November 2010 - arrl-odv - reflector.arrl.org

PSC Committee Meeting Minutes Nov 13, 2010
by Bill Edgar 23 Nov '10

23 Nov '10

Attached are the PSC Committee minutes for the November 13, 2010 meeting. - Bill N3LLR

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RE: Big Club List
by Sumner, Dave, K1ZZ 22 Nov '10

22 Nov '10

Jim, if you now go to www.arrl.org/big-club-list <http://www.arrl.org/big-club-list> you will see ASCII database (CSV) file as one of the available download options. You can pass this along to Dale (SM) and Scott (ACC) up in Michigan - please ask them to drop me an email if they encounter any glitches. 73, Dave K1ZZ ________________________________ From: Jim Weaver K8JE [mailto:K8JE@ARRL.org] Sent: Thursday, November 18, 2010 4:20 PM To: 'arrl-odv' Subject: Big Club List Dave, These listing are fine so far as they go; however, I'm unsure if they replace a feature that may have been available on the old site. I have a spreadsheet listing of all clubs that includes the addresses, meeting places, the names and calls of the president and contact person and their addresses and telephone numbers and, finally, the club names and meeting days and times. This listing was given me by the Michigan OOC who said it was downloaded from the old web site. It looks to me as though downloading such a spreadsheet from the new site is not possible. Can such a downloadable spreadsheet be made available? It has proven very valuable to me when scheduling trips to visit club meetings by vastly improving the efficiency of the trip. Jim Jim Weaver, K8JE, Director ARRL Great Lakes Division 5065 Bethany Rd. Mason, OH 45040; Tel. 513-459-1661 ARRL, The national association for Amateur Radio

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Director and Vice Director Election Results
by Sumner, Dave, K1ZZ 19 Nov '10

19 Nov '10

Here are the results of today's ballot-counting: Southeastern Division - Director Sherri Brower, W4STB 1,529 Doug Rehman, K4AC 1,555 Greg Sarratt, W4OZK 2,074 Southeastern Division - Vice Director Jeff Beals, WA4AW 1,615 Andrea Hartlage, KG4IUM 3,573 Southwestern Division - Director Carl Gardenias, WU6D 1,132 Dick Norton, N6AA 2,218 West Gulf Division - Director Larry Essary, K5XG 1,262 David Woolweaver, K5RAV 2,387 West Gulf Division - Vice Director Michael Reynolds, W0KIE 1,203 John Robert Stratton, N5AUS 2,427 The Tellers declared Directors Sarratt, Norton, and Woolweaver re-elected, Vice Director Stratton re-elected, and Andrea Hartlage, KG4IUM, elected as Southeastern Division Vice Director, effective at noon January 1, 2011. Congratulations to all candidates. 73, David Sumner, K1ZZ Secretary

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Re: Section club list is live
by Tom Frenaye 19 Nov '10

19 Nov '10

At 03:07 PM 11/17/2010, Sumner, Dave, K1ZZ wrote: >It is now possible to get a list of the ARRL affiliated clubs in a section, with detailed information and sorted in several different ways, directly from the Web site. The information can be displayed in three different ways: on the screen, as a list of hyperlinks, and as a PDF. The list of hyperlinks is a very useful way to go directly to the information on a specific club. > >If you go to <http://www.arrl.org/big-club-list>www.arrl.org/big-club-list you will see the search screen. It is labeled BETA; we are not aware of any bugs but don�t want to remove the label until more people have had a chance to use it. Please feel free to play with and let me know of any problems you encounter. > >This is a big step toward giving back to the section leadership the tools they need, but we know there is more work to do. > >Barring something unexpected (i.e. a glaring problem we haven�t yet detected) we�ll extend the same invitation to SMs before the end of the week. I'm also very pleased to see this feature available again! Thanks -- Tom ===== e-mail: k1ki(a)arrl.org ARRL New England Division Director http://www.arrl.org/ Tom Frenaye, K1KI, P O Box J, West Suffield CT 06093 Phone: 860-668-5444

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RE: Big Club List
by Jim Weaver K8JE 19 Nov '10

