Final
Chairman Linda Fox called the meeting to order on October 26, 2009 at 5:49 p.m. in the Barrington Hills Village Hall.
1.2 Roll Call
Communications Committee
Present
Linda Fox, Chairman
Barbara Kemp, Vice Chairman
Pamela Cools, Recording Secretary
Mike Zachar
Absent
Laura Ekstrom
Victoria Kelly
Debbie Stone
Village Representatives
Fritz Gohl, Trustee
Absent
Robert Kosin, Village Administrator
Lt. Joe Colditz, Police Department
1.3 Approval of Minutes
Approved September minutes as amended. Motion by Barbara Kemp, and seconded by Mike Zachar.
Approved 4-0-0.
2.1 Fritz Gohl
· A public ZBA hearing was held on Monday, October 19 on the topic of a proposed Exterior Lighting Ordinance. The Committee was advised to take a neutral stance when presenting aspects of the ordinance, only providing basic information. Trustee Gohl stressed that we should, however, work to solicit opinions from the residents on what they do or don’t want to see in the final ordinance. Written comments should be sent to the clerk clerk@barringtonhills-il.gov , with attention to the ZBA.
· The Board of Trustees is scheduled to vote tonight on the possible closure of Chapel Road.
· Pamela Cools reported that our Twitter followers have been increasing, and that our Twitter site ranks between 4th and 14th when a Google search is run for “Barrington Hills”.
· Pamela recommended that our official Twitter policy be loosened somewhat to allow for “tweeting” of certain announcements which might not have been posted yet on either the .gov or .info websites. There have been several instances in which a tweet could not be issued because of a delay in someone first posting the meeting agendas, minutes or construction updates to our websites. These sorts of delays will likely only become worse as the website integration process continues, and content shifts between websites, and updates to the old sites become less frequent.
· Chairman Linda Fox noted that Pamela had been taking the most conservative approach possible to avoid any perceived conflict with our written policy, and that the strict policy of only tweeting already web-posted items needed to be relaxed. This also would apply to linking to pdf documents, provided that the content still fell within the categories and classifications previously approved by the committee.
· Pamela Cools made a motion to expand the scope of Twitter announcements to content not previously posting on either .gov or .info websites, provided that the content adhered to the policy guidelines approved in August of 2009. Barbara Kemp seconded the motion.
Approved 4-0-0.
· Pamela also recommended that all other village committees and chairmen receive an announcement of our Twitter page and a copy of our Twitter policy. She will compose an announcement which Linda will review and distribute through the Clerk’s office.
· In Debbie Stone’s absence, Chairman Fox informed the members that Debbie has sent her several pages of text for the brochure which are being reviewed and edited.
7. Website Integration Update
· Barbara Kemp presented an extensive document (attached) identifying the root cause of the .info website outage over the Labor Day weekend. The bottom line was that Dreamhost, the server company for all village websites, had previously notified village administration that updating and maintenance would be occurring during that time. However, Mr. Kosin did not pass along this information to Barbara or Debbie (or any member of the Communications Committee), because he felt that our site wouldn’t be affected. Unfortunately, this assumption was incorrect, and when the site was accessed to post new content, the error occurred, causing problems for a week. Evans Web Services helped trace back the problem and restored the site to proper functioning.
· Barbara recommended that we set up a maintenance agreement with Evans. Currently there is no firm website back-up schedule, but Evans is temporarily doing our back-up 2-3 times per month.
· Barbara and Mike Zachar also discussed Website Integration progress and future actions and timing (document attached).
· Phase I Portal launch is tentatively scheduled for November 23rd.
· The Committee still has 10 hours of free IT assistance from BACOG. Mike suggested that we might used the time to have the Dreamweaver loaded onto the basement server, stored on a remote desktop so that all users can have access to the same version of DW. This will eliminate some of the problems we have with the committee members using several different versions of the software. Barb volunteered to assist with this process.
8. Survey
· Mike reported that he trained Sarah on the procedure for scoring and coding the survey responses. She has completed a 10% random sample of the surveys, and Mike will be reviewing this sample for consistency and accuracy shortly.
· There are numerous text comments, many written in places where they don’t belong, making it difficult to categorize some of the comments.
· Mike estimates that it will take him 40 hours to analyze the data once it is coded. Pamela volunteered to be trained as well to assist in the process and to help expedite survey analysis. Mike will set up a time to review Sarah’s coding, and to begin training Pam at the same time.
9. Adjournment
Given there was no new business, Linda Fox entertained a motion for dismissal at 7:39 p.m. The next meeting is on Monday, November 16, 2009. Motion to adjourn made by Barbara Kemp and seconded by Linda Fox.
Approved 4-0-0.
Meeting Adjourned
Respectfully submitted,
Pamela A. Cools
Recording Secretary
Attachments
Labor Day Website Crash 102609 Meeting
WIP Progress 102609
Updated Twitter Policy 102609