Saturday Nov13 2004 

present - Jabiru, Beluga,  AK-Eagle, Ellie, ananas, falcon_tw, Nairobi,roger-uk,Uncrafty, tinge 

regrets - Iron D-nairobi, no-use, woody,

 

Agenda Topics

1. Will keep #polish and #luxembourgish open. Grandpa will monitor usage of #polish and no-use will monitor #luxembourgish.

2. Feedback from JOTI - will be included at the end of these minutes including Peeves' report)

3.Scoutlink Services Proposal -  It was proposed and carried that Scoutlink council appoints a sub committee to look at the proposal for a member controlled network and report back to Council at the  February meeting. The volunteers for the committee are roger-uk, jabiru, AK-eagle, Ellie, kerbe, no-use, Beluga, and an Italian member.

4. Position of Council Chair - It was proposed and carried that Council will elect and appoint a chairperson.  The chair can be appointed from outside the Council. Position is for 12 months. Election of chair is in January each year.

5. Scouting Sunrise - It is part of the Centennial of Scouting. Visit http://www.world.scouting2007.org/english/sunrise.php. This will be discussed at the next meeting when everyone has read the information.

6. Akela_IT - It is a bot that works like mainframe, based on eggdrop bot, and has 2 functions: #1- control the channel as it  did during joti #2 animate the channel with games. It was confirmed that there is already a policy that all bots must be approved by techteam. This particular was dealt with in Council, because Council was asked. Council should in future direct requests to TechTeam for approval.

 

New Business:

1. RC #francais - Louvix ratified as new RC.

2. Confirmed that TT has 1 vote on council, the same as other CC/RCs. If there is a proposal from Council that TT believes that they cannot implement, TT will come back, after discussion,  with suggestions to Council. Council will listen to those suggestions or then DIY ( DO IT YOURSELF???)

3. Italian team requested an italiano.scoutlink.net redirect or something similar where they can put the webchat. They were directed to contact the webteam.(Stoffel or Doomer_be)

4. Feedback on Stats: Great! It presented what was needed.

 

Feedback on JOTI- pretty good all around - comments that o-line requests could be handled more quickly so that the temp-IRCOPS could take their training - others commented that their o-line requests were handled in a timely fashion - Training before hand was "exciting" and should be done earlier next year, with perhaps more trainers - hope to get #chinese webpage up and running again - From the Australian National JOTI Coordinator:"I liked the pro-active approach of Angel_Scout who asked questions all the time, steered the conversation onto scouting topics, and controlled the channel. "

 

letter: Dear Holgi,

 

Thank you very much for all your work for the JOTI2004 and the nice report about Geneva this weekend.

I had only one hour to visit the dutch JCC (JOTI Control Centre) and I can say that I was quite impressed what I saw. The #dutchies had a special "war-room" for there JCC and everybody was working hard to keep the channels clean from unwanted activities. I can only say that  from my point of view (as user who did a short visit), they did a great job.

As member of the Dutch JOTA-JOTI team I was very proud to see at one location a very  active amateurradio station with a big antenna farm like PI4DEC helping out with JOTA and and next to it the dutch JCC and a big JOTI setup with a scoutroom full of computers. (Including own power genarators for kWatts of extra 220Volts power).

And did the scouts enjoy JOTA and JOTI? Well they did. I took some time to speak with a couple of scouts and from them I heard they had a super time, both on the radio @ PI4DEC/J and ScoutLink @ the JCC location.

Only one scout was complaining that he was kicked by a SL-operator, but he didn't want to tell me what he DID to get this kick :-)

Well I enjoyed my short stay at the dutch JCC and like the work that's been done to make this JCC possible for monitoring the #dutch channels. And I hope that this big group wil help us during the 2005 JOTA-JOTI again.

YiS,

Edwin "Voske" Vos PA3GVQ

Member JOTA-JOTI team of Scouting Netherlands.

 

Dear JOTI helper,

 

as some of you know, I have been in the World Scout Bureau in Geneva / Switzerland. There was an official World JOTA Station as well as the first official World JOTI station.

 

During the weekend we had the opportunity to get the Secretary General of WOSM, Eduardo Missoni, in from of a radio as well as in front of a computer and let him take part in JOTA and JOTI in a active manner: he spoke to scout groups over the Echolink radio system, chatted with scouts over ScoutLink IRC network and talked to scouts over the ScoutLink TeamSpeak server.

Getting the Secretary General of WOSM to pay that much attention to JOTA and JOTI is a really big success. Additional some other employees from the World Scout Bureau visit the station as well and were very interested in our work there.

 

I also noticed that the number of participants in the JOTI as well as the countries where participant came from have been increased in IRC as well as in TeamSpeak. also the usage of the services at joti.org have been increased:

 

Entries in Contacts Database:

Year               2000    2001    2002    2003    2004

----------------------------------------------------

Groups           472     561     472     621     547

Single scouts    936    1159    1589    2700    3176

Countries         87      98      93     105     120

 

E-Mail Addresses / Entries in Guestbook / Sent JOTI Validation Cards:

Year                  2000    2001    2002    2003    2004

----------------------------------------------------------

E-Mail Addresses       629     829    1159     990    1115

Entries in Guestbook   421     377     421     481     754

JOTI Validation Cards                 2146    4125    5013

 

You can see a detailed statistic for 2004 at https://base.jotijota.org/joti/stats

 

 

So I would like to official thank everyone of you for helping in having such a successfull JOTI 2004:

            Thank you very much!

