Minutes of 07/15/09

Bill Tappan, Bob Holden, Kevin Ash, Lucy Edwards and IT Contractor Pete Jones attended the meeting.  Bob Young had a previous commitment.

Chair Bill Tappan called the meeting to order at 7:00 pm

The minutes of the June meeting were approved.

The IT Contractor presented his report as follows:

1. Web site updates on static site pages continuing as Town Administrator collects, composes, and sends info to me for posting.
   
2. Replacement/backup server purchased and being built and tested. Should be ready to deploy in two weeks.
   
3. Offsite automatic overnight backups experiment successful, continuing. Weekly offsite automatic overnight backup of large databases in place.
   
4. Data reorganization continuing, Town Administrator and I to review beginning of next week.
   
5. Contract affiliation with State of NH's Microsoft Select Agreement applied for, waiting for approval.

Bill Tappan asked Pete Jones how things were going as he worked at town hall.  Pete replied that he was very pleased with the town administrator, who was not a “techie” but had a very good grasp of the big IT picture.  He suggested that after he had completed a complete review and fix on all the machines in town hall he would be working on how to best address what might be called “helpdesk issues,” those day-to-day glitches.  He said that some of the staff contact him quickly when something is not working correctly, but others tend to let the problems go for weeks.

The main discussion of the meeting was about the town website.  There was a long discussion of how much money could be spent on the project, who would complete it, whether it should even be a project of the committee, and what needed to be changed.  Bob Holden did not think that the selectmen would budget any amounts over a couple of thousand for a website redesign.  Pete said that the current website software should be upgraded soon to the latest version.

It was finally agreed that Kevin, Pete, and Bill would work on a redesign to make the current site more user friendly and appealing so that when Pete does the upgrade sometime in the next 3 months the redesign could be done at the same time.  Meanwhile we will do a survey on the website to find out what the public would like to see, and Pete and the town administrator will continue to work on adding content, including asking town departments what else should be included.  Kevin will work with town committees to do the same.  Kevin will draft the survey and Lucy agreed to post press releases at The Suncook Sun and The Forum to call the public’s attention to the survey.

At the next meeting we will discuss Bob Young’s concerns about communication between town departments in emergencies and ideas to get information out to the public when regular communication is not working.

The meeting adjourned at 8:18 pm.

Respectfully submitted,
 Lucy Edwards

Approved 8/19/09