[plug] AGM Round up 2012

[James Bromberger]

Hello all,

A big thank you to all who turned up last night for the PLUG AGM, and
the ten or so people who watched live on line.

While Peter is to preparing the formal minutes of the AGM, I thought I'd
bring you up to speed with my take on the evening.

First up, we didn't get the required number of members to be able to
proceed with the AGM, so indeed what we have is a meeting that will be
followed with an additional meeting next week at the same time ad venue,
and  should we again not have thirty people, the committee can wait 30
minutes and then proceed. This follow up meeting is somewhat of a
formality; it's what happened last years (2011), and we moved and
accepted all votes and elections from the 'main' meeting.

Our venue last night was our first meeting at City West Lotteries House,
and it was a great facility for us. A large space, clean, ground floor,
exterior access, plenty of parking, train station 20 metres away,
centrally located, Internet access... for $90 for the evening (through
last nights was complimentary in lieu of the $181 joining fee as an
affiliate member of Lotteries House). The general consensus from the
meeting was that we should stick here for future meetings. They have
smaller rooms available - and I returned today to inspect them; they are
definitely smaller, probably catering for around 10 -15 people, and no
wired internet access (wifi MAY reach that far, probably not...).

A/V crew had one PC fail on the night so there was no clear capture of
slides for the evening, hopefully this was somewhat visible from one of
the cameras we had functioning. We will get video available in the next
few days hopefully. Latest update (yesterday) on the Lotteries Grant for
the A/V project is that it's going to the Board for approval on Feb 9,
and then off to the Premier for his signature; then we can go shopping.
Well done to Craig and Euan for getting this production done - more
volunteers needed!

I gave an overview of the membership level, up from 22 in January 2011
to 76 in December2011. We covered the events we've had (Quiz Night, PLUG
Social meetings at The Moon & Six Pence, Workshop, BBQ, etc), the
services we've offered through or generous supporting sponsors for co-lo
space and bandwidth, and of course thanked all who gave a presentation
this year, organised an event, or just paid their membership fees!

Thanks to Jason for his Acting Treasurers report; as shown in the
presentation we ended the year down slightly on last years revenue at
around $400 down - but if you exclude our one off investment of around
$1500 on the A/V project, we're looking pretty good (some of these funds
are still earmarked for bringing another speaker from interstate).

Next up, the elections. Jason Nichols has decided to not stand for
re-election this year, so he was nominated as returning officer. Here's
the results:

  * President: James Bromberger
  * Vice President: Euan de Kock
  * Treasurer: Nick Bannon
  * Secretary: Peter Lyons
  * OCMs: Alastair Irvine, Craig Inches, and Luke John


Our thanks goes to Mark, Jason, Daniel, Tim and Patrick for their time
on the Committee in 2011 (and previously).

These results are technically /provisional /based upon the need for
"special measures" to adopt these results formally, and then submit them
to Fair Trading.

The proposed constitution was also unanimously (again, /provisionally/)
approved; after the "special measures" meeting this too must be
presented to Fair Trading for their approval; after which some of the
bigger points that people would like to tackle in the constitution can
be reviewed. Our thanks to Alastair and Peter for this work here.

We had a lot of good ideas floating around at the conclusion of the AGM,
and hopefully people will be able to bring a few of thee ideas to
fruition. One surprising input (to me) was the feedback that our
membership fee is still way too low at $20/year full ($10/year conc).
I'd tend to agree, but the membership can discuss this with review
leading up to the June/July time if we want to change this again. I
believe now we have enough revenue (if we can sustain  the 76 members we
have) to continue to use City West Lotteries house and cover our other
expenses; but it's up to everyone on list to try to help keep the drive
and enthusiasm going, and keep membership growing.

Last night's venue was organised by Luke John (who joins committee for
2012) - thank you for the leg work in getting this sorted.

The next committee meeting will be an on-line meeting on using mumble on
mumble.plug.org.au, at this stage set for Monday 23rd January at 7:30pm.
Generally everyone is welcome to attend and listen or contribute.

Thank you all. Let's keep growing this and getting fabulous speakers.
Next month: Fremantle Challenger Tafe for Martin Dougiamas and Moodle.
March may be our National Broadband Network discussion/panel (if we can
get confirmation from the parties we've been talking to), and April is
looking like we'll rope Ian Kent into something about AutoFS.

  James

-- 
/Mobile:/ +61 422 166 708, /Email:/ james_AT_rcpt.to
PLUG President 2011: http://www.plug.org.au <http//www.plug.org.au>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.plug.org.au/pipermail/plug/attachments/20120111/164e1ce3/attachment.html>