CAGG committee, 2014-05-30
Minutes

Minutes of a CAGG committee meeting held at Trembraze on 2014-05-30. These were reviewed and accepted at the committee meeting on 2014-10-11. Readership is CAGG members.


Present: 
Peter Jackson
Calum Beeson
Pat Fitzsimmons
Tina Hitchings
Brigitte Mann
Helen Taverner
Apologies: 
Kevin Wright

Previous minutes

Minutes of the meetings on 2014-02-21 and 2014-03-21 were approved.

Meeting venue

Having lost the use of the hall at the Liskerrett centre, we have been considering alternative places to hold meetings. From polling the last meeting, we found that most members would prefer us to remain in Liskeard and continue to meet on the same day of the month.

From the research carried out by TH we decided to try the Long Room in the Liskeard Public Hall building in West Street. This has the advantage that we can hire the large hall in the same building for meetings where we anticipate a larger attendance than usual.

Action: TH to book the Long Room for the remainder of the year.

Further meetings

We decided to continue meeting monthly, with no August break, until December, which will have special plans.

We have an opportunity to use Carnglaze Caverns, which we would like to exercise. We could get a large sized audience for a prominent guest speaker, such as Iain Stewart, though he himself is proving hard to contact.

Nevertheless we decided to investigate using the caverns for a combined meeting/field meeting for 2014-12-06 or some nearby date. Although we've been offered free use of the cavern, we agreed it would be a worthwhile gesture to offer some reasonable payment if we run an event there.

Action: CB to investigate availability of caverns.

We thought that we should in any case earmark 2014-12-06 for some activity, even if the cavern is not available.

The next talk will be on 2014-06-20 and will be about volcanoes. The Field Meeting following will be part of the Liskeard Charter Fair on 2014-07-05.

Possible speakers to consider for the future might include:

Future Field meeting venues include Kingsand and the Valley of the Rocks.

Action: BM to contact Kevin to communicate with his daughter.

Action: PNJ to make a schedule page.

Tentatively we think we could schedule a talk on Asbestos for August and CB can do talks in July and September and continue running the field meetings.

Action: HT to contact Kingsley Rickard.

Action: CB will ask the RCGA if they have potential speakers for us.

Performance

We have 30 members plus one junior member. Maximum number of attendees at a meeting was 42. Meeting attractiveness has much to do with the wording of the title. Things involving dinosaurs or natural disasters being popular subjects. We agreed to ensure that we invent good titles in advance for BM to use in publicity.

The last meeting had four topics and was less well attended than usual [not sufficient as a data point about which to reach conclusions].

It is useful to do meeting reports for publicity. BM normally does these. TH volunteered to do it to spread the load and provide backup if BM is absent.

Accounts

We have £503.24 in the bank, £17.14 in petty cash and there is one outgoing cheque of £17.14.

We have turned over £991.50, some of which is due to the sale of equipment.

We have had no requests for expenses so far, but CB would like to charge £10 to cover his overheads for talks and field meetings.

Action: PF to make an expense claim form.

Affiliations

CB suggested two possible organisations with which we might benefit from afiliation.
Geologists’ Association
This is a national organisation. Calum has contacted them to ask about group membership, but has not yet received a reply.
Royal Geological Society of Cornwall
Calum has opened a dialogue with them. Insurance may be one benefit of this afiliation. Key members are Neil Plummer and Roger Holmes.

Web access is currently (2014-06-04) confusing: GEOLOGYCORNWALL.COM is the site referenced in the Wikipedia article about the society.

RGSC.ORG.UK looks like a work in progress, contains no meaningful information and is not a UK registered domain name.

We agreed that the latter should be followed up.

If we afiliate with an organisation we would treat members of that organisation in the same was as CAGG members in terms of meeting fees and similar considerations.

Charges outside of CAGG

CB makes saleable artefacts such as laminated cards for which he takes the money to cover his expenses. He also runs other activities that may be advertised through the CAGG but are financially independent of it.

We agreed that it is acceptable for Calum to market his services through the CAGG, with notes to make clear the distinction between these and the CAGG itself.

Roles

We should have an AGM sometime this year. Our constitution is not adopted and we might wish to modify it. A valid constitution is necessary when seeking funding or formal afiliations and for clarity when carrying out functions of the organisation.

We agreed to plan to have an AGM prior to our meeting in October. For this reason, the October talk should be an internal speaker so that timing can be flexible.

Action: PNJ to indicate examples of other constitutions for reference and to do a first-pass review of the CAGG draft constitution for others to consider.

Issues noted for consideration:

Next meeting

At Trembraze on a date to be decided after we've reviewed the constitution, probably in August.

References

Constitutions:

Updates

This document is maintained by the CAGG. Comments should be addressed to CAGG_secretary at caradon dot org dot uk.
  1. PNJ, 2014-05-30. Notes made at the meeting.
  2. PNJ, 2014-06-04. Updated for publishing.
  3. PNJ, 2014-10-21. Minutes reviewed and accepted.
Any text you see at this point onwards is the result of the style sheet used by this document being inaccessible or corrupt. The document content above is usable but probably renders less elegantly than the author intended.
Public