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ICS Meeting Minutes
Minutes of the March 10, 2008 ICS Meeting
-The meeting was called to order at 8:03 PM by President Dave Everton. The ICS would like to thank Bill Baus for hosting the meeting at his home in Bloomington. Others attending included Randy Jackson, Ty Spatta, Will Ott, Ray Sheldon, Jerry Walker and Bruce Trotter
-The minutes from the December meeting had been previously read and were approved.
-There is $2982.76 in the ICS treasury. A couple of members paid dues.
-A few County Directors reported that they had some new report forms but since they had been waiting on the latest database release they hadn’t done much. However, around the beginning of February the directors resumed entering data. A breakout is planned for a later date, maybe June.
-Web site is not current but Rob wants to continue being Webmaster per Dave. No mention of Rob’s county director duties
-There was some discussion around the loss of the Topozone web site. Topozone was purchased by Trails.com and is now a $50 a year subscription. No immediate fix was found.
-A concern was expressed about Keith’s Electronic Map Database project and having to reenter all the info that Keith has collected. His spreadsheet is a disconnected file that may be hard to integrate back into the database without a significant amount of time expended on reentry.
-As many are aware, Will Ott and Todd Webb are working on plotting cave locations electronically. Will is doing his the hard way, manually. Todd is using GIS to plot his. Dave has reviewed Todd’s work calling it the ICS Visual Database.
-Will stated that he has found some info that Dick Blenz has that is not in the database.
-Ty Spatta requested an upgrade from Regular Member to Contributing Member. Congrats to our newest Contributing Member!
-The remainder of the meeting consisted of mostly discussion around the new database direction headed by Randy Jackson. Randy has secured our very own domain name: indianacavesurvey.org through a web hosting service named Blue Host for $6.95 per month. It is a secured site that includes the ability to use MySQL software, run a forum and have our own unique e-mail addresses. Randy has imported the current database into MySQL and started some testing such as running reports and validations. He has also set up a forum with permissions based on membership levels.
-Want the ability for county directors to edit the database of other county directors. Randy stated that this was simply a matter of setting permissions. This could be temporary permissions for help to those directors needing it.
-Randy wants to set up a Computer Committee to help with the new database. These individuals would help with development and testing for a new online database. Anyone that has a desire to help Randy, send him a note.
-Randy will be sending out a note to all members to sign up for the new forum. It will be running in parallel with the existing forum.
-Links to the electronic maps database and entrance photos will be in the new database.
-Bill asked whether the new database will have an online query. Randy replied in the affirmative.
-The Indiana Cave Symposium details were discussed. A vote was taken and approved to split the food costs with the IKC. The Symposium will be held at Milltown at Cave Country Canoes. It will probably be the last time since the facility is being sold. Keith will be handling the food, and Bob Vandeventer will be doing the audio/visual duties.
-Next meeting will be held on June 9, 2008 at Bruce Trotter’s house in Columbus. There will be a cookout prior to the meeting. Dogs and burgers provided. Bring a covered dish or something.
Minutes recorded by Bruce Trotter
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