Beginning of Meeting
Schedule
Caius:
The first thing on the agenda for this meeting is the Society Schedule for the upcoming term. I’ve prepared a draft schedule which is, by all means, not final, but gives us a good basis to work from.
Starting with the most definite events, the MCM trip is a fixed date since we can’t rearrange that.
Week 9 is the most appropriate week for a movie night because it tends to be a busy weekend, so there’d be little point in doing an all nighter or karaoke since people are likely to be busy and have other commitments. On the other hand, as Tom suggested, Saturday Week 1 is the most appropriate for an all nightery because people will have just returned to the University so are unlikely to be busy.
Besides that, everything else is in flux. I’ve also talked to the Japanese Society President and he’s happy to do a collaboration. At the moment, we’re planning on doing a Movie Night collaboration, but there’s two relevant points to keep in mind here; (1) if we continue with a movie night, the Japan Soc President suggested showing a cultural movie – something the people from Japan Society would be interested in and not just anime. We can think about that later though. The other point is that if we don’t do a Movie night, and instead choose to do something non-anime related, we could do something such as laser tag or ice skating. Although this would require external planning so its something to keep in mind. We don’t have to decide what to do at this moment though.
In terms of other stuff, I’m thinking of flipping around the order for the Manga and meal social, thus moving the meal social to week 3 and manga social to week 4. How do you all feel about that?
Tomas: Having the meal social later is a better idea as otherwise we risk fewer people showing up as they might not know anyone so early.
Caius: Okay, that’s fine. I think the placement as Week 3 and 4 is ideal, since in the first two weeks we have the Kareoke and All Nighters which tend to be quite noisy and requires people to stay up quite late, so aren’t great environments to talk, so the meal and manga socials help balance this out. The only thing is that we’re also having a Manga social in week 0, so it might be too early to have another one.
Tomas: I guess, but the Week 0 Manga social might clash with other Welcome Week events, so it’d give people who miss the Week 0 event the opportunity to come to this one.
Caius: Fair enough. We’ll leave it like that then.
[Everyone agrees on the schedule; Weekly showings every Tuesday with ancillary events in between]
Caius: This has been mentioned for eons, but I want to discuss all night karaoke. How do people feel about it?
Tomas: I would like to do it but it might be a bit of a logistical issue in terms of room booking and noise levels. But I think if we do it has to be the second one in the term
Caius: I agree, but I’d like to do something like that. We can discuss this later in the future.
Regarding attendance of exec, I expect exec to be there 90-95% of the time. I recognise that there are sometimes legitimate reasons as to why people might not be able to attend on some weeks, but you’re expected to attend every week if possible, especially since we have a smaller exec this year.
Society Fair/Welcome Week
According to ‘inside sources’, our Welcome Week allocation will be on the 27th. Therefore, everyone needs to be in Warwick by the 26th of September as the 27th will be a big day for us. Because we only have 5 people, we’ll need to have two minimum by the stall, preferably three, and then do rotations. Expect to be contactable and within the vicinity throughout the whole day.
We also have the banner we can put up on the stall, and hopefully we’ll have a table and chairs. What should we put on the table?
Library and manga books, popular ones ideally.
Tomas: We’ll have to keep an eye on whether it rains; we’ll have to have a small box or something to keep everything in and keep it under the table in the worst case scenario.
Luke: I actually checked the weather forecast yesterday, and although its unreliable due to being almost a month away, the forecast indicates that there’s a rather high possibility of rain due to it being a very active Atlantic hurricane season, so its something we should probably prepare for.
Tomas: We can just bring something waterproof to take then.
Caius: If it doesn’t rain, I’ll also bring some figures to place on the table to make it look prettier and more engaging. We can sort the majority of this stuff closer to the date though.
Tomas: We will have to sort out the flyer printing.
Caius: Is the Flyer complete?
Tomas: Its essentially done but it depends on Covid restrictions.
Caius: We should know by the end of the week, so once we know we can change it.
Does anyone want to be in charge of flyer printing?
Tom: I’ll do it, but I just need someone to approve the purchase.
Tomas: Numbers is the only thing we need to decide; I don’t think we need to do too many.
Caius: We’re not going to be doing leafletting, but what will be allowed is putting posters outside residential buildings.
Caius: In my first year welcome week there were around 110 people or so and they printed 500. We can probably do a bit less than that.
All nighters
Caius: Two things; In relation to shorts, I was thinking that at an all nighter, perhaps around 12 or 1 am, we could show a series of shorts. I plan on doing something like that for all the all nighters I run. If we run out of shorts though we can get something a bit longer if needs be.
Luke: How do all nighters work, do people bring physical media or what?
