Sime~Gen™ Inc. Annual Meeting - 2007

Reviews Department Report
Laurraine Tutihasi, Reviews Gatemaster

We've been losing more reviewers than we've been able to recruit. We've had some ups and downs. 
We got, then lost, someone to do interviews. 
We've been losing more reviewers than we've been able to recruit. 
Only a few reviewers are active; that is, reviewing on a regular basis. One of our most prolific reviewers has mostly been reviewing books she gets on her own rather than the ones submitted to Sime~Gen, even though I had asked her to review at least one per month from our lists. 
I've taken on doing more reviews, partly to make up for the slack, but partly because I want to phase out of running the section.
Ann DellaCamera has been of invaluable assistance and could probably take over, except that she doesn't seem to have a lot of self-assurance.. 
Karen has also helped, both technically and as a reviewer and interviewer. 
If Patric can come back and finish more of the automating that he started to do, it will make it easier for almost anyone to run the section. I think that's it in a nutshell.

Domain Technical Report
Patric Michael, Sime~Gen Webmaster

Hi folks.. Happy New Year, and welcome to the Annual chat.

As most of you know (in one form or another) I have been.... delinquent in getting anything done. Most also know why so I wont go into that here. So all I can offer is a bit of information on the past, and a look ahead. 

Regarding the server, we have had an excellent year. We were upgraded in March 2005 to more memory, more hard drive storage, and better processing. Until just recently, no one even noticed, but if you will recall very recently, we went down for a time. The culprit was "mail flooding" which means many other servers at once sending spam to our server. Without those upgrades, we would have been down far longer than we were. Karen and I did some housecleaning and minimized the possibility of future floods and we have so far survived yet another attempt. 

But take careful note that we have an uptime of %99.99. Over a few months, that's nothing, but that figure is based on a TWO YEAR span, which is far better than many other servers can say. (Trust me, I've dealt with them.) So, right now, we have a new operating system which has proven itself very robust, and gives us a platform to plan for the future... 

Keen web observers will notice that there is a definite push for operating systems that run on a remote server. For example, rather than loading an IRC program to get to these chats, one would log into a website, get a download in the background, sign on, and start chatting all without ever having the program on your local hard drive. Sooner or later, this will happen. (probably when Microsoft figures out how to monopolize it. ~~Laugh~~) 
At any rate, the point is that we (simegen.com) will eventually get rid of the need for its volunteers to have FTP, IRC, HTML Editor programs and the like. You as a volunteer will only ever need a login.With that, you will be able to use SERVER BASED programs to do what you need, whether it be posting a review, putting up a new page or editong an old one, making changes or additions to departments you run, etc. 
I have noticed that many potential volunteers don't want to play when they discover what they have to install or operate on their system. To that end, we plan to retrofit the domain to a slightly different format (database driven) wherein most pages will simply not exist in hard copy. Most pages will be created "on the fly" as a browser requests a page. You have seen examples of this already. The "global pages" are all delivered this way in fact. The entire reviews department is actualy only a small handful of hard copy pages. All the rest are dynamic. 
In the near future, expect to see most, if not all of our general maintenance to be web based, meaning you do to need anything other than a browser to do anything you normally do. And no, this is not PHP, ASP, or any COMMONLY known languages. Because this chat is recorded, I won't cover it here, but you can expect similar functionality with a far more robust set of options. Options we can literally create as we need.

One major caveat to remember, however. An all web based interface will take some getting used to, especially if you are already accustomed to doing things locally. JL and Front Page comes to mind. Me and FTP comes to mind. :) Just keep in mind that things will be different at first, but because of platform independence, user friendliness, and simple availability, the changes will be worth it. 
I have recruited Midge as a victim...er...volunteer, to test these things as they are written. I will look for other volunteers to streamline usability as time goes by. But please remember this is not a "done by tomorrow" kind of thing. I am only just now able to start working on these things, and since we are doing our own thing, it won't be terribly fast. But it will happen, so be ready when it does. :) Thanks...

