Beginning of meeting
[The last meeting before the Newgmi Elections
Alexa play komm susser tod
it all comes Tumbling down, Tumbling down, Tumbling down]
Events
Esports
Caius: Lets firstly deal with our upcoming events. Regarding our planned collaboration with E-Sports, I still need to get a full proposal from them and ask them whether they can accept.
Tomas: Week 4 would be best for this event as we don’t have any weekend events for that week, otherwise the week is going to be fairly empty.
Caius: It would have to be 6th of February which is a Sunday in that case, because of Chinese New Year
[Agreement that we’ll hold the event on Sunday the 6th]
Paint ball
Caius: Regarding paintball, I’ve asked for coach quotes and the prices structures seemed somewhat complex. I haven’t got a definitive cost yet, but the estimated prices are around £5.
Caius: I’ve been having second thoughts about having a meal after Birmingham – it occurred to me that there wouldn’t be much point going out to eat for a meal when people are likely feeling sweaty and tired. Not to mention that it’d be a logistical challenge, with the bus back also being a practical issue and an extra cost. If there’s any demand for this then the next Exec can arrange it themselves, perhaps instead of going to Zorbas for the next meal social.
Luke: Are Birmingham Anisoc planning on coming with us again now? Last I heard they said that it’d cost too much.
Caius: Yeah, they said that they could make it but that it’d have to be around March, essentially around Term 2 Week 10 or slightly into the holidays.
[Need to practice my shooting skills for the upcoming catboy uprising. Need to defend myself from catboy toxoplasmosis
!bravonolan
Harvey Dent: Carbon fibre, 28 calibre, Made in China, if you want to (do well in paintball) Mr Maroni I recommend you buy American.]
Elections
[Okay so here’s the boring election stuff. Stop the count! I WILL NOT USE THE DOMINION VOTING MACHINES!!]
Caius: There’s still a lot of work we need to do for the upcoming election. To begin with, we still need to make the document laying out the duties and responsibilities of each role.
Caius: I was planning on doing the election presentation in Week 4, but I think Week 3 is better since Week 4 is too close to the election. Make sure to write this in the upcoming announcement, Luke.
Caius: I attended the Society Officer’s presentation. They are encouraging people to use the MSL system for elections, but I’m planning on doing it in person instead, as we have traditionally one.
Caius: The argument for online is that, if someone gets COVID who plans to run, it puts someone at a disadvantage. To mitigate against this, what we could do is have people publicly nominate themselves after Week 4. We will then give them a grace period and then open up a section on the website where people can see who is running along with a 128 character sentence.
Luke: Alternatively, we could set up an MS Teams call instead where anyone with Covid can answer questions and do a speech.
[Agreement to set up MS Teams call where people have Covid and can’t make it; and also agree to set up section on the website whereby people can nominate themselves ahead of time for a role]
Caius: People can officially nominate themselves from Week 4 Tuesday; the point of having nominations is also for SU purposes – they want as many people to run and vote as possible.
Tomas: I disagree with SU perspective here – I think that having the in-person speech is important and adds a lot. People shouldn’t vote without being able to hearing speeches and seeing the candidates in person.
[Agreement]
Tomas: Logistically we could do this with a Google form; ask for real name; Discord; ask for sentence.
Caius: Official cut off date will be Wednesday 12am (manga social name).
Tomas: How are we going to verify voters? I’d suggest, at the end of the vote, having people leave the room and then line up telling us their student IDs. We can then verify it on our end.
[Agreement - vaccine passorts and now voter ID for anisoc elections - LITERALLY 1984!!]
Caius: In terms of practicalities, for each role we’ll ask people who wants to run. The candidates putting themselves up will be ushered out the room. We’ll then have one candidate enter, can have someone type their name on a Word Document, which we’ll project, and then they’ll have a one minute timed speech.
Caius: They’ll then face questions once everyone has finished; I think we can have 2 questions max except for Exec. When people answer questions we should alternate who starts first to stop people from copying answers.
Caius: Once all questions have been asked we’ll move onto voting. We’ll be running votes through preference voting. Lots of paper will be needed for this.
[Agreement]
Roles in the Election
Caius: Equal Opps, Health and Safety and Environmental officer aren’t required roles for societies. The only one that is required is welfare for passing the Exec handover pack. My suggestion in relation to the latter is that the future Execs between them decide and vote amongst themselves who wants to take those responsibilities.
[Agree]
Caius: Relating to the new role, here are the some suggestions for the jobs and responsibilities that could be fulfilled.
Caius: Currently its pretty obvious we are inept at promotion and social media. This seems strange for a Society to our size. Its clear that the Secretary is not solely sufficient for carrying out these duties. Additionally, we have tended, in my experience, to outsource anything creative – we don’t have anyone who, in an official capacity is capable of producing creative materials such as posters, videos and that sort. We also don’t have anyone who is creatively orientated in the sense that, if we want to do some sort of art event – we sort of hope that Execs have these abilities and there may be a time in which there isn’t.
The third deficient aspect is in general just socialising, but I think this is more due to the dynamics of the Execs currently doing the job as opposed to this being a structural issue, so this could be something we consider in the framing of the new role.
Tomas: For me, the main issue stems from the fact we have a core set of roles and responsibilities but then some positions are somewhat auxiliary one job things, like webmaster, librarian and treasurer – webmaster just has to run the website; librarian just carry the library ect; compared to president and secretary which have a bunch of responsibilities and are much more busy.
Tomas: My plan, instead, would be to change President and Secretary and add a new role in support them to alleviate the burden. The Secretary would continue to write announcements, run social media and minute meetings, but then we’d create a new role - event coordinator - which takes the room booking job off the secretary. They would book all rooms, negotiate with room booking, call restaurants, and handle logistics for events such as movies. This gives us eight exec but instead of adding in one exec which deals with auxiliary things it deals with the more structural issue of frontloaded responsibilities onto President and Secretary by redistributing responsibilities.
Caius: That’s a good suggestion but I feel this doesn’t really deal with the lack of creativity– someone could be good at organisation but might not be artistically gifted. When I mentioned the three responsibilities which were lacking, we can add a fourth one – that the workload of the Sec and Pres is very heavy.
Tomas: Honestly I don’t think there’s enough of a need to dedicate a specific role for being creative. The only thing we need creative people for is the poster, which is easy to make and there’ll almost always be someone who can do this on the Exec.
Caius: I suppose if there’s no one creative future Exec could always use personal connections to fill that role.
Tomas: I think with creativity and adding events, we just need to promote that we’d be happy to assist people with events better. We have the feedback form but its buried. Often this type of thing is very spontaneous and its difficult for an Exec member to know exactly what people want. It needs to be a bottom-up process as opposed to top-down, and I think this gets facilitated by having clear channels for this type of thing and promoting it further.
[Agreement to add Events Co-Ordinator role]
Handover/Aftermath
Caius: Anything else needed to be discussed?
Luke: Do we need to adjust the constitution to add the new role?
Caius: Yeah, but we can discuss that later.
When election ends, we still officially carry out our roles under the handover packs are completed.
Tomas: The way we did it in our first year wasn’t really sufficient. I think for the more in-depth handovers its something we can individually do.
[Agreement]
[End of meeting
Thanks to the fellow Exec for such a pleasant experience over the past year!
the worst of kali yuga is coming]