19 Nov '10

Aww, heck. Yes. I was thinking "official" instead of Affiliated. Tnx. Jim Jim Weaver, K8JE, Director ARRL Great Lakes Division 5065 Bethany Rd. Mason, OH 45040; Tel. 513-459-1661 ARRL, The national association for Amateur Radio _____ From: Sumner, Dave, K1ZZ [mailto:dsumner@arrl.org] Sent: Thursday, November 18, 2010 8:50 PM To: Jim Weaver K8JE Subject: RE: Big Club List Jim, did you mean Michigan ACC? Dave _____ From: Jim Weaver K8JE [mailto:K8JE@ARRL.org] Sent: Fri 11/19/2010 1:11 AM To: arrl-odv Subject: RE: Big Club List I meant to say Michigan "OCC" rather than Michigan "OOC" in my previous message. Sorry for any confusion my errant typing my have caused. Jim Jim Weaver, K8JE, Director ARRL Great Lakes Division 5065 Bethany Rd. Mason, OH 45040; Tel. 513-459-1661 ARRL, The national association for Amateur Radio _____ From: Jim Weaver K8JE [mailto:K8JE@ARRL.org] Sent: Thursday, November 18, 2010 4:20 PM To: 'arrl-odv' Subject: Big Club List Dave, These listing are fine so far as they go; however, I'm unsure if they replace a feature that may have been available on the old site. I have a spreadsheet listing of all clubs that includes the addresses, meeting places, the names and calls of the president and contact person and their addresses and telephone numbers and, finally, the club names and meeting days and times. This listing was given me by the Michigan OOC who said it was downloaded from the old web site. It looks to me as though downloading such a spreadsheet from the new site is not possible. Can such a downloadable spreadsheet be made available? It has proven very valuable to me when scheduling trips to visit club meetings by vastly improving the efficiency of the trip. Jim Jim Weaver, K8JE, Director ARRL Great Lakes Division 5065 Bethany Rd. Mason, OH 45040; Tel. 513-459-1661 ARRL, The national association for Amateur Radio _____ No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 10.0.1153 / Virus Database: 424/3265 - Release Date: 11/18/10

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RE: Big Club List
by Jim Weaver K8JE 19 Nov '10

19 Nov '10

I meant to say Michigan "OCC" rather than Michigan "OOC" in my previous message. Sorry for any confusion my errant typing my have caused. Jim Jim Weaver, K8JE, Director ARRL Great Lakes Division 5065 Bethany Rd. Mason, OH 45040; Tel. 513-459-1661 ARRL, The national association for Amateur Radio _____ From: Jim Weaver K8JE [mailto:K8JE@ARRL.org] Sent: Thursday, November 18, 2010 4:20 PM To: 'arrl-odv' Subject: Big Club List Dave, These listing are fine so far as they go; however, I'm unsure if they replace a feature that may have been available on the old site. I have a spreadsheet listing of all clubs that includes the addresses, meeting places, the names and calls of the president and contact person and their addresses and telephone numbers and, finally, the club names and meeting days and times. This listing was given me by the Michigan OOC who said it was downloaded from the old web site. It looks to me as though downloading such a spreadsheet from the new site is not possible. Can such a downloadable spreadsheet be made available? It has proven very valuable to me when scheduling trips to visit club meetings by vastly improving the efficiency of the trip. Jim Jim Weaver, K8JE, Director ARRL Great Lakes Division 5065 Bethany Rd. Mason, OH 45040; Tel. 513-459-1661 ARRL, The national association for Amateur Radio

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Big Club List
by Jim Weaver K8JE 18 Nov '10

18 Nov '10

Dave, These listing are fine so far as they go; however, I'm unsure if they replace a feature that may have been available on the old site. I have a spreadsheet listing of all clubs that includes the addresses, meeting places, the names and calls of the president and contact person and their addresses and telephone numbers and, finally, the club names and meeting days and times. This listing was given me by the Michigan OOC who said it was downloaded from the old web site. It looks to me as though downloading such a spreadsheet from the new site is not possible. Can such a downloadable spreadsheet be made available? It has proven very valuable to me when scheduling trips to visit club meetings by vastly improving the efficiency of the trip. Jim Jim Weaver, K8JE, Director ARRL Great Lakes Division 5065 Bethany Rd. Mason, OH 45040; Tel. 513-459-1661 ARRL, The national association for Amateur Radio

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RE: Section club list is live
by Grant Hopper 18 Nov '10

