Attending: Tony Bruzaitis, Bruce Byrne, Alberto Forestier, Michael Kolitsky, Joesph Sanders, Joesph Sauder, Neal Sturm, Peter Teklinski, David Ullman, Jay Zahner, George Laskaris (Ex officio), Stacie Nicole Lyons (Recorder).

Acceptance of Minutes

N. Sturm motioned to accept the minutes from the October 3, 2000 NJ Edge. Net Network Board Meeting. The minutes were unanimously accepted.

President's Council Update

D. Ullman reviewed the October 23rd meeting of the Presidents Council. The NJ Edge.Net By-Laws were introduced and a final version, along with its revisions, will be distributed. A copy is included in the board folders.

NJ Edge.Net Dues

The status of NJ Edge.Net income as dues was discussed. D. Ullman suggested adopting the same structure as NJIN for the first year:

$5,000 for Research Institutions
$2,000 for State, County, Independent Colleges and Universities

N. Sturm suggests a letter to college presidents, along with the constituent service representatives, noting that dues will remain the same through the transition. J. Zahner agreed as all NJIN members fully expected that dues would be shifted over to NJ Edge. G. Laskaris suggested that an attachment accompany the letter detailing NJ Edge support services.

A discussion ensued regarding the rational behind the Research Institutional Membership Fee. Although the $5,000 membership fee guaranteed a seat on the NJIN Board of Trustees, N. Sturm suggested that a formula based on the FTE be adopted for next year.

T. Bruzaitis motioned to adopt the due structure based on NJIN for the first year. N. Sturm seconded the motion and it passed unanimously.

Sussex County Issue

G. Laskaris detailed the service issue bearing on Sussex County Community College, indicating that their location falls outside of the state-regulated Verizon footprint and their participation in the network will require a circuit from Sprint who is assigned that region of NJ. It was noted that once Verizon becomes a long distance provider, in the next year or two, this would no longer be an issue. G Laskaris proposed that the required Sprint circuit be subsidized within the parameters of the pricing model, essentially distributing the cost across the entire membership. N. Sturm proposed setting a cap on total bandwidth above which Sussex would be responsible for, using a 20 MB DS-3 as a limit. A. Forestier raised the fact that if the subsidy were based on a per circuit basis then his institution would then be penalized for buying more links. All were in agreement that Sussex should not be required to pay the fee and G. Laskaris suggested recalculating the subsidy into the number of installations. He will bring several different ways of apportioning this cost to an upcoming advisory board meeting for discussion.

J. Zahner made a motion to subsidize Sussex County Community College's local cost among other connectivity charges up to 20 meg fractional DS3. M. Kolitsky seconded and the motion passed unanimously.

Categories of Corporate Membership & Participation

G. Laskaris led the discussion on developing a corporate category of membership so that corporations may directly may access distance learning instructional opportunities or develop research relationships with various institutions. It was suggested that creating a category of corporate member with its own rate structure could help subsidize circuit costs for institutional members and promote economic development within the state of New Jersey. It was agreed that a number of policy issues need to be resolved and agreed to guidelines for corporate participation. Volunteers are needed to serve on a subgroup in an effort to develop recommendations of how additional corporate members should work. G. Laskaris and J. Zahner will begin this effort, engage two more officers, and return with a proposal for the January Board meeting.

Executive Directors Report

G. Laskaris updated the Board on the status of Sheri Prupis who began work on October 30, 2000 to head up the NJVU position with NJEDge.Net. A needs and requirements analysis is underway and suggestions were solicited for new programs.

Contacts will be been made with teaching excellence centers and faculty development programs at NJ Colleges and Universities in an effort to identify needs and put together programs to increase faculty development and participation. Sheri Prupis is the chair of the upcoming NJ Edge.Net Recruitment, Retention & Retraining of Higher Education Technical Staff to held at Rutgers University on December 11th.

The outcome of the Nov 3rd video evaluation meeting held at William Paterson University was also reviewed. The meeting was well attended by institutional members with strong commitments to the use of video in higher education. Charlie McMickle from WPU put together an impressive comparative evaluation of vendor products. Side-by-side comparisons of IDLS, MPEG2, Video-over-IP at various bit rates were presented. Representatives from both First Virtual (FVC) and Polycom made presentations and answered questions. The conference scheduling software from FVC demonstrated, it was clearly a mature and effective alternative to other vendor offerings. G. Laskaris mentioned that managing a complex statewide conferencing system was a major concern and J. Zahner agreed that the credibility gained was the highlight of this meeting.

The next goal is to assemble both the video and data evaluation teams to work with Verizon engineers to review, assess and finalize the technical configurations and overall architecture and design. Several recommendations to start this effort were made:

• J. Sanders recommended M. Mundrane
  
• N. Sturm recommended Chris Hose from Stevens Institute of Technology
  
• Someone from FDU
  
• P. Teklinski volunteered
  
• Montclair State U (Mento)
  

G. Laskaris then reported on the current status of the Master Services Agreement. George indicated that as a result of the input received at the regional meetings and subsequent discussions with Verizon that there were two major unresolved contractual issues: one video issue dealing with the timing of IDLS migration to the new Video-Over-IP standard, and how coordinated this transition will be for both higher ed institutions and K-12 schools. This is a major issue for a number of the community colleges that have programmatic commitments with K-12 schools. The other issue concerned aggregate internet bandwidth scaling as the needs of institutions grow over time. Internet bandwidth is currently based on a model of 150 MB and costing models beyond this are at issue. A meeting with Verizon to confront these two issues is scheduled for November 8th. J. Zahner requested an update and G. Laskaris agreed noting that this initial meeting will likely not resolve the outstanding contractual issues. The Network Board supported G. Laskaris recommendation to slow down the implementation clock at the next scheduled President's Council meeting.

The next meeting of the NJEDge.Net Network Advisory Board will be held on December 5, 2000 at the CHE Office, Trenton, NJ at 1:30pm.