Community Development

1. I met with Dr. Augustine Martinez, director of UNM Taos, on May 28, 1998 to discuss possible collaboration between La Plaza Telecommunity and UNM Taos. The discussion included assistance for La Plaza with the application for career school license from the Commission on Higher Education, and Internet connectivity for UNM Taos with wireless for the both the south campus and the administrative offices. We have begun developing a Memorandum of Agreement for both agencies.

 
2. Mike Stanford, owner of First State Bank and the property in which La Plaza is office, has joined our Corporate Sponsorship program. Mr. Stanford is assisting with the public access costs in the TLC by donating to La Plaza a portion of the monthly lease costs.

 
3. The National Library of Medicine approved the Fellowship for Barbara Hau, which La Plaza is the sponsoring agency. The Fellowship offers Ms. Hau additional professional training to promote public health with information technology through La Plaza Telecommunity. Ms. Hau will report on the Fellowship at this meeting.

 
4. The La Plaza web site is being slightly revised by Daniel Pruitt and Nancy Montano for easier accessing and viewing by the users. Daniel is also creating a Corporate Sponsor web page and will have it activated soon. This page will list our Corporate Sponsors with a brief description of their donation and will also link to their home pages when available.

 
5. La Plaza Telecommunity and the Council of Neighborhood Associations have developed a cooperative grant to the Office of Management and Budget to provide access and training to the Taos County neighborhood associations. The total grant is for $50,000, $25,000 from OMB and $25,000 inkind from La Plaza. It is an excellent community development project for information technology with the neighborhood associations and the Taos County government being trained through La Plaza. Notification will be in July.

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Technology

1. We did attempt to install the new 28 digital modems and US Robotics had a scheduling conflict on June 1, the date we had previously scheduled with them. We are waiting on US Robotics to reschedule with Daniel Pruitt.

 
2. The busy lines we experienced last week are due to 9 modems being dead and found the problem to be USWest hardware, not the La Plaza system. The problem was corrected on Thursday, June 4, 1998.

 
3. The problem with the mail server over the Memorial Day Weekend was due to spammers using the www sendmail program as a relay. This caused our server to run slowly and eventually crash because of the amount of information being mailed. The Tech Department has made changes which will prevent this problem from reoccurring.

 
4. A user survey is being developed and will be distributed to the TLC users as a control group to assist with data to determine information needed to complete the application to the Commission on Higher Education for licensure of a career school. The survey will be distributed for 30 days and the information will be shared upon completion.

 
5. Integrity Network Systems donated the $3995 Ethernet Switch and it has been installed. Daniel reconfigured the La Plaza LAN to accommodate the switch and the users.

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W. K. Kellogg Foundation grant # 1:

1. The grant ended on May 31, 1998 and all goals and objectives were met. The third year evaluation has been completed by Dr. Forouz Joucar and was mailed on Friday, June 5, 1998. The evaluation will be kept in my office and is available for review by the Board.
2. As all the grant money was expended, the final report will be completed and sent to the Kellogg Foundation for review. I spoke with Antonio Gomez, project director, regarding the documentation and Kellogg will be mailing the final instructions in the next few days.

Fiscal Information:

1. Financial statements: see attachments (not published on web site)
2. Amended budget: see attachments (not published on web site)

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May Monthly Statistics

Public Access Users

Registrations

Dial-in Statistics

Number of Memberships / May 31: 84

Judith Pepper, Executive Director, La Plaza Telecommunity