ACS Chicago Section PR/NTEC Meeting Notes 12 March 2014

Participants: Mark Kaiser, Cherlyn Bradley, Milt Levenberg, Josh Kurutz, Russ Johnson

Notes:

• 1.  We reviewed progress made on the site so far.  Site is available at http://chicagoacs.org/index.php, and about 4,400 members have been added.  The site is making good progress and the team agreed that it has a modern “look and feel.”  We also agreed that this site will take a lot more work and that the Section volunteers will need to prioritize and enter content.
  
  This site has not yet gone live, but will do so after we complete actions pertaining to i) completing priority page updating; ii) establishing general meeting reservation input and payment methodology; iii) completing the member log-in process; and iv) developing member roster updating process.  This is likely to take several more months and substantial involvement with StarChapter by the committee.
  
• 2.  We reviewed specific items that need to be addressed as we move forward.
• a.  There is a structural issue with the ability to only use one hierarchy sublevel in the front page side menu for links.  We have too many committees to accommodate the one level.  This means that we can’t pre-group the committee types from the menu.  This is not a critical issue. Solution is to link committee pages from a separate page.  Action is for Josh to work this solution.
• b.  It was our understanding that we would be able to establish unique page permissions for each page.  For example, it was our understanding from earlier communications with StarChapter that we could have committee chairs have permission to edit their committee’s page without granting broader permission, which would allow a committee member to change another committee page for which they don’t have admin rights.  It has become clear that permissions are granted for the site and not for specific regions.  The committee views this as a serious issue but one for which we will be able to develop a work-around.
• c.  We discussed availability of server-side scripting with our own PHP code.  We were told that this is possible but we have not yet verified that this can be done. This will be necessary if we are to conduct planning activities such as populating the State Fair volunteer calendar.  Fall-back is to use old site if this is not yet workable with the new site.
• d.  Many of the pages from our current site have now been copied to the new site.  However, this total represents a small amount of the total pages.  Our plan is to migrate key pages and keep the old site for historical files.  Action is for Milt to prioritize any remaining files that we need to copy to the new site.  We also need to develop an archiving process. 
• e.  We have only a skeleton page for the dinner reservations.  This will need to become a priority. 
• 3.  Other actions not yet started that need to be addressed moving forward.
• a.  We need to develop and communicate a Member log-in approach.
• b.  We need to ensure that member-submitted updates are not replaced with the routine updates from the national roster.