Twelve members and two guests attended via Zoom teleconference.
Committee Chair Reports:
Secretary: Maude Svensson reviewed February’s Board Meeting Minutes.
Treasurer: Bruce Schaefer presented the revised SSCC Budget Projections for the current club year. He forecast a $1,243 surplus by the end of June, which would imply a $6,002 carryover balance to next club year.
Due to present uncertainties in the club’s planned activities caused by the effects of the Corona virus, the forecast may change. Honoraria will still be paid for judges and speakers, who will be contracted to lead Zoom meetings. Depending on how, where, and if the Year-End Awards Celebration will take place, there will be implications for the budget’s income as well as expenditure sides. Moreover, it is hard to forecast April and May income from new members’ dues. (Last year five new members joined in April-May).
The total number of members is now 97, including 25 new members who have joined since the start of the club year last September. There was an extensive discussion about the amount and rules for new members’ fees after January 31. Marc Auerbach will check to ensure that member application forms and the club website are transparent and contain the same information. Bruce will re-check and ensure that the actual payments from new members correspond with the records and SSCC Budget Projections.
Bruce is to send Catherine the computerized check ledger and update the previous months from the prior bank account for the next audit.
The George DeBuchanne Community Service Fund has a balance of $489 after executing two projects within the “Wider Circle” and “Shepherd’s Table” (amounting to $291).
Other Reports:
Programming: Due to Passover, April 9 Competition Night is postponed to April 16. The Speaker’s Night on April 2 and the Competition Night will take place via Zoom. Renee Schaefer and Karen Finkelman have discussed this with the speaker and judge who have both agreed. David Terao will provide the call in number for Zoom events. He will schedule and setup the Speaker’s Night, and David Blass will do the same for the Competition Night. Catherine Honigsberg will send out invitations to all members for both evenings. David Powell will lead the Closer Focus Night on April 23. Renee and Karen will discuss with May month’s speaker and judge as soon as there is more information and experience of the current situation.
Cable Release: Sherm Edwards is about to finalize the April issue of the Cable Release. Dennis Freeman shared the results from last month’s survey of CR contents. Seven board members had submitted their votes on what they found to be “essential”, “nice to have”, and “not necessary” for the contents. Among these 7 members there was consensus on essential contents being the Club Calendar, Meetings and Field Trips, Competition Results, and Board Meetings. Sherm initiated a discussion about complementing the survey with a simple system for feed-back from all readers. Sherm is confident that WordPress can still be used. Dennis will look into a plug in for thumbs up to vote. Catherine will look into the Blue Host analytics.
Field Trips: All field trips are currently cancelled.
Website, Meetup, Facebook, Twitter: Up and running. See also below on “Club taking ownership of Meet-up.”
Nominations and Elections Committee: Bruce pointed out that a review of membership applications might be helpful in order to explore new members’ interest in different tasks within the club.
Competition: The Competition Night on April 16 will replace the cancelled Competition Night in March. The judge is the same, Joel Hoffman; and the theme is the same, open. David Terao will be hosting the Zoom event and David Blass will be running the computer. There will only be digital submissions. Each member can submit two digital images and these need to enter one week in advance. Members that sent in digital submissions for the cancelled March event cannot submit more images since their March submissions will be automatically transferred to the April competition.
The Year-End Competition will take place – if it is not physically possible, it will be a Zoom event. Different solutions exist to deal with digital submissions, but less so with prints, points, and awards. Renee will contact David Blass and Larry Gold to talk about last year’s year-end judging of digital images. At the April board meeting, we will have more information and further experience as a foundation for better decisions.
Membership: Marc and Lisa Auerbach will go through the new members’ application forms and compare them with the club website to check for eventual inconsistencies.
PSA: Pete Morton informed us that the annual PSA conference is still planned to take place in Colorado Springs during September 29 – October 3. But the situation is uncertain, and it might not be possible to go ahead with the conference. For that reason, the registration which starts on April 1 will not require any pre-payments.
Other Topics:
Year End Task Breakdowns: Catherine discussed the possibility that the Year-End Celebrations might not take place physically as planned. As we will gradually learn more to assess the situation, we will take decisions on what to do in due course. We decided not to ask for door prizes.
Letter for Speaker Criteria: Catherine will report back on a Speakers’ Letter that specifies the club’s technical facilities, practical details and expectations.
Should we limit Zoom invites to members only because of the 100 limit or include Meetup and be first come first served? The Zoom subscription limits meeting participants to 100. SSCC currently has 97 members. According to David Terao’s estimate based on another MPA club’s Zoom meeting, 53 SSCC members are expected to attend the Zoom meeting. However, Michael Koren noted that there are 603 members in the Meetup group that will also be invited. Even though only 20 are active, it is difficult to estimate how many Meetup members will actually attend. David proposed participants join the meeting on a “first-come, first-served” basis. In order to ensure that SSCC members will not be locked out if the limit is reached, David proposed to open the Zoom session 30 minutes before the meeting start time, and notify SSCC members to join the meeting as early as possible to ensure they have a seat.
Talk about making decisions and acting without the board voting: Catherine underlined the importance of keeping all board members informed in order to ensure that everybody is treated equally.
Club taking ownership of Meetup: The SSCC will now pay for our own Meetup group membership and Michael Koren has graciously agreed to still be the organizer.
MPA and Zoom: David Terao helped develop Zoom training procedures for another MPA club and is prepared to conduct Zoom training for SSCC members. On Sunday 29 March he could do two separate training sessions at 1PM and 7PM. He would prefer each session to go through the basics first and then open up for questions. He is also prepared to do one more training session if there is demand. An invitation will be sent out to all members.
See also under “Should we limit Zoom invites to members only because of the 100 limit or include Meetup and be first come first served?”
Judge Survey by Pete: Pete has drafted evaluation forms that would be available for members to fill out at Competition Night. These forms now need to be adapted to events via Zoom. There was brainstorming and a wide discussion on how to go ahead. Lisa Auerbach volunteered to find out how our account on Survey Monkey could be used for evaluating the judges. Pete would share a copy of his questionnaire with Lisa.
Action Items from last meeting: All action items with a stop date have been performed. Year-End Event Tasks will be specified further when we have gained more information.