Diocese of Newark Technology Committee
Tuesday, September 4, 2007 - Agenda and Notes

Present: Jan Paxton, John Rollins, Russ Worthington, Steve Boston, John Murphy, Michael Francaviglia, Peter Katzenbach, Scott Bennett, Nina Nicholson

Next Meeting: TBD

Agenda: Technology Committee Meeting
Technology committee e-mail list is:
technology@email.dioceseofnewark.org

Agenda:

1. --Update on Communications Summit (Subscription) - screen shots of e-mail lists, Russ would like us to use the features of Mailman - we maintain about 30, mostly closed, groups. It has some features like the page for updating an e-mail address. The Diocese of NJ is using it with some more features used. There seems to be a need for a clergy list where clergy can sign on and sign off. We might want to change some of the parameters on Mailman so that people can sign up for open lists at the web site. This is in response to the communications summit suggestion that there is a need for e-mail list communications to be opened up and better utilized. Russ is not suggesting that we change the Newark List at this time. Russ would like feedback to see if we should move in this direction to handle electronic mail subscription.
   --Subscription to the Voice is another issue.
   --Diocesan Admin Day - October 13 - Question - would the Coaching group do a workshop (1hr 15 min) on that day? The group has agreed to do so and Michael will send Carter to work with us on what she wants. At St. E's Ridgwood, 8:30 registration, plenary session with the bishop, one workshop, lunch, 2 workshops, out by 4 pm.
   --Nina's Web page generic page - everyone liked the idea of a "yellow pages" type page that could be holding a place and a url on the system for a more extensive web site for congregations that have yet to make a web site. Exactly who, when and how this would be implemented was not decided.
2. New Electronic Balloting System - last year Russ wound up hand calculating the balloting. As a result, the results were not available at convention, but he did some statistics. 41% of the ballots had at least one invalid contest!! Russ has now a pre-convention meeting presentation to help with this. We now have a new machine, on which John, Jan, Russ and Larry have been trained.
3. New Database at Episcopal House - Russ has been working on learning Shelby. Only finance has been using this program, but now it has been opened up to use by the rest of the needs of the diocese. Russ has prepared data from Michael's WP file from the directory and now the new directory can be prepared in a couple of mouse clicks. He is ready to import the data bases into Shelby and clean up the duplicates so that there will be a clean database. There will be a training by Shelby this fall. This will give us what we've been looking for for....years! Shelby will be the database for the diocese.
4. Electronic Communications Policy - Russ gave out Appendix E, a revision of what is presently on the web site. This will eventually be a part of Safe Church Guidelines. We have been asked to review this document and provide feed back before it is presented to Council for a vote and then to Convention. Provide comments to Russ.
5. Jan send chocolate sauce recipe - click here to open recipe