Electronic village of Abingdon

 

“91st Day” Subcommittee

 

MINUTES

 

28 July, 1999   12:30 PM

 

            The scheduled meeting of the Electronic Village of Abingdon “91st Day” Subcommittee held in the Johnston Memorial Hospital Cafeteria was opened by Dr. F. H. Moore, Chairman.  There were eleven participants present.  These included:

 

Dr. F. H. Moore, Jr., Chairman

Al Bradley, Secretary

Eric Schuler

Bob Franklin

Jean Luker

David Taverner

Jack White

John Mongle

Steve Galyean

Mathew Matt

Burt Bassham

 

            The minutes of the 30 June 1999 meeting were approved with two corrections.  Steve Galyean should be shown as present at the meeting making a total of thirteen participants and Jean Luker had stated that the Washington County Public School System wished to participate in the demonstration of teleconferencing.  With these two corrections, the minutes of the 30 June 1999 meeting were accepted.

 

            The next item for review was the status of new connections, including:

 

NAME

ADDRESS

COST

STATUS

The Travel Shop/Abgn. Baptist Church

339 W. Main St.

$ 1,619.37

Scheduled for 7/28/99

Dunn's Pharmacy, Inc

191 N. Court St.

 

Just Received

 

            Dr. Moore opened the meeting with the hub situation that had arisen as a problem with Dr. F. H. Moore III and Abingdon Radiology, both connected through JMH.  The problem appeared to be at least one defective hub at JMH which had been temporarily swapped pending warranty replacement of the normal unit.  David Taverner advised that there was a problem that occurred with a second hub at the Sprint Central Office the origin of which was undetermined. 

 

            The next item was that of the EVA home page being unavailable to users outside of the NetAccess system.  Bob Franklin reported that NetAccess had already taken several steps to repair this problem, but nothing seems to have worked.  The problem appears to be with the DNS setup of the EVA page and may have to be resolved with Internic.  Further discussion of the EVA page ensued and a Web Team was appointed to review the materials there.  This included Mathew Matt, John Mongle, Eric Schuler and Chris Edwards.

 

            Al Bradley reported that he had submitted an application to the AOL Foundation to include EVA in the Rural Telecommunications Leadership Awards program.  The application was submitted electronically and a signed copy mailed prior to the deadline on 20 July and notification of its receipt has been received.  The notification stated that nothing further would be heard from the program until September.

 

            Al Bradley reported that he and Mathew Matt had begun documenting the pole routes for the EVA fibers the day before.  This information, including pole numbers, descriptions and some information of the locations of splice cases and connections had been shown on a spreadsheet and may be added to the Town's GIS system.

 

            David Taverner began a discussion of some of the details of the proposed teleconferencing system using standards H.320, H.323 equipment as offered by the PictureTel Company.  EVA has the built-in bandwidth to easily support use of basic teleconferencing equipment and with the introduction of some more sophisticated equipment, interconnection to outside systems.  Using the more basic equipment, two videoconferencing applications may be connected by IP address across the EVA system or across the Internet.  Interconnecting outside systems requires a specialized gateway for such connections depending upon where the other user is located and what connectivity that user might have.  There is an even more sophisticated multiconferencing server unit that would control interconnection of 28 units in many combinations of connections.  David also discussed a streaming server that could prove useful for some applications.

 

            Following David's presentation of the possibilities of this system, there was a protracted discussion of how deeply EVA should become involved in this service.  Jean Luker proposed that, for instance, the School System might purchase a basic card, as well as EVA and Emory and Henry College to demonstrate the ready interconnectivity that would become available with such systems.  Eric Schuler stated that the library might employ less sophisticated equipment that fit its budget, but met the standard and accomplish the same purpose. 

 

            It was decided that several basic units could be purchased by any of the groups previously mentioned and interconnected as desired and that, as these nodes proliferated and further sophistication were required, more equipment could be added when and if necessary.

 

            There being no further business, the meeting adjourned at 2:17 PM.

 

                                                                             Respectfully Submitted,

 

 

 

                                                                                                                                ______________________________________

                                                                                                            Albert C. Bradley,

                                                                                                            Secretary

 

 

 

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