18 Nov '10

Section club list is liveThanks for the info Dave! I understand the priorities thing. I'm glad to see this approach being taken as I suspect our staff will be much more context sensitive, motivated to do a good job, and far less concerned about making the most off a contract with the ARRL. Is there a list of the various tasks or enhancements/improvements that the staff is compiling? I'd think that would be a time saver to consult instead of bugging you/Barry/ the IT staff regarding ideas and statuses. On the "big club list" I'm planning to (attempt) to work my way through the list, as well as noting which area clubs aren't on either list and see what encouragement I can provide to cause them to become affiliated.... 73, Grant -----Original Message----- From: Sumner, Dave, K1ZZ [mailto:dsumner@arrl.org] Sent: Thursday, November 18, 2010 7:02 AM To: arrl-odv Subject: RE: Section club list is live Thanks for the suggestion, Grant. This was a Fathom project, and because the parameters of their cleanup work are to provide functionality at least equivalent to the old site the options you would like would be an extra-cost enhancement. We are avoiding those wherever possible. Eventually our IT staff will be able to make changes of this kind but they're working down an established priority list right now. We do plan to implement - I hope in a matter of weeks, not months - a "report generator" to output from our various databases (including clubs) in a variety of formats, including CSV. Clubs are moved from active to inactive if they fail to file an annual report two years in a row. We send them reminders, but maintaining contact with the clubs and specifically, getting them to file annual reports is a responsibility of the Affiliated Club Coordinator. The "big-club-list" tool was designed mainly to help the ACCs and SMs do their jobs. Who to name as their contact person is a club decision. To kill two birds with one stone, to answer Brian's question here is a description of the club update process works. When logged in, any ARRL member who is viewing a club page will see a small "Edit" button in the upper right. If they click on that they will then see a page where that club 's information can be edited. A submission from this page doesn't directly result in an update but generates a message to staff that is used to perform the update. The submitter is told that it may take up to three days for the update to appear on the site. In my October 29 report on Web status I mentioned that Web-to-Siebel data communication issues - that is, the two getting out of sync - were the cause of some of our problems. Without knowing details I can't say for sure but that may have been the cause of the Albuquerque DX Association issue. The club data was resynced yesterday after Jon Bloom fixed a bug, and whether because of that or for some other reason I see that the club's record was updated earlier today. 73, Dave K1ZZ From: Grant Hopper [mailto:ghopper@eskimo.com] Sent: Wednesday, November 17, 2010 3:53 PM To: arrl-odv Subject: RE: Section club list is live This is going to be a HANDY tool! A hardy THANK YOU to the staff for rolling this out. I'd ask for one more sort option (I guess it's a search option with a sort order.) Rather than doing two searches, one for active clubs and another for inactive ones, I'd love an option that allows me to have both on one list and have them flagged (in each record) as inactive (or as active, or both.) After that, being able to sort by active/inactive would be nice. Actually, while I'm wishing, having the ability to sort on two fields would be awesome! An example of this might be to sort by Active/Inactive, and then by city to see how many clubs are in a city and how many of those are 'inactive' with the idea of seeing if a population was under served or over served as an explanation of why the clubs died off, or need some support to get more active. The only other data I'd love to have is the date that the club listing was last "active" for the inactive clubs (as opposed to the last update date), and a note about why it went 'inactive' if known. An option to dump to a comma delimited text file so I can do further sorting or searching would be nice too, but I suspect that's more messing than the above requests are. 73, Grant KB7WSD Also, in doing some searches, I noticed several clubs that actually use the call of the club president or contact person. This doesn't seem like a good (or sensible) practice. Any thoughts on this? -----Original Message----- From: Sumner, Dave, K1ZZ [mailto:dsumner@arrl.org] Sent: Wednesday, November 17, 2010 12:08 PM To: arrl-odv Subject: Section club list is live It is now possible to get a list of the ARRL affiliated clubs in a section, with detailed information and sorted in several different ways, directly from the Web site. The information can be displayed in three different ways: on the screen, as a list of hyperlinks, and as a PDF. The list of hyperlinks is a very useful way to go directly to the information on a specific club. If you go to www.arrl.org/big-club-list you will see the search screen. It is labeled BETA; we are not aware of any bugs but don't want to remove the label until more people have had a chance to use it. Please feel free to play with and let me know of any problems you encounter. This is a big step toward giving back to the section leadership the tools they need, but we know there is more work to do. Barring something unexpected (i.e. a glaring problem we haven't yet detected) we'll extend the same invitation to SMs before the end of the week. 73, Dave K1ZZ

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Cynthia Rushton, WB3CNJ v. ARRL, Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities
by Chris Imlay 18 Nov '10

