Leeds Atheist Society

I was reading over the Web 2.0 blogs I read and came across ShoutLife which is basically a Christian version of MySpace. They have a space for organisations to sign up so I though I would register the society . Our public profile is pretty bland at the moment but I like to think it’s amusing none the less.

It’s been a while since anything has happened given that there was little point doing things over Chrismukka with most people not being in Leeds. Now we’re back in the swing of things, the society can start rolling forward again. I’m going down to events tomorrow to sort things out for the launch party which hopefully should be sorted fairly soon.

I haven’t heard back on the state of our block bookings yet (and film making society have which is a little unnerving) not finance so I need to chase those issues up as well. Once they are in place we can start putting together a schedule for this coming semester.

The first emails have arrived in the society inbox! The honour of the first email goes to George who gave me a heads up that the site has only been up for a few weeks and is already broken . Still that issue is solved now so people can actually sign up to the mailing list once again. And indeed a few people have. Not many but given I haven’t really driven into promotion mode yet I think it’s a good sign that the site isn’t a ghost town.

Speaking of not being a ghost town, that last line got me thinking about traffic so I checked the web stats for the site and while visitors are not in the mega numbers we are getting traffic from the search engines for people searching for the society. It’s all kicking off!

The second email I got was from someone named Kate who claimed to be from the ITV. I am always really suspicious of this type of communication but the email seems to originate from an ITV mail server. I’m worried my phone has died again though as it wasn’t making any sound when I tried to phone them. But yeah, it’s all very exciting. I mean, how did they hear about us already? Seriously the promotion so far has been one poster in the union.

I went to the first faith and cultural societies assembly today. Attendance was a little better than expected with about 12-15 of us there (compared to the 8 last time according to Craig and 2 at the last general interest assembly according to Jess) and I picked up some interesting tips about the funding forms and such so it’s all good. I’ve also done the block bookings form and we have put together a budget too which is all ready to submit tomorrow.

Tomorrow we have our first societies assembly. They have them grouped into various different assemblies, ours being the faith and cultural one. I have lots of issues to raise and we need to get our block booking and finance forms sorted. I’m interested to see just how bad the turnout is, all societies are supposed to send a representative but apparently about 20% of societies turn out.

I just got an email informing me that the society would be eligable to apply for funding in January which is great news as I thought we were going to have to wait until next September to be able to get union funding. This now presents the question of what we should apply for funding for. Apparently they wouldn

It’s official! Well actually it’s not. But I am reliably informed that we were approved at the societies assembly at Tuesday and are now a ratified society of the union. Go us!

Ok so here is what is going on. I’ve just been to speak to Jess (the societies officer for those not clear on that) who says that the petition goes to the Societies Exec rather than the Union Council and the next meeting for that is Tuesday so it will be considered then and they will be in contact on Wednesday to give me the decision.

This afternoon I went into the Exec office at the union and dumped the form on Jess’s desk. Hopefully everything is go for consideration at the next Union Council meeting. She wasn’t there at the time though so I’ll probably go back in tomorrow to check everything is good. One step closer though.

Things are happening. We now have a constitution and have finalised the aims and objectives and such so I am planning to sort everything out and go talk to Jess today. Hopefully it should be all sorted in time for the deadline to submit to the next Union Council meeting and get the society ratified.