Agenda for May 2015 board meeting Meeting to be held at 3pm BST on Saturday 23 May 2015 at irc.starlink-irc.org #autscape Apologies: Debbie (Partial attendance), Elaine, Liz, Trish 1. Request to waive right to formal notice of meeting. 2. Ratifications 2.1 To change the fees to variant C of the options presented to the board (2 votes for C, one vote for 1), in order to reduce the workload for the programmer and as such get the booking opened sooner. [See Appendix A for summary] 3. Proposals 3.1 The vice treasurer proposes that the board accept the draft accounts forwarded to the board on May 6th. 3.2 The vice treasurer proposes that the board ammends item c) in the reserves policy to "Set the reserves upper and lower limits to GBP 2000 and GBP 5000 respectively." (See appendix B for rationale) 4. Follow Ups 4.1 Annual Report (Liz) 4.2 Opening Registration (Debbie - Sent to list) 4.3 Policy Updates (Elaine) 4.4 Personal Data Retention Policy (Martijn) 4.5 Allowances policy for out and about (Elaine) 4.6 Guidance for splitting conference from governance (Elaine) 4.7 Domain purchase (Martijn) 4.8 Purchase of Font License (Martijn) 4.9 Finance Authorisations (Stephen) 4.10 Extra Facebook Admin (Martijn) 5. Role Reports 5.1 Chair (Martijn) 5.2 Treasurer (Stephen as Vice) 5.3 Company Secretary (Elaine) 5.4 Web Systems (Martijn) 5.5 Honorary Secretary (Stephen) 5.6 Programme Coordinator (Kalen) 5.7 Venue Coordinator (Elaine) 5.8 Childcare (Elaine) 6. Subcommittee and working group reports 6.1 Fundraising (Liz) 6.2 Publicity and Publications (Martijn) 6.3 Merchandise and Purchasing (Stephen) 6.4 Newsletter 7. AOB
Closed portion of meeting (confidential; main programme decisions)
Appendix A - Summary of on-list discussion relating to 2.1 Stephen suggested that the comparitive lack of twins compared to previous years meant that Variant C would incentivise people to either go for singles or flexible bookings, Trish preferred the family discount of C. Debbie indicated that the choice was between adults having more options to share, leading to lower fees available for sharing, or one set of adult sharing fees giving the possibility of lower family fees.
Appendix B - Rationale for 3.2 The current reserves policy, as voted for in item 2.2 of the September meeting in 2012, is for Autscape to maintain general reserves between GBP 1000 and GBP 3000. The reserves policy was voted on when Autscape paid event insurance as part of the event funds, rather than general funds. Autscape now has integrated event and indemity insurance. This is relevent since we now pay for event insurance out of general, rather than event funds. The increase at the lower end, and half of the increase at the upper end, of our reserves policy, is intended to accomodate this change in where the insurance payment comes from. Additionally it is difficult to exactly predict both demand and what booking options people will go for, and the GBP 2000 window our general reserves currently provide is very easy to accidentally fall outside the bounds of what we decided our general reserves should be, especially while the conference is growing. The additional GBP 1000 increase at the upper end is intended to give the registrar and treasurer more margin of error when setting the fees. If we are at the upper end of our reserves, for example, with the extra room we could more sensibly target to decrease our reserves by more than we are able to with a GBP 2000 window. If demand is then higher than we anticipated that year, we might maintain our reserves within the window, rather than accidentally increasing our general reserves when we targetted reducing them. The proposed change is based on a suggestion from Peter.