18 Nov '10

CONFIDENTIAL, ATTORNEY-CLIENT PRIVILEGED COMMUNICATION WORK-PRODUCT Greetings. On November 8, 2010 ARRL was served with a complaint filed against the Corporation with the State of Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities (CHRO). The procedures of the Connecticut CHRO require a response to be filed within 30 days of the date of ARRL’s receipt of the Complaint. Thus, our answer is due on or before December 8, 2010. The Complaint was filed by Ms. Cynthia Rushton, WB3CNJ of Conneautville, PA (near Erie). Ms. Rushton is an ARRL member, at least until February of 2011. She apparently has some physical disability that causes her to utilize a wheelchair. Until late April of this year, Ms. Rushton was a VE with the ARRL-VEC and was a VE team liaison for a three-person examining team. We have no evidence of any exam irregularities involving any of her examination sessions. Ms. Rushton is apparently a difficult person with a contentious personality. Based on some complaints received from reliable field organization members, and from his own personal experience, Bill Edgar, N3LLR concluded that Ms. Rushton’s aggressive and confrontational manner was creating at examination sessions and otherwise a disincentive for persons to participate in examinations at venues in which Ms. Rushton was an examiner. Therefore, Bill Edgar asked the ARRL-VEC early this year to disaccredit Ms. Rushton, which the staff did based entirely on Bill’s request by letter dated April 20, 2010. When Ms. Rushton received this correspondence, she commenced a barrage of borderline harassing telephone calls to the Headquarters staff, demanding reinstatement and a statement of the “charges against her.” The staff had followed standard disaccreditation procedure in issuing the letter, including sending to Laura Smith at FCC a copy of the letter sent to Ms. Rushton. Ms. Rushton took this to mean that there was some threat to her amateur license. She was subsequently assured by the ARRL-VEC staff that this was not the case, but she continued to demand a listing of the allegations against her. Following standard policy, the staff refused to specify a reason for the disaccreditation, and simply told her that her volunteer services were no longer necessary, and she was thanked for her past service. She was told that no one associated with ARRL had made any allegations against her to FCC. Ms. Rushton’s strident effort to be reinstated as a VE culminated in an e-mail addressed to Maria Somma dated May 14, 2010 reporting the results of Ms. Rushton’s research, and noting that she had contacted Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Federal agencies concerning ARRL’s obligations to her. There were clear inferences that unless ARRL reinstated her as a VE immediately, she would pursue legal remedies against ARRL. At this point, the staff (again, following standard procedure) referred all further contacts by Ms. Rushton to my office. I asked Ms. Rushton by e-mail, in view of her threat of legal action, to please put all future communications on the subject of her VE status in writing or e-mail and to send them to me. I informed her, as had the ARRL-VEC staff, that her application for accreditation as a VE included the following certification: CERTIFICATION By signing this Application form, I certify that to the best of my knowledge the above information and the following statements are true: ***** 4) I understand that the ARRL as my coordinating VEC, or I as an accredited ARRL VE, may terminate this relationship at any time, with or without any reason or cause. ***** Ms. Rushton acknowledged having signed this certification in a written e-mail, but asserted that we nevertheless had some nonspecific contractual obligation to continue her “at-will employment.” Of course, she has never been an employee of ARRL, and this apparently was the result of some flawed legal research on her part. Because of the outstanding threat of legal action by Ms. Rushton, at the time we changed liability carriers, Barry Shelley sent information and a memo from my office to both our old and current insurance companies describing the issue approximately a month ago. Ms. Rushton filed her complaint with the Connecticut CHRO asserting essentially that she is an “older” female with a date of birth of 06/12/1959, and who has physical disabilities. She said that her credentials had been revoked, in essence, because a group of male persons had “called for, both orally and in writing, [her] being silenced in whatever form they could arrange for.” She says that after she was disaccredited, certain male persons were issued credentials in a new VE team. Three members of that new team were persons that were in the VE team that she “was the founder/leader/liaison of” shortly before her credentials were revoked. She therefore charges ARRL with discrimination against her based on her gender and physical disability. She alleges no facts whatsoever linking the disaccreditation with her asserted disability, and relative to the gender discrimination, she cites some statistics (that, as far as we can tell, were simply made up) to the effect that less than 10% of credentialed VEs are female and that female persons who are both licensed and VE-credentialed are “approximately less than 0.5% of the general population.” These statistics are prima facie baseless since gender information in this context is not collected anywhere as far as we know. Barry Shelley has now notified our insurance company of this claim, and we have received a standard reservation of rights letter, but we expect to be referred to counsel in Connecticut to represent us in this matter imminently. Due to the short period for a response and the delay in obtaining defense counsel, I have prepared a detailed memorandum for whoever that attorney turns out to be, and we will work with her or him immediately in order to get a timely answer filed to the Complaint. There exists no evidence that I can find that any discrimnation took place in this context. The sole reason for Ms. Rushton's disaccreditation seems to be that she is apparently not a pleasant person to deal with, and that she created at examination sessions an environment that was not conducive to encouraging new and upgrading candidates for Amateur licenses. Please, for obvious reasons, keep this information confidential and do not disclose any facts related to this administrative litigation to anyone. Let me know if you have any questions about this matter. 73, Chris W3KD Christopher D. Imlay Booth, Freret, Imlay & Tepper. P.C. 14356 Cape May Road Silver Spring, Maryland 20904-6011 (301) 384-5525 telephone (301) 384-6384 facsimile W3KD(a)ARRL.ORG