 

Yours in Scouting and Guiding,

Holger "Holgi" Sickenberg

World JOTI Advisor

 

 

 

Business from the Mail-list

Doomer_be ratified as CC Belgium.

Appointment of two new IRCOPS for Australia, Ozzles and Jagman.

New #francais chanops: Otarie, Petitseb, teddy-, syanur, Zacco

 

Report from TechTeam

This last year has seen the network remain stable and the techteam workload easing and slowing down almost to a stand still...You will have noticed the network undergoing some changes and you will inthe near future see the techteam changing the way we do things and handle queries etc...this is so we can become more efficient in servicing what the network users and operators need...

 

Secondly it is with a little sadness that Kendod has resigned...he asked if he could take leave as his life has become very hectic and busy and he cannot devote the time he previously did...He has the option of returning at a later date...his skills are current and enhance those of the rest of the team and he has been an asset to the team as a whole...

 

Currently the techteam is going through a restructure in that we are defining what areas we have skills in and what areas we need to either learn or refresh...with a view to working more in smaller teams to specialise in the different aspects of our jobs... We will not as yet be looking at a  replacement for Kendod until we finish looking at the skills levels and see if there is a gap we need to fill...In that event we will send out to council and the team information and also look at recommendations from within techteam to find the right person for that role...but that is a ways away after we do the skills stuff...

 

We are testing a Ticketing system which will receive the TT mail and give ppl a ticket to refer to...it will also be managed and assigned and be easily followed up on by myself and another...so no more of anyone saying they wrote to techteam and never got an answer...this way you get assigned a job number and it flags when its done or when it should be done...we are looking at a 12 to 24 hour turnaround on easy jobs...but with more complex tasks like coding etc those time frames will be longer...but we feel this is better than having ppl hanging for an answer...

Once the RT system is in place, the email contact address will stay the same...  techteam@scoutlink.net  this will be redirected to the RT..so nothing will change for users or ops...but I will let you know when that happens...We are also trialing a document store program...

 

JOTI went well we thought... techies with nothing to do at JOTI is a good thing on the network...or techies with not very much to do...it gave them the opportunity to do some ordinary work and to chat...which is something the guys don't get a lot of time to do usually during joti...only a couple

of instances of server and services down time...a couple of server core dumps...and AGAIN we had servers crash due to glines not being set correctly...This is a training issue I believe and ppl need to be more careful...we all know that glitch is there...its been there for 3 years...and  everyone knows that atm it can't be fixed adequately...but we continue to work on it...Please please please...can we make sure our ops at joti know how to do this properly or take a refresher prior to joti...

 

We again had the usual problem of bored dutchies at joti gerben...I really get sick of being glined every joti just for the hell of it...and then being yelled at for killing the person...I could have glined them right off the network but I don't believe someone bored and feeling like using their power

and having a joke should necessarily be glined or punished harshly when they are ONLY bored...Can I suggest some alternative activities away from the puter if the guys get bored??? maybe set them to do the washing up or something...I understood the joke...but at the time I was in the middle of doing something and it stopped what I was doing...Anyway...will leave that one with you gerben to deal with next joti...

 

On this note also...we (TT) did think there were too many bots and too many ircops on the  network this year...as we do every year...perhaps council could look at this as per the stats file I made and allocate numbers of ircops based on user levels in channels...for example...the espanol and portuguese channels had large volumes of users at joti...but only two or 3

ircops...where some language teams had way more ircops and similar levels of users...this I think needs to be addressed... The bots well...why did we need 3 jotibots to every english channels and multiples in other channels also??? All in all JOTI was good and hopefully the stats will give us a better idea of where ppl are connecting from...it certainly was an eye opener for me

doing it...and here I thought there wasn't a lot of interest in chatting from small african countries...do we have an RC Africa??? lol

 

Anyway thats pretty much a rundown of what we have been up to and what our plans are for the short term future...Any comments...feel free...

 

Ellie

 

 #dutch Report

Technicaly JOTI imho went well. I did not get much input on the network being unstable. Only once the network collapsed, but that was under control in no time. Perhaps because every techie was waiting for something to happen :o)

 

I do have some items on my list i would like to see improved: Communication en preparation for JOTI. The website did not show any info on how to contact scoutlink if you exceeded the clone limit. Our rules and regulations should be highlighted when contacting the website shortly before and during joti.

 

JOTI mode? when are we in JOTI mode and what does JOTI mode mean? nickserv

closed for registration? clonelimit reased?, etc. I like to know these things.

 

Bored dutchies: The only dutchie who glined you was the dutchie not on my team with an oline: Bagheera. That is, if my information is correct, but i stand corrected if the info i got was wrong.

o-lines. Because of the system we use: 2 JOTI coordinators present 24/7 who can open/close channels and set a gline if an tempop asks it, we need a lot of olines.

 

I am a bit confused the TTC complains about the amount of bots online. I would think techteam knows how many bots will be online and how many in one channel? Bagheera who made the bots also communicated he was going to have multiple bots in the channels due to the fact these were old backup-bot who needed to be with more to spread the workload.

YiS

Gerben

no-use

 

 

Next meeting scheduled for Friday, December 3, 2004 2200 GMT.