Minutes of the Board Meeting of the Greater Phoenix Orienteering Club (GPHXO) Location: Boulders On Broadway, Tempe, AZ Date/Time: Jan. 9, 2016 5-6PM Participants: Glenn Haselfeld, Forest Brown, Sheryl Berling-Wolff, Charles Wolff, Jill Kyle, Erik Ringnes, Derrick Beracy, Gary Hickey, Ron Birks Agenda: - Review Slides for General Meeting - Discuss proposed By-Law changes - Discuss election process - Other Topics, as time permits Minutes: Note: in the following, the term "agreed" means unanimous approval by all Board members present. Note: the entire Board was present, as were all the Volunteer Officers. We quickly reviewed the presentation for the General Meeting. - The agenda for the Gen Mtg was agreed upon. The slide content was also agreed, with no changes necessary. A pre-review meeting was recently held, and Glenn had already updated the slides accordingly. We discussed By-Law changes. - The Board agreed we should remove the requirement for monthly Board meetings from Article 6.1. The Board will call meetings on an as-needed basis. - Agreed to replace "USOF" with "OUSA" throughout (e.g., 11.1 and 11.2). OUSA is the current name of the national organization. - The Order of Business for Gen Mtgs listed in Article 4.3 will become a guideline instead of a mandatory list. - Gary asked what the item called "Program" refers to. It refers to time alloted for Guest Speakers and Special Presentations. - We agreed there are additional changes needed which will require more time to discuss. We will have to address them later. - Sheryl will look for the source document: the copy posted on our website is not editable. We discussed some Other Topics that were suggested in emails leading up to the meeting. - Newsletter: Should we stop sending hardcopy newsletter? There are a few members that have no email address. Charles does not mind sending hardcopies for now. We agreed that Charles will continue to support those members until they elect electronic distribution, or until such time as Charles decides to stop sending hardcopy. And, going forward we will not accept new hardcopy subscriptions (applies to new memberships and renewals). Eventually there will be no more hardcopy newsletters sent out. - Membership. Sheryl reported. We currently have 56 members reported to the OUSA. This includes non-paid members, of which we do have quite a few. And in this count, each family gets counted as 2 members. Sheryl has the latest list of members. The lists sent out Feb 2015 and Dec 2014 are out of date, they show 83 and 100 names, respectively. - Treasury. Forest researched moving the club's bank account to another bank. Our current bank only has three branches, they are not well-located and Pay Pal is not supported. Moving the account requires the presence of the Secretary and Treasurer at the bank. It was agreed to move the account. Gary and Forest will do it. We will set up a PayPal account at the new bank. We discussed the Election of Officers and the Election Process. - The By-Laws currently require our election process to hold a vote, even if the position is uncontested. We want to streamline this process. Derrick brought to our attention the Acclamation method this week. Many organizations use it. Basically, for a non-contested election (where there is only one nominee), an organization can skip the voting process and elect the officer via a motion which acclaims the person has won the office. We agreed to use this method in today's election, if indeed nobody else is nominated for office. It is our intent to recommended a change to By-Laws Article 12 to add the Acclamation method as an available election method, and temporarily adopted this change now, then actually change Article 12 later in the year. We recommended/nominated one person for each of the four offices, as follows: President: Ron Birks, Vice-President: Glenn Haselfeld, Treasurer: Forest Brown, Secretary: Gary Hickey A document was written which lists these recommendations/nominations and solicits further nominations for each office. This document will be presented in the Gen Mtg, and the membership will have a chance to nominate other candidates. Additional Other Topics: - Forest suggested we have the General Meeting every January. Agreed. - Forest wants to set a budget for Facebook advertising. It costs $1 a day to "boost" it, which we would do for a 2-week period before an event. - Glenn suggested a cash mileage reimbursement for volunteers. Discussed how much it should be. We don't want to give the full government rate (over 50 cents a mile), but it can't be too low either or it could end up being a disincentive. - Should we hold a B-meet (now called a "Club Meet")? It must be done properly, and to do that, we would need more volunteers, maybe a 10-person team to do it right. We did not discuss this much. It would be nice to have electronic timing for a Club Meet but it is not absolutely required. - Forest has ideas on improving mentoring for course setters. One good way is to leave a few bags out after a meet and take somebody with you when you go collect them later. Forest will do this for the First Water event Jan 10, 2016. - We agreed we need to talk about getting a backup for Charles on the Newsletter. Did not discuss it further than that. - We talked a bit about how to implement the Member Database better. Ideally, the Newsletter creation tools could access the database when generating, addressing and emailing the newsletter. Forest researched the use of Meetup. It seems it can support what we need. For example, we can use Meetup to create a member database, track payments and member status, etc. Meetup Administrators get a different view than the General Membership. Still some more details to figure out, so he will keep working this. - Gary suggested we need to schedule a follow-up Board Meeting for Feb/March, certainly no later than mid-summer, because there are many topics we cannot resolve in one day. There was not much enthusiasm for this idea. Board members will consider the idea and we may schedule another meeting this year. Forest suggested, and all agreed, that we should get all topics worked and resolved beforehand (via email, phone etc) so this second meeting can be very efficient and topics can be closed out then. These Minutes submitted for approval to the Board by Gary Hickey, Secretary, GPHXO.