Date Posted to Website: 11/29/2016

Date E-mail version sent: 11/30/2016

E-mail issues mailed: 3,163

Returned: Large Print 7; Braille 6; Cassette 13; CD-ROM 0; Miscellaneous 4

January 2017: Issue type: hard copy; Print Page Count: 48

Large Print Issues Mailed: 3,011

Braille Issues Mailed: 727

Cassette Issues Mailed: 1,078

CD-ROM Issues Mailed: 156

E-mail issues mailed: 3,089

No distribution dates were available.

ACB Radio: Larry Turnbull

  • Working to rescue data from the dying server in the VA office and data will now be located in the cloud. Most staff have access to the new location and this migration will be completed soon for the rest of the staff.
  • Completed setup for an in-house server to manage notifications for ACB Link and the app update has been released.
  • Completed relocation of ACB Radio server following closure of the data center which had housed this server.
  • No ACB Radio listener count statistics for the phone system were available for November and December so Larry is determining why this is occurring.
  • In general, listener counts are increasing and listeners responded favorably to the special holiday programming offered on Treasure Trove and Interactive. Mainstream is averaging 55-60 listeners for most programming with 70 for Main Menu. Trove averages 120, Café averages 20, Interactive averages 45, and World News and Information averages 30 listeners per month.
  • ACB Reports and the Braille Forum podcasts were posted and put into rotation on Mainstream.

ACB Email List Moderator: Bob Hachey

Bob was unable to attend the call due to illness but provided a report in advance.

He noted there was lots of good discussion on ACB-L concerning accessible set top boxes and the new FCC regulations. There was also discussion of the recent election which has been transitioned over to the chat list.

December, 2016 Stats

ACB-L Number of Members: 306; Messages Posted: 289

ACB-Chat Number of Members: 147; Messages Posted: 11

Leadership List: 225 Subscribers; Number of Messages: 120

Social Media: Carla Ruschival

Facebook: 2,785 likes

  • Blind man sets out alone in Google’s Driverless Car: 10,657 people reached; 105 likes, loves and wows; 113 shares
  • ACB responds to 60 Minutes ADA segment: 3,145 people reached; 24 likes; 51 shares
  • Making Microsoft products more accessible: What to expect in 2017: 2,017 people reached; 34 likes and loves; 33 shares

Twitter: 1,699 Followers

  • ACB responds to 60 minutes ADA Segment: 1,500 Impressions; 45 Engagements
  • Charter/Spectrum Accessible features: 1,341 impressions; 49 engagements
  • Verizon Launches Accessibility Features for FiOS Video Customers: 1,155 impressions; 49 engagements

Deb commented on the excellent coordination  across the various media channels in getting the word out about the 60 Minutes segment. Ron commented on how the material was presented in a way that was easy to share with others, and asked if ACB received any response from the comments that were submitted. Kim said we did not receive any responses that she was aware of. Kim and Doug confirmed that there was no acknowledgement of ACB’s comments on air the following week. There was discussion about whether it would be useful in future for PR or Goal One to engage other media outlets, civil rights organizations, etc. in order to generate a wider base of commenters and draw more diverse attention to the issue.

Public Relations: Katie Frederick

Katie was ill and unable to attend the meeting. She sent email explaining that the PR Committee did not meet in December but would meet in January.

Goal 1: Carla and Ron

There was no additional report.

Large Print Reader preference Survey: Deb Lewis

  • Contacted appointed members to negotiate a meeting date which is unresolved as of now.
  • Overall dates for completion need to be revised to March.

Updating ACB Editorial Policy Manual

  • Ron has asked Doug and Susan to take the lead on this task. The goal at this meeting is to outline the task and develop a timeline for completing the review and update in 2017.
  • Doug and Susan will initially review the current Editorial Policy Manual and will send recommendations to the BOP. This topic will be included on the March agenda to solicit additional feedback.
  • Doug said that this revision will likely include recommendations to update language in the ACB Constitution related to the Editorial Policy.
  • Sharon said that she recently learned that the Hollis K Ligget award is incorrectly named and that Mr. Ligget’s middle name is Samuel. No one knows how this unfortunate error occurred. It will require a change in the Editorial Policy and on future awards. It was agreed that the K should be dropped for all future references.
  • Ron asked that the requirements for each award be formatted and structured in a similar manner. Kim indicated that there are new guidelines from the Awards Committee which will be published soon.
  • Ron also noted that it’s not possible to direct readers to specific sections of the manual on the web site and hoped that the manual could be formatted in a way that allows this by putting the awards on a separate page or by using other structural techniques such as linked headings. This would reduce the need to reprint the awards criteria each year. Deb said she thought this is an issue with most or all documents posted to the ACB web site and wondered if a policy change regarding this should be considered by Goal One or as part of the editorial Policy. Larry agreed that this formatting change is easy to implement. Kim expressed concern that correcting the structure of one document would not be a good use of resources in the overall scheme of revising the web site, and she requested that the criteria for the awards be listed in articles or other contexts in which they are discussed until the web site revisions can be fully implemented.
  • Sharon will add the awards criteria to Ron’s Braille Forum article.

Talking Points for Midyear Meeting

  • Ron will develop and distribute the previously agreed upon talking points for the Midyear Meeting presentation to be given by Doug and Paul. Kim will allocate 15 minutes on the Midyear agenda for the BOP presentation.
  • There was discussion of how to offer focus groups on specific topics during Midyear or Convention but no specific action was taken.

Work Plan Update

  • The KPI Tool is ready for use and data collection begins with January data.
  • Midyear presentation: circulate list of topics prior to February meeting.
  • Convention program recommendations: Deb will add the results of the brainstorming to the to-do list. Invite Janet when we’re ready to discuss this again.
  • E-forum format and content: not yet started. Postponing this to April due to workload.
  • BOP Awards: Braille Forum article is written and Sharon will add criteria for awards from previous article.
  • Constitution and Bylaws amendments: Doug has identified items as part of the Editorial Policy.
  • Large print preference survey: Deb will hold intro meeting and begin taskforce work.
  • ACB Candidates Forum: Need to get an article written. Agendize for February.
  • Editors Workshop: Ron will follow up on referrals for possible presenters. Still need to identify components and presenters for the additional strand on affiliate relationships with the media. May want to consider a name change to broaden the scope of the audience. Susan will discuss collaboration with the Teachers affiliate and Paul will discuss with PR.

Announcements

There were no additional announcements.

Next Meeting:

Tuesday, February 7, 2017 – 9:00 PM Eastern. Doug will be unable to make the meeting.

Adjourn

Doug moved and Deb seconded adjournment. Motion passed and the meeting adjourned at 10:54 PM.

Respectfully Submitted,

Deb Lewis, Secretary