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RE: Section club list is live
by Sumner, Dave, K1ZZ 18 Nov '10

18 Nov '10

Thanks for the suggestion, Grant. This was a Fathom project, and because the parameters of their cleanup work are to provide functionality at least equivalent to the old site the options you would like would be an extra-cost enhancement. We are avoiding those wherever possible. Eventually our IT staff will be able to make changes of this kind but they're working down an established priority list right now. We do plan to implement - I hope in a matter of weeks, not months - a "report generator" to output from our various databases (including clubs) in a variety of formats, including CSV. Clubs are moved from active to inactive if they fail to file an annual report two years in a row. We send them reminders, but maintaining contact with the clubs and specifically, getting them to file annual reports is a responsibility of the Affiliated Club Coordinator. The "big-club-list" tool was designed mainly to help the ACCs and SMs do their jobs. Who to name as their contact person is a club decision. To kill two birds with one stone, to answer Brian's question here is a description of the club update process works. When logged in, any ARRL member who is viewing a club page will see a small "Edit" button in the upper right. If they click on that they will then see a page where that club's information can be edited. A submission from this page doesn't directly result in an update but generates a message to staff that is used to perform the update. The submitter is told that it may take up to three days for the update to appear on the site. In my October 29 report on Web status I mentioned that Web-to-Siebel data communication issues - that is, the two getting out of sync - were the cause of some of our problems. Without knowing details I can't say for sure but that may have been the cause of the Albuquerque DX Association issue. The club data was resynced yesterday after Jon Bloom fixed a bug, and whether because of that or for some other reason I see that the club's record was updated earlier today. 73, Dave K1ZZ From: Grant Hopper [mailto:ghopper@eskimo.com] Sent: Wednesday, November 17, 2010 3:53 PM To: arrl-odv Subject: RE: Section club list is live This is going to be a HANDY tool! A hardy THANK YOU to the staff for rolling this out. I'd ask for one more sort option (I guess it's a search option with a sort order.) Rather than doing two searches, one for active clubs and another for inactive ones, I'd love an option that allows me to have both on one list and have them flagged (in each record) as inactive (or as active, or both.) After that, being able to sort by active/inactive would be nice. Actually, while I'm wishing, having the ability to sort on two fields would be awesome! An example of this might be to sort by Active/Inactive, and then by city to see how many clubs are in a city and how many of those are 'inactive' with the idea of seeing if a population was under served or over served as an explanation of why the clubs died off, or need some support to get more active. The only other data I'd love to have is the date that the club listing was last "active" for the inactive clubs (as opposed to the last update date), and a note about why it went 'inactive' if known. An option to dump to a comma delimited text file so I can do further sorting or searching would be nice too, but I suspect that's more messing than the above requests are. 73, Grant KB7WSD Also, in doing some searches, I noticed several clubs that actually use the call of the club president or contact person. This doesn't seem like a good (or sensible) practice. Any thoughts on this? -----Original Message----- From: Sumner, Dave, K1ZZ [mailto:dsumner@arrl.org] Sent: Wednesday, November 17, 2010 12:08 PM To: arrl-odv Subject: Section club list is live It is now possible to get a list of the ARRL affiliated clubs in a section, with detailed information and sorted in several different ways, directly from the Web site. The information can be displayed in three different ways: on the screen, as a list of hyperlinks, and as a PDF. The list of hyperlinks is a very useful way to go directly to the information on a specific club. If you go to www.arrl.org/big-club-list <http://www.arrl.org/big-club-list> you will see the search screen. It is labeled BETA; we are not aware of any bugs but don't want to remove the label until more people have had a chance to use it. Please feel free to play with and let me know of any problems you encounter. This is a big step toward giving back to the section leadership the tools they need, but we know there is more work to do. Barring something unexpected (i.e. a glaring problem we haven't yet detected) we'll extend the same invitation to SMs before the end of the week. 73, Dave K1ZZ

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