CAGG committee, 2014-10-11
Minutes

Minutes of a CAGG committee meeting held at Trembraze on 2014-10-11. Readership is CAGG members.


Present: 
Peter Jackson
Calum Beeson
Pat Fitzsimmons
Tina Hitchings
Brigitte Mann

The meeting was chaired by Pat Fitzsimmons.

Previous minutes

Minutes of the meeting on 2014-05-30 were reviewed and matters arising discussed.

We haven't actioned all the possible speakers suggested at the previous meeting.

Online presence

PNJ hasn't yet produced the schedule page.

Kevin maintains a Facebook page for the organisation and this is a potentially valuable channel for reaching some parts of the community.

A web designer based at Holsworthy called Alison Rowan has contacted us with an offer of doing some work for our online presence. It is unclear what this offer entails.

Our options for web presence are:

In both cases there are requirements for commitment to maintaining publicity.

Brigitte sends CAGG material to a Twitter feed.

Calum said that staff at the Camborne School of Mines had been impressed by what we've seen on our field meetings and that there could be value in publishing more from that material, especially as this represents a membership that can be quite distinct from that which attends the monthly talks.

Action: Calum and PNJ to discuss options with Alison.

Affiliations

Calum reported that the two possible organisations for affiliation mentioned last time have proved to be unsuitable. However, it may be worth connecting with the Ussher Society for cross linking publicity. In their latest publication, half of the articles had been written by staff of the Camborne School of Mines.

Insurance for field meetings remains a concern and requires further investigation. This will be included in the agenda for the next committee meeting.

Chair

Our Chair role only has the responsibility of running committee meetings. Our public meetings are run collectively by committee members present.

Some other organisations have a flexible chair role. The Chair for the next committee meeting is decided at the one previous. Once nominated, the Chair becomes responsible for operational decisions and communications focus between committee meetings and the construction of the next committee meeting agenda.

It was agreed that we will operate on this basis in the future and we will write that into the constitution.

Action: Tina to communicate this to Helen, with thanks for her work so far and encouragement to remain part of the committee.

Previous events

Membership has increased from 30 to 34 members and one Junior. Attendance is down slightly (12 at the last meeting). At the field meetings there were 4 at Praa Sands and 10-12 at Kingsand.

The Long Room has proved appropriate for our monthly talks and its hire is covered by the monies taken from the attendees.

We don't think the Field Meeting numbers are problematic.

Treasurer's report

We have £570.88 in the bank and some equipment still to sell. This stock has already been paid for by existing sales. Calum said that he could sell some stock to his students, some of whom may come to field meetings in the future.

Programme and speakers

We need a 3-month rolling programme plan so that it can be adequately publicised in advance. It will be important to have a programme available for people to see when the next round of membership fees are due. We also need to engage more outside speakers (The asbestos talk was well received).

Possible speakers mentioned were:

We generate about £20 profit per session, so we don't have much scope for paying (say) £100 for a speaker.

Calum aims to be doing about 50% of the talks, which means we need to arrange about 3 external speakers for the next 6 months.

When contacting organisations for possible speakers it is important to go through the correct channels. It can be hard to know what these are, so a 'phone call is more likely to result in useful guidance. Many organisations have a policy of discarding electronic communications which aren't directed to the appropriate contacts.

We discussed reducing the workload by alternating talks and field meetings. We decided against this because of the small overlap of attendees for each type of event.

The next talk will be called "Diamonds and the deep Earth", which will cover the results of very recent research. It is important to publicise the Carnglaze Cavern event on 2014-11-21 soon. The title for this will be "The fascinating geology of crystals".

Plan for 2014-11-21

Calum proposed and it was agreed that funds from this meeting will be in aid of the "Reading the Hurlers" project. If that project stalls, CAGG will hold the funds until it resumes. It was also agreed to donate £100 to Carnglaze Caverns.

This project follows on from findings from the "Mapping the Sun" project to do with analysis of the granite in various parts of the Hurlers. The most interesting of these is that the stones from the central and northern circles appear to be from different granite sites. In the new project, we intend to do deeper analysis of the granites by photographing 10cm squares and analysing 6 factors about each crystal in the image. From this we end up with 11 different attributes of the granite formation, which we believe is enough to identify its point of origin to within 100m. We will also survey roughly 10 km2 of the surrounding area to find the rocks that match the stones in the circles. Another part of the project will involve excavating the fourth circle, which has never been done before. We have full permissions to do that.

We hope that the project will demonstrate the viability of the method, which can then be applied at many more sites.

The U3A will be the host funding organisation for the project, which will be a "shared learning project".

There will be no admission charge for this event, but there will be voluntary contributions (known to often raise more funds than a fixed fee would have done), a raffle, table sales and an auction of more expensive items.

The raffle will be for a painting of the Hurlers by Gary Cooper. Pat has also had cards made to sell. We hope that one of the items to be auctioned will be a petrological microscope and training in its use (these cost about £6000 new).

A subheading to publicise Reading the Hurlers might be "The Hurlers have a story to tell and now is the time to read it".

Future meetings

The November field meeting should be close to the Liskeard area, perhaps in a quarry. The December one may be Crackington Haven.

Publicity and timing

For effective publicity, Brigitte requires a minimum of 3 weeks notice, preferably 4 weeks.

We discussed how to publish notes from field meetings. PNJ's notes have a place but are possibly too technical to attract the amateur audience. Perhaps at each meeting we can nominate someone to submit a short trip report for publicity. For example, "at Praa Sands we observed how the granite was intruded into the older rocks, which is something we don't see in the Caradon Hill area".

AGM

Our constitution is not yet ratified. This is not an urgent practical need, but is desirable in the long term because it is sometimes scrutinised by funding providers and insurers. It also gives us a clear framework of operation.

There are a number of changes to the constitution that we need to make, for example, to reduce the quorum to 4 and document the roles in accordance with actuality.

Action: PNJ to update the constitution for discussion early in 2015.

Next meeting

At Trembraze at 2015-01-10-16:00, to be chaired by Pat.

Updates

This document is maintained by the CAGG. Comments should be addressed to CAGG_secretary at caradon dot org dot uk.
  1. PNJ, 2014-10-11. Notes made at the meeting.
  2. PNJ, 2014-10-22. Transcribed for publication.
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