Caius: We could have issues with that. All previous allnighters worked on exec having their hard drives with them. But with fewer exec this could be problematic. Also given that the first all nightery is on week one, it’d be unrealistic to expect people to bring stuff in since most people haven’t been to an all nighter.
Tomas: I have 5TB of stuff, enough for 4 all nighters. I think it’ll be fine as enough people have anime hard drives.
Caius: But as a contingency, if someone wants to put up something which we can’t get, we could always watch it on [redacted] or something. Another thing is we could ask people if there’s anything they particularly want to watch beforehand
Tomas: Im not turning myself into some download proxy for people though. If we promote it in such a way as to encourage people to bring what they want shown it should be fine.
Luke: Do we have anything we could use to play physical media if someone decided to bring something?
Tomas: We have a Blu Ray and DVD player.
Caius: Luke, the announcements we do for the first events, we need to explain how the events work and the structure behind them - especially the all nighters. We’ll also have to include details about the locations of buildings and how to navigate around campus since people are likely to be unfamiliar with the layout in such a short period of time.
Caius: One other small thing, the SU website doesn’t have the link to the library, was thinking of adding it.
Tomas: I assume we’re offering the online takeaway for the library?
Tom: I think it’s the only way I can do the library. I just want to get an email.
Tomas agrees to add email notifications or a Discord bot
Luke: What about bringing the library to events?
Caius: Not logistically possible, would cost too much money.
Tom: We could take one or two volumes from a particular series and put them in manageable bags.
Caius: Yeah, cool. I think we should do this for the Welcome Week one too.
Mudae Bot
Caius: We will reset it, Tomas you suggested?
Tomas: Make people aware, then lock it down during welcome week. Then have a message saying this will open up on X day. Last day of Welcome Week probably best since then we’ll have had an influx of people. Then we can chuck out an announcement saying that at X time we’ll be restarting the Mudae bot
[Mass agreement in exterminating the waifus.]
Drawing activity
Caius: We need to start preparing for that our Saturday manga and drawing activity social, Stefan, last time we talked about it you mentioned paper. A4 or A5? What else do you want
Stefan: A5, crayons, maybe some colours for variety and some sharpeners would be ideal.
Tom: I think we have to stick to pencils. Crayons sound a lot of money.
Tomas: FilmSoc had a good model for this type of event when they did their Ghibli Night; they gave people a piece of paper and a pencil and told people to draw their favourite character, and then showcased the drawings. We need people moving in and out relatively quickly so I don’t think we need to be super extensive with the equipment anyway; no one should be drawing huge landscapes or anything.
I’m sure we’ll find the next Leanardo Da Vinci…
Caius says he’ll pop into London; if he can’t find any the Tom’s agree to purchase some from the convenience store
Boring Health and Safety stuff
Agree to bring hand sanetizer for our Manga and drawing events, but agree that there’s no need to take any additional measures at other events such as karaoke.
Other miscellaneous stuff:
Agree to announce Kareoke list and requests during Welcome Week, at the same time as announcing karaoke, to avoid people flooding it early. Still waiting on Trev to upload the relevant files,
Election:
Caius: Next, lets talk about adding some additional people to the Exec team
Looking at what we have now. We have 5 exec; two librarians need filling whilst two people are fulfilling two roles at the same time.
Tom: We could also open up the safety roles
Caius: Issue is though that if we’re telling people we need more people but then there’s no jobs for them, it’s a bit weird.
Tomas: Can probably rearrange librarian in Term 2.
Caius; Part of it is for the long term for the society though. I think 5 people exec is too small, but 9 people is too inefficient and big. 6 or 7 seems like a good sweetspot.
That aside, I feel if we say wweek 5 term 1 anelection and give them a librarian role where there’s nothing to do, it’s going to be weird. We don’t want someone nailing someone to a society when they don’t have a specific role.
Caius: We could change the election handover process so we’re in the background supporting, more active than previously if needed.
Tomas: Comp Soc keep the old exec around until the end of term 2 to support people.
Caius: I think something like this could be okay, as unless they’re doing something radically different, they’ll probably need more guidance than that. And the society guide on latex isn’t really sufficient. Can’t really teach people like that about the considerations for events etc.
Caius: The term 1 elections will be an EGM.
Tomas: I f we do do an EGM, we should dbe like ‘hey all exec are leaving this year, if you want to be exec this year apply here and you’ll be an assistant exec and supervise, allowing you to run in term 2.’ More of a supervisor role than anything else.
Agree this is probably the best route to go down, but table the matter for further discussion closer to the time.
Movie Selection
Millenium Actress: Wednesday (overlaps with FilmSoc event)
Promare: Thursday (Will be played twice if there’s covid restrictions)
Anime:
Dennou Coil, Berserk, Gurren Lagann and Kaiji