A society for atheists, rationalists, secularists and humanists
Yesterday was our 2008 AGM and as a result we have a new committee. Congratulations to everyone who got elected, details will be posted on the website soon.
Our new executive committee is composed of Norman as president, Nicola as secretary and Charlie as treasurer.
I was going to blog live from the societies fair in the Riley Smith Hall today but we got a bit busy so I didn't have chance.
Unlike previous years, this year each society only gets one day in the Riley Smith Hall and Tuesday was the day for faith and culture which includes us.
Having got to bed just before 4am, I've now been up since 7:30am this morning (well technically, yesterday morning now) to get everything ready. So as you can imagine, I'm rather tired now :p.
The day didn't go too badly, we got quite good conversation rates in terms of signing up paid members rather than just mailing list subscriptions but perhaps that is due to the lack of people who joined the mailing list ;). We talked to a lot of people though so I'm hoping for a good turn out at our intro meeting next Tuesday.
If you missed us today, don't worry, you can come down and talk to us (and sign up too!) at the intro meeting. See the events page for details on that.
Congratulations to Norm for being elected secretary and Sarann for being elected social secretary!
Next year we will hopefully be able to do a whole lot more than we have this year (not that our schedule wasn't packed this year!) so be prepared for a kick-ass first semester in September.
On Saturday I discovered that there was a societies fair running today and tomorrow. Without any chance to sort anything out given nobody would be around over the weekend and I was working both days anyway it presented somewhat of a tricky situation. Luckily, thanks to me just randomly turning up we managed to get a table and promoting the society.
I say randomly, some planning went into it. I went to all the effort of buying some canes on Sunday and transporting them over to uni Sunday night (technically Monday morning) only to find when I got there that canes were being provided. After getting a little under four hours sleep I set forth and arrived in time to grab a table next to Mr. O'Shea's recently formed Jazz & Blues Society.
We got some quite good interest in the society. Nothing major but a handful of mailing list sign-ups and some paid members too which is good as I wasn’t really expecting much, it was more about making sure we were there and letting people know that we now actually existed. I've also set up a meeting with the faith and cultures development rep which should be interesting.
We will be back down at the societies fair tomorrow from 10am-4pm if anyone wants to come down and have a chat with us. Don't forget that it's the launch party in the evening too - it's going to be a long day :D.
It's hard to believe it's only three days until the launch party. As ever we are rushing round at the last minute trying to organise things (sign of not being as well prepared as possible but don't pretend you would be any more prepared :p). We've started to heavily promote it though so hopefully we should get a decent enough turn out. Make sure you're there!
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 :D . 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.
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’t fund things like food for events but I started brainstorming what would cost us money based on our plans and my initial shortlist is as follows.
I don’t know what of this the union will pay for or what the union will say, “buy that yourselfs you lazy hippies!” but I listed everything I thought might be a possibility.
* Hiring venues
* Possibly paying for guest speakers
* Printing, signs, etc
* Transport to events
* Committee hoodies, t-shirts, etc
* Membership cards
Any suggestions are welcome.
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.