First UU Congregation of Second Life

MINUTES of the FUUCSL Leadership Group meeting of Thursday, September 23, 2010

The meeting was called to order at 5:31 pm SLT by Zyzzy Zarf, who distributed agendas.

Present: Zyzzy Zarf, Darcy Cedarbridge, Joan Ixito, Zena Silverstar, and Etaoin Barcelona.
Absent: Pomona Writer and Sofia Freenote.

Guests: Aelita Longfall.

Minutes: The Minutes of the meeting of September 2, 2010 were approved as written.

Treasurer’s Report: (Sofia)

• 53 members, no new members

Old Business:

Replacing items in sanctuary: (Zyzzy)

• A waterfall and pool have replaced Biz’s gazebo.

• Floating items have been returned.

• Everyone should return Biz’s items and replace them with items sent to group.

New signs: (Zyzzy)

• Pomona submitted textures of signs replacing “church” with “congregation.” This will be revisited next month.

Date of Leadership Group Meetings: (Zyzzy)

• LG meetings were changed to 4th Thursdays by email vote. Zyzzy updated the website calendar to reflect the new date.

Visitor Logger: (Zyzzy)

• Zyzzy has searched, but not found an appropriate logger. He plans to write one using Python for the service-side code.

• Etaoin rezzed an obelisk “Visitor Monolith v2”. and explained that whenever someone gets within 96m of the sanctuary, it will look them up in a database and if they’re not there, offer them a notecard with UUtopia information. Etaoin wrote the code years ago. It’s in 1:4:9 proportions. It keeps data locally. The purpose is to give information to new people and collect attendance logs. Zyzzy has a visitor logger like this on Thoreau, but feels something should be “up in the cloud.”

Ongoing CLF Interaction: (Etaoin)

• There is a CLF board member in SL. (Laura24 Kiranov).

• The new CLF minister has seen SL.

• Darcy hopes that Lilith will invite Erik Wikstron to come to a service.

• Also, Rev Jeremy has been settled, so he might be in SL a little bit more.

• Etaoin will invite Laura when he sees her online.

Membership Promotion: (Darcy)

• The generic service notecard will be updated to explain how to become a member.

New Business:

Treasury and the SL Exchange Rate: (Etaoin)

• The Linden to Dollar exchange rate has been fluctuating. Some feel this has not been adequately explained. Some online worlds (There) have suddenly closed and people lost money. Linden Labs has been laying off employees and closing grids. However, it’s believed that Linden Labs is still operating in the black.

• Etaoin recommends converting most of L$ holdings to US$. The money could stay in a Linden account, not earning interest. Etaoin proposes policy that would allow FUUCSL to have no more than US$ 200 on hand, and every time we have over (the L$ equivalent of) about US$ 300 in the treasury, we convert it to US$ to get the balance about US$ 100.

• Etaoin reports that there are hacks that will empty your L$ balance quickly. Worn objects can evaporate an avatar’s Linden balance. There are two treasurer avatars which are unlikely to hacked in this way, but the hacking hazard will be mentioned to Sofia.

• Making a new policy to hold amounts of $L / US$ must be discussed with Sofia.

• This discussion will be put in the minutes and continued at the next meeting.

• The LG does recommend a policy to convert some $L holdings to US$.

Saturday Morning Services: (Joan and Darcy)

• Saturday morning services beginning with one per month are suggested.

• European UU’s cannot come to the Thursday night services for time zone conflicts.

• Etaoin has conducted Saturday morning services some years ago, at 9:30 am SLT.

• Saturday morning services will not require a vote, but an announcement should be made to the FUUCSL Group as well as telling European friends on Facebook when services will be held.

• Joan may start the project in October.

Adjournment: The meeting was adjourned at 6:25 pm STL.

Respectfully submitted, Pomona Writer, Secretary