The Global Scoutlink Council Meeting, 26th of october 2001

Who was present:

Country Coordinators

Jabiru Australia
IRON[Fe26 Italy
Mike_uk United Kingdom
Nerilka United States
No-use Holland
Ispy Canada
Tinge Scandinavia
Coxwain HongKong
Woody Switzerland

Who Was Apologized

Fips_de
Faona
Falcon_tw
Tabaqui was replaced by no-use
Ernie_nl

Important notice: At this meeting Council adopted the document that describes rules for Scoutlink. The document can be found at: http://www.scoutlink.net/votingdoc/voting.htm

1.0 Ircops and Espanol
1.1 Ircops and Espanol
Under this item there was a long conversation about the the situation on #espanol side of Scoutlink. Every CC agreed that Scoutlink needs to sort that problem because there are many users from spanish language countries joining everyday on the network. We should involve Faona more, and in some way IK. But it is necessary that they find some new chanops and eventually a global: in brief they have to rebuild the espanol staff. So the Council took this decision: On behalf of the Council, IRON[Fe26 will contact faona and IK and he will ask them to look for new chanops names ( within 3 weeks ) and a date for the elections of them ( within 5 weeks );

1.2 Ircop status of IK
Due to the decision of Scoutlink Council IK should loose his rights like IrcOP. The Council decided that he can stay active like Country Coordinator untill new a new CC is elected. Faona is the official IrcOP for #espanol.

1.3 Ircop for #portuguese
This channel has the same problem as #espanol. A very crowed channel without control. We have a Country Coordinator, Carol, that for many reasons can't be present and active on that side. Council adopted the procedure for elections of new chanops and for one ircop ( within 1 month ) .

2.0 General conversation about Joti. It was positive or negative a report for each country rapresented;

Canada: Well, from what I saw, other than when the services went wild, I have to say it went pretty well; We had good cooperation from the regulars as temp chanops; As most of you know, I was mostly in the #francais channels and things in there went smooth; And even when the services went bonkers, we managed to stay afloat thanks to the new servers.

Hong Kong: " the Associtaion of HK has two official station, only one of them using IRC; the other one not even has any JOTI stuff at all... only playing computer games at that station for cubs..
and due to some problems, the HQ of HK not joining IRC on the next day..cause of some ops intend #chinese to be a #chinese Only channel and refuse the SAHK (Scout Assn of HK) participates to type Eng within the channel..the SAHK is quite angry about this..I had a 2 hrs phone discussion with the JOTI coordinator in HK on the Monday after JOTI, he said the deputy Chief Commissioner is not happy with this issue..and possible not using IRC in next year.." further details are avaliable in the log of the meeting

Italy: we had about 44 patrols that subscribed the quizscout from 4 associations ( wosm and independent ) : so it was a success there. Our forecasts are that 600 scouts took part from italy; no activity on other irc network; so joti in italy was totaly on scoutlink; there was open 3 channels plus two channels dedicated to forums for leaders and rovers. We had a good result because we had all associations and this is the first time and the first activity in italy wich involves everybody.

Australia: Had around 14 operators (inluding temps) ; Was great to see Tely, Sez, Bishop in there; Oz was very prepared... there was a lot of information put out via Radio Scoutling mail lists, our own scoutlink-ozanz mail list and the Scout magazine before JOTI also websites; We may have some participation figures later. People have to submit a station log to get their JOTI badges; Only two contacts on the weekend about connection problems; 1 contact about a gline on a network i sent feedback form to around 60 users on the mail list.. one reply so far informal feedback - was great.

United Kingdom: lots of good feedback from a lot of new users... couple of technical points for next year..save those for the joti/tt wrap up meeting some of the information relating to UK Scout Assoc and WOSM is confidential ..i shall be upset if any of it gets outside council good input from UK Scout Association..finally winning there... 2002 the guy who is UK national joti co-ordinator is takingover co-ordination for WOSM has convinced UK to go with us for joti in future years and in confidence..for 2005 and 2007 i have a meeting with UK assoc to start planning 2002 in November

United States: As you know BSA/GSUSA do not support JOTI overtly and I think USA users participation was down this year - I hope to find a way to rectify this for next year although I am not sure how. One incident with #wagggschat being misadvirtised in NZ which may have caused hurt feelings for users on some of the guiding listservs - I am not yet sure how to rectify this, but I will continue to work on this project. Perhaps sharing contacts and advirtisements with them in general will improve this. It hurt us especially in relationship to US users and It was exacerbated by some user going over there and advirtising US in their channel - to the point of a kick/ban which they *NEVER* do; The users/chanops that I solicitied feedback from enjoyed it and felt like it went smoothly. The interactions with the users were everyone's favorite part. One suggested a ROTA of #joti ops. For the USA we had 3 tempops and both ircops participating. And much support for UK, NL, and AUS for what I consider our timezones; I felt that the execution of the day went well, although preparation left much to be desired (I preped #joti and #espanol in terms of opening channels; I agree with my user that it was unclear when ops were scheduled on or not) I think the new servers, services made it go as smoothly as it did in terms of little swearing, little sending of viruses, little flooding. They also made it easier to recover from the usual craziness that happensFinally, as a personal note - I think it would alleviate some strain on our ops if we shared the specialty channels amoungst the language channels instead of entirely staffing them from #Joti tempops.

