December 2004
From RmmsWiki
General Meeting - December, 2004
25 emails were received approving of the slate as presented resulting in Brian E., being the Chairman (not to be confused with president), Vice President Dewey A., Tony M., Treasurer and Jim W., as Sec'y. The president's seat is still vacant and available to volunteers and will remain open till someone decides to take it with presumably Board approval, and is not a term-limited position as are the Board and Officers. Warm and heartfelt thanks were extended to the outgoing Pres., Brad J., who was unanimously recognized for doing an excellent job in the two years that he held the position and for providing a steady stream of interesting speakers, topics and running a tight ship with humor and grace. He fortunately will continue with RMMS while he devotes more energy to space-related and environmental issues and we wish him the best in his endeavors.
A lively general discussion was had about space exploration utilizing humans, robots, and telemetry in a synergistic manner to maximize the potential in each of these systems, much of which was related to and /or covered in Brian's soon-to-be-released novel, 'Shadows of Medusa'. MDRS has an all-Candian crew and most of the other time slots are already filled in for the duration of the MDRS season. Many improvements, repairs and upgrades are being planned for this season including, but not limited to, plumbing, GreenHab, and the telescope and some new crew mixes are planned including one all-female, and an all-male with testing to determine what if any differences may exist in crew dynamics of these compositions.
It's becoming more recognized that a considerable body of knowledge exists now that has been derived from several busy seasons at MDRS and the need is apparent that it should be archived and made available in a more user-friendly fashion for others to do data-mining, secondary research and to insure non-duplication of efforts in future research done there. Apogee, Citesearch and other options were considered for such archival storage, as was the Mars Society webpage for listing paper(s) titles and abstracts from the conventions and other Mars Society-generated or published research and this will be further looked into.