SimeCenter Report
Kaíres Tévesu, SimeCenter Gatemaster

I'm going to put up a page on SimeCenter that thanks all the contributing authors and artists. 
The reason for doing it now is (sad to report) one of our most loyal authors recently passed away: Jayge Carr. I still have a story of hers on file, that hadn't yet been posted. I asked her family if I could post that last story in January, as part of a special memorial edition, and they said YES. They are having a memorial service January 20th. I plan to have the page up well before then, featuring American Cancer Society, because that's where she asked to have donations made in her name. 
And the side page honoring our authors and artists will also go up then, with a link to the web page I designed for her. The family also said they are planning a slide show for the memorial service, including webshots of relevant sites, and will include her mini-site on simegen.com in that presentation.

In other news... 
- we introduced two new authors this year: John Grant and Sue Lange 
  They both just wrote to me and said they saw the site and were interested. 
  And they both have said they will be happy to contribute again. 
I saw that John was an art agent, and asked if he would recommend SimeCenter to any of his artistic colleagues. As a result of which... 
- we introduced two new artists this year: Jael and TODD LOCKWOOD 
- Jael gave us the wonderful caricature "Larry and Jerry" (Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle) 
  that graced the special WorldCon edition of SimeCenter. 
- and Todd let us post his beautiful cover art for The Unity Trilogy 
- both of them offered special prices for buying prints of their art, if people mentioned 
  SimeCenter I didn't ask them to do that. They both offered it.

SimeCenter had another good year. I feared we'd have to quit, when we ran out of both stories and recipients. I'm not real worried about that any more.

Stock Awards
Jacqueline Lichtenberg, President, Sime~Gen, Inc.

The next order of business should be the stock awards.  
For the first time in Known History, and all thanks to RONNIE BOB WHITAKER, the stock awards letters are all printed and waiting to be mailed tomorrow. Every last person on this list has done multiple chores, worn multiple hats, hung in past all reason, and just plain amazed us.
Patric Michael- 6 shares
Karen MacLeod - 4 shares
Ronnie Bob Whitaker - 2 shares
Lois Wickstrom - 4 shares
Laurraine Tutihasi - 2 shares
Martha Ann Dellacamera - 1 share
Lisa Saunders - 2 shares
Kaires - 4 shares
Wendy Fischer 2 shares
Bruce Gray - 1 share
Eric Berlin - 1 share
Doreen DaBinett - 1 share -
- Doreen has given us some novels everyone just plain LOVES. 
- Eric has stood by though we didn't call on him much this year, and has done what was asked of him.
- Bruce has run into massive health problems but STILL produces Keybooks pages so well stocked with books, we make amazon sales. 
- Wendy helped us through a very trying time on a holiday weekend. 
- Kaires does so much I can't even remember it all - but we admire her PARTY HOSTESSING beyond measure. 
- Lisa has kept up with the monthly Newsletter, and with Karen's help, gotten it out, though Karen does heaps of work on it. Lisa also handles our advertising records.
- Martha and Laurraine have kept reviews going despite enormous challenges, and it's an important contribution to the world, *I think*. 
You don't hear much from Jean's other writing partner, Lois Wickstrom -- but behind the scenes, she's been responsible for earning the domain money. 
- On Ronnie Bob I could talk for an hour and not cover it all - he's scanned 'zines for posting this year, fixed the database I use to track our stock, and handled immensely important record keeping. 
Which brings us to the Webmaster department 
- Karen works in all our departments, finds things I lose, keeps everything organized around here. And this year she got back to editing some html pages, (well that was last year), and every question you ask has the answer "Ask Karen". 
- Patric -- well, we wouldn't be having this chat at all if not for Patric. He is on-call 24/7 just about, despite also working double-full-time jobs on and off (mostly on) this year. Though we've had other SysAdmins in the past, Patric by this point in time has basically BUILT our server from scratch and made it his own. You heard his plans -- well, they aren't beyond him.
That concludes the non-voting preferred stock awards for this year!