That the Lane County SAO (Software Association of Oregon) work jointly as an adhoc working group with the:

...Eugene Library IPAC Lab (Internet Public Access Center - Janus Lindholm), ...Oregon Public Networking, ...4J School District (Lynn Moore? - just got his name/ didn't write it down!), ...LCC SBDC - Lane Com College Small Biz Dev Ctr (Gary Valde) ...Site-maintenance team that has developed the Millennium Salons' Forums ...Lost Valley Educational Center (community publishing; hard copy and Net)

VIA a paid team (outlined below)

Purpose: to bring skill and focus to our current local meetings on y2k-readiness, and expand and then communicate y2k readiness work to the community-at-large, county wide, in a fashion that can be shared with other counties, states and countries.

Specifically, this group can use the IPAC Lab at the Eugene Library (and others throughout the county) to help people run through the y2k self-inventory, self-assessment and self-remediation currently recommended by the SBA, Merrill Lynch, The Cassandra Project, General Motors, the State of Oregon, the President of the United States, and others - to the greatest extent possible - by:

1) holding regular meetings that help people look at their systems and key partners' readiness, as well as plan for community contingency needs - known forthwith as "Plan B". I've had one technical session so far at OPN offices - next technical session is announced on Alert2000 Listserv - June 10, 10am-1pm IPAC at Eugene Library)

2) creating on-line resources that really work for people and communicate findings, as well as allow for discussion and timely fact-finding, while eliminating liability for the information for the project team.

3) bring in high school and college students this summer/fall/ to focus on having a local county-inclusive site by this winter that works numerous angles of y2k - inventory, assessment, patch downloading, safe-self-fixing, organizational and personal contingency planning, etc. Many kids are great with computers - they'll be able to buddy up with others (parents, friends' businesses, etc.) and help conduct self-inventories and self-assessments.

I've spoken informally with Dave Piercy (buttonholed him last night in the store - it's not safe to shop for a cucumber anymore!), Assist. Super. of 4J Schools - he says yes, we should talk about doing this. As I said to Eric Potter of Omnitek "If you private-business folks spend money to help build a self-inventory and self-assessment site that WORKS for our community, your trained staff can handle more clients, because more people can do more of the basic legwork themselves. If potentially affected parties (like banks, computer sellers, etc.) help fund this effort, the fewer problems we (their borrowers and customers) experience, the fewer problems they experience. Problems = dollars for most of us. And, until problems = dollars, many of us don't get it.

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-- Cynthia (cabeal@efn.org), May 30, 1998