Virtual Moreland

Although a tiny community isolated from Europe by great distance, its politial innovatons were sufficiently impressive to attract the interest of people as diverse as Anthony Trollope, Sir Charles Dilke, Henry George, the Webbs, and Lenin.

Robin Gollan, 1966, Radical and Working Class Politics, Preface.

Minutes for 7 May 1999

Attending: Bill McPherson, Geri Simm, Rob Brittain, Craig Silva, Paolo Ricci, Jonathan O'Donnell (minutes).

Business arising from the minutes

Telstra bill

Paolo is chasing this up, and will report back.

Health centre

Paolo has contacted them by e-mail and will follow up in person.

Standing items

Skills.net report

Paolo gave us a report on the current Skills.net numbers. He is confident that we will reach the target numbers. While access hours remain an issue, we have systems in place to cope.

Business of the meeting

Disabled Motorists Association

Paolo reported on his visit to the Disabled Motorists Association. They are keen to work with us to establish a community access point in their premises.

Action: Paolo to write back within two weeks, detailing costs and outcomes. Paolo will draft a letter and circulate it to the committee for comments before forwarding it to the Disabled Motorists Association.

Moreland Education Expo

The Moreland Education Expo is on Sunday 24th May. We will have a stand there, with a computer or two connected to the Internet.

It would make sense to:

Put the Disabled Motorists Association computer together;
Use it at the Moreland Education Expo; and then
Deliver it to the Disabled Motorists Association when they are ready.

Action: Paolo and Daniel to organise computers for the Expo.
Action: Geri, Craig, Bill and Paolo to attend on the day.

Insurance

We are covered for public liability insurance by the organisations that we work with:æCoAsIT, Inca and Brunswick Secondary College.

To participate in the ARC Telecentre grant, RMIT requires that we have professional indemnity insurance. We need to investigate professional indemnity insurance further. Paolo is waiting for a broker to get back to him with a quote.

If it turns out that professional indemnity insurance is required, and the quote comes in at under $500, Chris and Craig can sign a cheque without reference to the committee.

Action: Jonathan to contact Amanda Way at RMIT to check the insurance requirements of the grant.

ARC Telecentre project

We are in partnership with RMIT and CoAsIT in a successful ARC grant to design and establish a telecentre in the Moreland area.

The grant will enable Nicola Morelli to design two telecentres: one at CoAsIT and one at Brunswick Secondary College. CoAsIT will be working with Nicola to establish a virtual school support system for Italian teachers. Virtual Moreland will be assisting with technical support.

Other Business

New training courses

Paolo reported that he has a lot of interest in courses for:

on-line trading; and
genealogy.

He asked committee members if they knew of people who would be willing to run courses. While committee members did not know of any suitable people, they did come up with some useful suggestions:

run the first course for free with people who know about share trading. Run it as an exploration of what is possible and you will probably get enough information to create a course.
invite one or two people from on-line trading organisations to talk to the participants.

With regard to the genealogy course, people suggested that the CAE and VicNet courses are very good, and we should point people towards them.

ComputerBank

Can they use our Skills.Net training notes? While people thought that this would be OK, they should probably talk to Skill.Net first.

Skyary.com/venture

Bill asked people to check http://www.skyary.com/venture/. He was impressed by their training notes and asked people to see what they thought of it. But please ignore the multi-level marketing part of the system and just look at the training system.

Action: All members to have a look at the training system on http://www.skyary.com/venture/ and tell Bill what you think.

Next meeting

The next meeting will be 7.30 pm Wednesday 19 May 1999 at INCA, 352a Sydney Rd, Coburg 3058.