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While the club has utilized the BlueJeans video conferencing solution for a few years to hold virtual portions of our club meetings, we now have access to less expensive options (via discounts for non-profit organizations) including Zoom. Thus, starting for our April 2022 business meeting, we’ll be sending out a new video conferencing link directing folks to Zoom.

For those who would like to validate you have things configured correctly, we’ll be hosting a “test” meeting this Thursday at our normal 7:30 start time. Feel free to join for a bit and say Hi and test your system.

Jim Brain (GCCC ’22 President) is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: GCCC Zoom Video Test
Time: Apr 14, 2022 07:30 PM Central Time (US and Canada)

Join Zoom Meeting
https://zoom.us/j/99249032946?pwd=SG5RUUMvalE4aFZwSG1BTDY5R2xQUT09

Meeting ID: 992 4903 2946
Passcode: glenside
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Meeting ID: 992 4903 2946
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Hey everyone. This is the club treasurer here.

Recently I’ve been looking at ways that we can operate our club indefinitely. I asked in our meeting recently if anyone could help out in setting up something like a trust fund or investment account. One of our members, Bob Swoger, said something to us that took me a couple days to data process. He asked mainly if we’re allowed to do this. He said something like: “I’ve been in many ham and computer clubs and we never did anything like this.”

Of course investments in the future are what non-profits like ours is all about. But what did he mean, nobody else does this? It struck me that he’s looking at it through a lens of a modern computer club. Of course in any modern computer club, their mission would almost certainly not think 10, 20, 30 years down the road. They’d be looking at how to throw a great LAN party or something next year!

For me and I bet for others in the club, we are moving on from being a simple modern computer club to being more of a knowledge resource and historical society, one that will need to worry about how to keep things going if and when our membership dwindles or retro computing becomes less of a popular hobby.

I have some ideas for goals for the next 20-30 years. My current mission is I would like CoCoFEST! to some day become entirely self-funded. As in, nobody needs to pay anything to have a CoCoFEST! every year. This would mean that there would never have to be a “Last” CoCoFEST!

Is this something I should be focusing on? Do you all see us as a computer club or are we becoming something (should we becoming something) different?

Lastly, if anybody with some investment knowledge wants to help me figure out a proposal for the club to help shape a 20-30 year mission, please get in touch with me!