BGA Council Meeting 2022-09-02

Held at: ZOOM conference call

Meeting started: 19:30

Present:

• Andrew Ambrose-Thurman (AAT)
• Mohammed Amin (MA)
• Peter Rootham-Smith (PRS)
• Stephen Tweedie (ST)
• Richard Wheeldon (RW)
• Colin Williams (CW)

Absent:

• David Killen (DK)
• Dylan Carter (DC)

1) Apologies.

Toby Manning (TM) had previously tendered apologies, and RW had agreed to act as Chair for this meeting.

2) Newsletter

An anomaly with how pictures are displayed in various e-mail clients was discussed. The issue appeared to be with Outlook as a client. PR-S mentioned that it may be how the HTML is set, in that some images have width set and some have not. CW said he would investigate further.

3) Previous minutes.

The minutes of 5 July were accepted as accurate.

4) Reports

Presidents Report - The report from Toby was discussed and noted.

The need for improving our outreach efforts was discussed, and the fundamental issue of lack of an individual with outreach and marketing as a responsibility. TM to discuss this as a possibility with the two applicants for Treasurer.

It was agreed that a face to face meeting would not be appropriate until we have the new Treasurer and any new Directors in place, making January/February a better timescale. A date should be nailed down by the time of the next meeting.

Membership Secretary's Report - The report from Chris was noted. In particular the Strategy Day objective of increasing membership was currently failing, possibly due to lack of someone responsible for outreach.

Tournaments Report - The report was noted. There was some discussion around the possibility of charging a levy next year to the MindSports Association, in line with some other organisations.

It was agreed the BGA should have a formal policy on how to display Chinese names, in terms of what is the family name and the given name.

5) Printing Costs

PR-S wanted to check that should on occasion the BGJ exceed 48 pages the extra printing costs would not be an issue. The Council agreed unanimously that as this was a major benefit to members Pat Ridley should feel comfortable in incurring any additional printing costs.

6) CLG Sign-up progress

CW reported that as at the end of August we had approaching 50 members that had migrated. It was agreed that members who had not yet migrated by the next AGM should be reminded a little in advance that they would not have a vote unless they did migrate.

7) TOURMAN Support

ST explained his current priorities for the Technology Committee, and that generally this was his third priority. However, it was agreed that we had to make sure there was no impact on the operation of current tournaments.

It was agreed that ST would approach Geoff to get a walk-through of TOURMAN and the processes involved, and come up with a way forwards.

8) Outstanding Actions

Council worked through the outstanding actions on Trello and updated them as they went along.

9) AOB

Advertising collateral - we have a list of items on the website which we allegedly have, and who has them. It appears stock levels are not up to date, mainly because we do not have anyone responsible for marketing and outreach. There followed a debate on how we should control and issue this information, and whether printing should be central by the BGA or local.

There was some discussion about a photo competition, which fell into the standard problem of having someone (a marketing person) to own it.

10) Next meeting

CW to issue a Doodle for the next meeting for early November.

The meeting closed at 21:25