Meeting:Committee (2010-09-25)

Start: 10:30 AEST, 25 September, 2010

Attendance, absence, apologies, previous minutes.

Attendance: John (chair), Sarah, Adam (minutes), Craig, Andrew, Charles, Brian (observing)

Motion: previous minutes

Motion: That the minutes of the meeting 8 August 2010 are accepted.

• Moved: Andrew
• Seconded: Sarah
• Opposed: None
• Abstained: John, Adam

• Carried without dissent.

Note added October 25: The minutes of the meeting 8 August 2010 are still in the process of being approved.

Motions

(Note: as the first two motions involved Brian Salter-Duke, it was decided prior to the meeting that those motions would be handled before the reports were tabled, and Brian could attend subsequent matters as an observer if the first motion passed).

Motion: Non-voting participatory member

Motion: Brian Salter-Duke, current Public Officer, is invited to take part in committee discussions as a non-voting participatory member.

• Moved: John
• Seconded: Sarah
• Opposed: None
• Abstained: None

• Carried without dissent.

Motion: Bank signatories

The committee discussed who should be listed as a signatory. The initial proposed motion did not mention Brian and Sarah, as they were to be ongoing, rather than new signatories, but it was decided to explicitly add both names to the motion.

Motion: Craig Franklin and Adam Jenkins replace Steve Peters and Brianna Laugher as signatories for Wikimedia Australia's Bendigo Bank account, and that Brian Salter-Duke and Sarah Ewart remain as a signatory for the same.

• Moved: John
• Seconded: Andrew
• Opposed: None
• Abstained: None

• Carried without dissent.

(Note: At this point Sarah contacted Brian via email to inform him that he was now able to attend the meeting. Brian joined the meeting at 10:53 and remained for all subsequent discussion. With Brian in attendance, the discussion moved to tabling the reports).

Reports

Secretary

• Correspondence Report

Sarah noted that the Chapter was receiving approximately 10-15 emails per day. These included a number of CVs, which it was suggested may be a result of recent job advertisements from the Foundation. In response to a question from John, Sarah informed the committee that she has been responding by directing the authors to the appropriate WMF page. One letter was received requesting assistance on identifying players who had signed a cricket bat in the author's possession. When queried about how these letters are typically handled, Sarah informed the committee that her usual response in such cases was to respond with an edited version of the standard OTRS response, informing them that we are unable to provide research assistance. She also noted that correspondence written in regard to Wikipedia matters were typically referred to OTRS, and that all email received a response unless it was spam.

Currently, all correspondence is up-to-date.

• Membership Report

One new membership application (via mail) which was subsequently added to memberdb. A couple of lapsed members have contacted the secretary via email to inform her that they intend to renew their memberships, but no payments have yet been received.

• Small Grants Report

A small grant application was received, but no decision was reached by the committee.

• Promotional material

Sarah has business cards to send out to new committee members, and that she had contacted Steve to ask that he send along any remaining ones for redistribution. She suspected that there would be enough all together to send 100 cards to each committee member. Sarah also had some newspapers and fliers from Germany which she hoped to share with the committee to help determine what sort of materials should be developed. These she would have to mail to committee members, as scanning would be difficult.

• General business

John and Craig have been subscribed to fundraising-l, and Sarah requested that Brian be retained on the list.

Sarah noted that the CiviCRM system was still having problems, and John informed the committee that he would be able to finish fixing those by October 1st.

Treasurer

Craig informed the committee that he had been receiving a handover and documents from Brian, and that all appeared to be in order. The paper-based material was, however, yet to arrive, and thus Craig would be in a better position to provide an overview of the Chapter's financial status once the material was on hand. (In response to a question, it was noted that the materials were due to be sent on the forthcoming Monday). Nevertheless, Craig informed the committee that there is $10,000 in the bank, with $5,200 of that in unallocated funding.

Craig also informed the committee that he would be continuing to use Brian's system until a better model is found to record the Chapter's financial activities.

The question as to who would contact the WMF in regard to the status of unspent money provided to the Chapter in 2009 towards conferences. It was decided that Brian and Craig would need to contact Eric in order to clarify the situation.

System administrator

Problems with organising the email forwarding have caused delays. Attempts to use CPanel to update the email aliases for the president, vice president and treasurer email accounts have been unsuccessful.

John investigated the problem and determined that the email forwarding needs to be administrated on the new server, hosted by the Linux Users Victoria.

The only services still residing on original server are memberdb and the mailing lists. John has not transferred those as he was uncomfortable doing this so close to the election. memberdb has been successfully tested on the new server.

Next meeting

It was decided to determine the date via email.

Meeting closed 12:10.

Actions

• Sarah to organise subscriptions to Chapters and Internal mailing lists for relevant committee members.
• Sarah to send business cards to new committee members, and German publications to the committee.
• John to fix the CiviCRM system, hopefully by 1 October.
• John to fix the email forwarding.
• Craig and Sarah to organise updating signatories.
• Craig and Brian to contact Eric regarding the status of the conference grant.
• General: organise date and time for next meeting.