Members present: chair Denise Colley, Ron Brooks, Marcia Dresser, Doug Powell; ex officio members Berl Colley, Bob Hachey; ACB staff/contractors Sharon Lovering, Annette Carter, Larry Turnbull. Absent: Ron Milliman. ACB president Kim Charlson, ACB treasurer Carla Ruschival, and former BOP member Ken Stewart also participated on the call.
Chair Denise Colley convened the meeting at 9:05 PM EDT. Ron moved and Marcia seconded adoption of the agenda as revised; the motion passed. Ron moved and Doug seconded acceptance of the minutes of the midyear meeting as distributed; the motion passed. Denise moved and Ron seconded adoption of the April 7 minutes as distributed; the motion passed.
Survey Dissemination
The survey officially went live yesterday. The article containing the survey will appear in the June and July Forums. It has also been sent to the ACB leadership and acb-l lists. A phone number has been set up for people to call requesting assistance with the survey; we have already received five calls. Twelve surveys have been submitted. Email responses will go to Denise, and braille responses will be sent to Marcia to be put into the survey instrument. At the convention, we will be available to assist people with the survey from 4:15 to 5:30 PM on Monday through Wednesday. Ron will be available Monday, Marcia Tuesday, and Doug Wednesday. We will publicize this and our town hall meetings in the newspaper and on the convention floor.
Town Hall Meetings
The town hall meetings will take place on Sunday afternoon and Thursday afternoon. We will begin with a ten-minute overview of the BOP, including the scope of what we do and how we interact with the board and other committees. We will discuss how ACB and most organizations have had a downturn in revenue, which has forced us to think hard about how we generate information. The ACB Braille Form is available in many formats; also, since it costs so much to produce hard copy, the E-Forum provides a chance for longer issues, and so we have reduced the frequency of hard copy issues. The phone format is probably the best alternative to replace cassettes. We will talk for no more than 20 minutes and then open it up for discussion. The town meetings are qualitative; the survey is quantitative. We want both sessions recorded. We will try to stream one of the sessions so people at home can participate; if we can't work that out, we will hold a virtual town meeting via conference call after convention.
Candidates' Forum
Denise and Ron will host the Candidates' Forum, and they will meet soon to draft the questions.
Awards
We finalized our decisions regarding the awards. Doug moved and Denise seconded that we give Sara Conrad an honorable mention for her excellent memorial article on Brenda Dillon.
Editor's Report
Sharon emailed the June E-Forum out today, and is working on the numbers for May. She is very busy with convention preparations. She recorded the pre-registration form onto cassette for those who request it. She also duplicated the large print form and will mail those out tomorrow.
Leadership Training Seminar
Everything is set for this event, which will take place on Friday, July 11. A reporter from a Las Vegas newspaper will be the luncheon speaker.
Internet Oversight Committee
A couple of people have used a pseudonym rather than their real names on acb-l. The BOP recommended that Bob discuss this with the IOC to determine if they want to require everyone to use their real names, and whether this requirement should be included in the best practices document. Bob will inform the BOP of the IOC's decision.
ACB Radio
Two new broadcasters will be starting shortly. Bruce Taitz will do a comedy show, and Mike Moran will be doing a doo-wop show. The June E-Forum will be available on the phone in a day or two; it takes Larry about three hours to prepare the MP3 files. Preparations are underway for the convention.
Social Media
ACB's Facebook page has 510 subscribers, and the twitter account has 694 followers. Everyone is pleased with these figures.
Web Site Task Force
Annette is making improvements to the test site based on feedback from the testers. Carla feels that soon we will have a shopping cart for the mini-mall.
Marketing of the Forum
Denise would like the BOP members to think about how we can better market the ACB Braille Forum and E-Forum in the magazine. This will be a topic for the July or August meeting.
The BOP will next meet in person at the ACB convention in Las Vegas on Sunday, July 13, at 10:30 AM Pacific Daylight Time.
The meeting adjourned at 11:10 PM EDT.
Respectfully submitted,
Marcia N. Dresser, Secretary