[H-GEN] Presidents Report
Russell Stuart
russell-humbug at stuart.id.au
Fri Nov 13 08:19:06 EST 2009
The next exec meeting is tomorrow, so it is time for my Presidents
report. I did originally promise my report would be short and sweet -
just a list of what has and hasn't been done. However since this is my
first report and I made a few promises before coming president, I cover
them first.
Item 1 - opening the private lists
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This proved a very contentious issue - I confess to not realising just
how contentious it was. Just opening up the current lists as I had
original proposed was strongly opposed by most of the committee. I was
equally determined that I wanted to do something to make the operations
of the committee more transparent, so what followed were, shall I say,
fairly robust discussions that went on for a while. In the end a
compromised was reached that everybody seemed to be happy with.
The existing lists have been be kept as they are, but new public
equivalents have been created. They are:
admin at lists.humbug.org.au
- The public version of exec at humbug.org.au
- http://lists.humbug.org.au/mailman/listinfo/admin
sasig at lists.humbug.org.au
- The public version of sysadim at lists.humbug.org.au
- http://lists.humbug.org.au/mailman/listinfo/sasig
Needless to say you are all welcome to join those lists if you want to.
You can also also inspect the archives at the above URL's at any time.
I also said I would close inactive lists. Total posts over the last 12
months to various lists are:
blipvert - 0
chat - 18
csig - 0
dsig - 10
general - a lot
talks - 1
My feeling is all bar general should be closed. Anybody else want to
put their 2c in?
Item 2 - reassignment of committee roles
----------------------------------------
The idea here was to align the job descriptions of the elected committee
with the tasks that the actually have to be done. For example no
particular committee member was officially responsible for booking
rooms. Now there is one. Hopefully this means if say the rooms aren't
booked you will know who to blame at the next AGM and vote accordingly.
There was some discussion about whether the jobs should be allocated the
way I planned. In the end it seemed best to ask each individual
committee member if they are happy to take on the tasks I put in my
nomination. They are now all happy to do so.
This is a bit of an experiment, of course. It remains to be seen
whether if it works out. At this stage I want to give it a year -
possibly more if we decide to reshuffle things. However, once it
settles down I am hoping we can change the constitution accordingly.
Item 3 - committee reporting
----------------------------
I undertook to ask all committee members to give reports at each
committee meeting. To my surprise all committee members endeavoured to
do just that - despite the fact they hadn't actually formally agreed to
take on their jobs yet. You will find their reports in the minutes.
The only person who didn't do that was me. You may recall I undertook
to give a brief report on how all tasks and reports were done. Since no
tasks or reports had been allocated at that point, this was rather
superfluous.
Item 4 - Meeting times
----------------------
I had some grand plans here - but no doubt you have all seen Mathews
posts to general on the subject. My idea was to ensure the night owls
could stay as long as they wanted while not forcing those normally
responsible for locking up - the committee, to be night owls themselves.
Right now Matthew is doing just that using the old system, so there is
no need for any changes.
Now we come to the pointy end of the report. This is where I say what
we promised to do at the last exec meeting, but hasn't happened. The
list is:
Outstanding items for the Treasurer - Mark Ellem:
- treasurer to put details of how to deposit into the humbug account on
the website.
- Get Scott's old key.
Actions for the Librarian, Stephen Thomas:
- Steven to put previous list of deputies on the wiki.
Actions for the President, Russell Stuart:
- Endeavour to get Excalibur moved to a new home.
In relation to this last item - it is in progress. We actually have a
new temporary home we can call our own, but the environment it different
to the one we are using now. It requires some work to make the existing
VM run on it.
--
Regards,
Russell Stuart
Humbug President
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