Minutes of the board of Directors

Present:
Robin McDonough (UK)
Bruno Paternostre (Belgium)
Kristel Sarlin (Finland)
Yves Epelboin (France)
Peter Mederly (Slovakia)
John Moriarty (Ireland)
Jean Françcois Desnos (France)
Jan Knop (Germany)
Jan Sandrej (Slovakia)
Gordon Young (Ireland)
Apologies were received from Solke Veling (Netherlands) and John Heap (UK).

1. EUNIS Congress - Dusseldorf 6 - 8 November 1995

Jan Knop circulated an outline of the programme. There will be two parallel conferences A and B with the following themes:

• Conference A : High Performance Computing Support for Teaching and Learning
• Conference B : Administrative and Management Computing in Higher Education

The Congress will start and end with plenary sessions. It was agreed that some additional papers covering the Applications of High Speed Networking should be included. They will be put into the two sessions of Conference A.
An open business meeting of EUNIS will be held at about 17.00 hours on one of the two evenings. This will be our first Annual General Meeting.
Two keynote speakers are still required. Jan Knop will try to find a speaker from Brussels to cover the topic "The European Way towards the Information Society". Robin McDonough will contact a speaker for the final session on the topic "A Vision of Universities in the Future".
The programme and attendance registration form will be distributed at the end of August. In the meantime, representatives will remind people in their own countries about the Congress.
It was agreed that Proceedings of the Congress should be published on the WWW. A paper version would also be considered.

2. Membership

The Chairman welcomed Peter Mederly and Jan Sandrej from Slovakia as members - the first from, that country. Yves Epelboin reported that he now had made contacts in Spain and Estonia. Peter Mederly undertook to attempt to establish contacts in the Czech Republic and in Hungary.
At this time we now had established a network of EUNIS contacts in 16 countries. There was still no representation from Italy, Greece and many of the East European countries.

3. EUNIS Constitution

The Chairman undertook to circulate immediately a version of the EUNIS constitution. It was confirmed that representation on the Executive was as follows:

• each country was entitled to two representatives;
• where a national organisation exists, it would nominate the representatives;
• where no national organisation exists, two individual volunteers would become Executive members on the understanding that they agreed to try to establish a national organisation.

4. The EUNIS distribution lists

Yves Epelboin reported that he had now established two distribution lists:
EUNIS-EX : a restricted list for the executive of EUNIS
EUNIS : an open list for everybody.
There are 60 persons on the EUNIS list.
To subscribe to the list EUNIS, a message is sent to
listserve@lmcp.jussieeu.fr
containing the instruction
subscribe EUNIS Name, Institution, Country

5. The EUNIS WWW Server

Yves Epelboin reported that he had received funding from the French Government to purchase an IBM 42 to act as the server. Part of the case for this system was that it would act as the EUNIS WWW Server. He believed that from August this system will be large enough for what we need. He described the set up of the current EUNIS pages. It is accessed by http//www.lmcp.jussieu.fr/EUNIS
On the main pages he has placed the Constitution, minutes of meetings, details of the Congress and a list of the Executive members. Pointers exist which access membership lists, reports and the national pages. At present the only national pager available is that for France. Others need to be added.
Yves Epelboin will prepare a model for the home page for each country and will mail it when it is ready.
We need to include the EUNIS reports and the three which exist are:

• the networking report
• administrative computing
• software report

6. Student access to Internet

Bruno Paternostre reported on the responses to his questionnaire on student access to the Internet. He had received 20 replies and he agreed to produce a report on these.

7.

Copies of the regulations governing student use at Rochester Institute of Technology and at Helsinki University of Technology were circulated by Kristel Sarlin.

8. Editorial Control of WWW Contents

The Chairman raised this issue saying universities might find themselves legally liable for contents of their Information Servers, contents over which they have little editorial control. Jean-Francois Desnos reported that following an incident in his University, they were required to take on an extra 200 students who argued that a legal commitment had been given on the equivalent of an information server.

9. Review of original aims

1. The Chairman reminded the meeting of the original aims of EUNIS:
   - to encourage the communication and transfer of information between information systems providers in Higher Education establishments in Europe;
   - to undertake discussions and representations with suppliers of information systems products;
   - to seek to influence various organisations within Europe which are responsible for information systems and for their funding.
   He said that he felt we had started to make progress on the first of these but that we should now turn our thoughts to the other two.
2. It was agreed to start action on the second one by organising a meeting with representatives of a Software Editorin Europe. There are a number of stages in this activity:
   (i) we should identify the person in the community in each of our countries who was involved in negotiating this vendor.
   (ii) we should exchange information on the costs and establish the position in the US;
   (iii) we should select a place for a meeting with this vendor, ask him to attend, giving them detail of who will be present and whom they represent;
   (iv) we should publicise the intention to hold the meeting amongst our members and the subsequent outcome.
   Gordon Young undertook to co-ordinate this activity.
3. With regard to the European Union, Jean Francois Desnos reported that he believed there was now an appropriate programme which would allow an approach for some funding for EUNIS He agreed to try to get in touch with the relevant part of the Commission and report back.

10. Date of next meeting

It was agreed to meet in Dusseldorf on the day before the Congress. This is Sunday 5th November 1995 at about 4.00pm.

W Robin McDonough

Summary of Actions

1. Keynote speakers at Congress J Knop R McDonough
2. Congress programme etc. J Knop
3. Congress - riminder to all members All of us
4. Contact Czech Republic/Hungary P Mederly
5. EUNIS Constitution R McDonough
6. EUNIS WWW Server - National Pages All of us
7. Circulate model of home page Y Epelboin
8. Report on Student Access to Internet B Paternostre
9. Meetings with Microsoft G Young
10. Funding from EU J-F Desnos