Holland: short report is avaibale through council mailing list and they will send a final report on Joti to the council as soon as possible. Anyway first impressions are positive.

Scandinavia: The Scandinavian channels went well we had seperate language chans for the youngest (norwegian/Swedish/Danish) and ended up with 6 #scandinavian (languageMIX) ones too; All in all everything went great, even during services failure. I was r/l with 5 temp-ops and DanScout (TT) and that helped alot. That is btw recommendable ... to be ops together r/l ... fun and efficient; Before JOTI i had very little contact to the 3 national joti organizers, but now they all saw me online and I think it wil be much better next year. I am recieving e-mail evaluation from folks; we are going to meet al 16 jotiops r/l and evaluate ... i hope.... and I opened #finland too .... expanding my 'RC-area; i hope #finland will be 'strong enought' to grow and end up beeing permanent.

Switzerland: We wanted to find a way to find out how may people participate to the joti in switzerland. For jota it is easy, you have to register to get the premit to speak. So we tought of a game. But this had not the desired result. Only two small stations registered. During the joti we heard of about 6 other joti station and a realy large one with 60 computers...I was in one of the two "official" stations of the swiss guide and scout movement from saturday noon to sunday noon. The largest problems we had was: We did not exactly define how we choose tempops, so some people keept asking why other people were made tempops and them not...Basel got some troubles on saturday and was shut down...Around 21:00 MESZ when most people came, we unfortunately had a lot of swearing about the techteam and full servers...After zurich crashed, it was nearly impossible to find a server in europe which was not password protedted or full...After midnight this went better and next morning, luchs found a bug in the ircd of zuerich and we could bring it up again...The feedback I got from ops that attended the joti last year (I was with cox at that time) is that the servers were more stable and everything was running smooter...But that the change to the new services was too close to the joti. Much hat troubles with the new commands etc...

3.0 proposal of a committee of each lang channel's JOTI coordinators to report to the council periodically on progress for next years JOTI
The proposal is the following: a coordinator for JOTI with one person from each language channel on it for the following reasons: we had many good ideas in each language channel that could have been used in other channels (i.e. dutch age level channels, german Deutschbot had very cool featuers); Nerilka explained the council that and also she found in the week before JOTI that she was doing much to prepare other places (i.e. #espanol) and that during JOTI i covered many places (i.e. #deutsch for 3 hours).She thinks it would be helpful if we all simply knew what others were doing. I am not proposing that each channel must agree or actually work together. Some CC's wasn't agree because they think that it should another structure ( = another meeting, another chair, another secretary ) and also for the particular realtion between CC and scouting associations in their country. Anyway the proposal was voted: 7 YES and 2 NO plus 1 abstension
4.0 selection/use of tempops during JOTI
Here the main problem is the respecting of rules about opping or not opping someone. There were some problems in this sense during last Joti. But they were just some mistakes due to not attention surely not powered by bad faith. During the next Joti the proposal is that at all times, only CCs or their deputy (as emailed to the council) may add ops to #globops or whatever channel will be used for opping and also they shall email that to the council and only add ops from their channel(s)

5.0 other business
Joti certificates: proposal by Coxwain to set up an official certificate for thanking the participation of chanops, globops and ircops to Joti. Here the main problem is to find a designer for that. Anyway Coxswain will follow this thing and will report to the council.

#Rover channel topic: proposal by IRON[Fe26 to set up an international topic with welcome message " Welcome to Rovers " written in more languages possibile.

National sites/experiences: proposal by IRON[Fe26 to build a link to national Scoutlink headquarters ( scoutlink.it and scoutlink.ch sites ) from the main one ( scoutlink.net )

6.0 Next meeting
The Council will find a date for the next meeting within 15 days to let Ernie to take part and have a conversation of technical aspects of Joti and network problems.

7.0. The log of conversation
The log will be avaiable for all members of the council behind request to the secretary. The outcomes of the meeting will be published in a web site by the Chair.

The Secretary The Chair

Davide Grisafi Bob Bristow Abano Terme, october 2001 the 27th