BCRA > Special Interest Groups > CREG > AGM >Agenda

Agenda for 2007 AGM

1. Appointment of a chairman and a recorder for the meeting
    
2. Apologies for absence
    
3. Establishment of quorum and procedural matters
   A quorum of four members of CREG is required. To vote at this meeting, or to be counted in the quorum, you must provide sufficient proof - e.g. membership card - of your individual membership of BCA (DIM or CIM categories). Note: If you pay a fee to receive the CREG journal, this classes you as a 'subscriber'. You are only a 'member' of the Group if you are an individual member of BCA. Only members of CREG may vote at the AGM although all are welcome to participate.
    
4. Reports
   Brief written reports from chairman, treasurer, membership secretary, journal editor, equipment officer, enquiries officer, bibliographer, web site editor; and discussion of any topics that arise. The meeting needs to vote on the acceptance of the treasurer's report.
    
5. Election of Committee
   i) In accordance with the Constitution, prior to the election of officers, the meeting must vote on the size and composition of the committee for the coming year. The CREG committee has made no recommendation, this year on the size of the committee.
   ii) Election of committee members. Note... 1. Richard Rushton has announced that he wishes to step down from the committee. 2. David Gibson has informed the committee that he wishes to stand for re-election as treasurer, and for the additional post of secretary, which is vacant; but he has received no nomination for either post. 3. None of the other existing committee members (Chris Trayner, Rob Gill, Steve Laugher) have yet announced their intentions nor sought nomination for re-election. 4. In view of the absence of any properly-constituted nominations for election to the committee, the AGM may, of necessity, have to take nominations for committee posts from the floor.
    
6. Any other business accepted by the chairman
    
7. Suggested date and venue for 2008 AGM
    

Reports

Chairman

Richard Rushton writes...

This last year we are well on the way to publishing four journals, which is our aim for each year. Although the publication dates are a little erratic, the quality is certainly very high and I congratulate Rob Gill and his team on maintaining the high standards we have come to expect.

Earlier this year CREG members helped to organise the BCRA Cave Technology Symposium, which also offered the opportunity to interface with the Cave Surveying Group. It is noticeable that quite a few current electronics projects are aimed at making surveying quicker and more accurate. Hopefully this cross-group interest will continue and will lead to more projects and to more journal articles of interest to our members.

We presented the 2006 CREG award to Graham Naylor for his innovative work in digital radio design and his novel method of SSB generation (see Caving Awards). The CREG award is a valuable way of recognising good quality and ground-breaking work being carried out in our sphere.

The past couple of years, since my last report, have seen some large changes within the group. Overall volunteer-levels are very low at the moment, with a substantial proportion of the CREG activities being carried out by only a few people. We have implemented some new measures to make it easier for people to be involved. These include having committee meetings in cyberspace i.e. Windows Messenger. This has been reasonably successful, especially as it allows more direct contributions from our more distant committee members. However, the limited volunteer pool is still shrinking and so some further changes in the way the group is run and in the activities it pursues will inevitably have to follow.

Unfortunately, for personal reasons, I have resigned as both the CREG chairman and from the CREG committee. A forced change of job with a much longer commute and my general reduction in caving and electronics as hobbies have led me to the conclusion that I cannot contribute as much as I would like to the next phase of the Group's existenc. However, I am still an eager subscriber to the Journal and will continue to look forward to reading about the new work being carried out in the caving and electronics world.

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Treasurer

David Gibson writes...

Please see treasurer_report_2006-7_v1-AGM.pdf (43K)

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Membership Secretary

Rob Gill writes...

This report will be given verbally at the AGM and added to the minutes.

David Gibson writes...

As an indication of the Group's activity; from my Treasurer's file I can give the following SmartStamp breakdown for the postage of journal 66.

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Journal Editor

Rob Gill writes...

This report will be given verbally at the AGM and added to the minutes.

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Equipment Officer

John Hey continues in the non-committee post of equipment officer, maintaining and repairing CREG's stock of HeyPhones and Pease beacons. The majority of this equipment is currently stored at Richard Rushton's house, as noted on the inventory in the accounts. DG

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Enquiries officer

John Rabson continues in the non-committee post of 'creg contact', providing an initial point of contact for all enquiries. John has also been acting as a 'commissioning editor' for the journal although john's recent ill-health has lead to his needing to reduce this role. DG

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Bibliographer

Chris Trayner writes...

The post of Bibliographer traditionally includes (merely for practical convenience) the task of posting the CREG Journal whenever it is printed, plus handling orders for back issues.

The Bibliography of Underground Communications has been on hold for several years now. There have always been higher priority tasks than updating it, though I still intend to do so some day. More recently, David Gibson's online index to CREGJ articles has removed some of the urgency.

Posting of the Journal every time it is published runs smoothly. Our printers, KallKwik in Bradford, deliver the print run to my house without charge, a great help. The software mechanism to produce address labels, renewal inserts and so on has changed completely. The old one was written originally by Bill Purvis, with modifications by myself, and has served us well for many years. David Gibson has produced a new mechanism based on the Royal Mail's SmartStamp facility, whereby he prints address labels with what constitutes a stamp. This runs very smoothly and saves me significant time. The transistion from the old to the new mechanism went without hitch, thanks to careful preparation by David.

I continue to maintain stocks of back issues and to post them when required. The Committee have been discussing for about ten years whether to run down paper stocks and move to a print-on-demand, and keeping an eye on the scene. We have now started to implement this. We are not re-printing out-of-print issues, at least not in the sense of taking them to a printer. Rob Gill has scanned as PDFs many of the issues (those now out of print) and I print them on a laser printer as needed. Of the un-scanned back issues, the more recent ones can be turned into PDF from the Word files; the others will be scanned in due course.

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Web Site Editor

David Gibson writes...

A couple of years ago, the CREG web site was re-written and migrated across to BCRA's web pages. The URL creg.org.uk now redirects to bcra.org.uk/creg and the URL heyphone.org.uk redirects to bcra.org.uk/creg/heyphone. The domain heyphone.org has been allowed to expire. The HeyPhone section of the CREG web site has been marked as "no longer maintained". A dedicated password allows FTP access to be restricted to CREG's pages, to allow them to be updated separately to BCRA's main pages. Similar restricted access has been arranged for bcra.org.uk/csg, which was migrated from Andrew Brooks' site at about the same time as the CREG pages. The domain creg.org.uk was registered on 3 Sept 2005 and is renewed until 3 Sept 2009. The domain heyphone.org.uk was registered on 17 Dec 2005 and is (at the time of writing) renewed till 17 Dec 2007 although, by the time of the AGM it is expected to be renewed till 17 Dec 2009. The domain bcra.org.uk was registered on 11 Apr 1999 and is renewed till 11 Apr 2009.

The main CREG web site currently attracts little interest from any CREG person wishing to maintain it. David Gibson provides minimal maintenance, but this does include the journal bibliography pages, which are maintained via a set of PHP scripts and a database. This saves quite a bit of tedious messing about: when a new journal issue is published the only files to be uploaded are 1) a text file listing the contents in a prescribed format (e.g. j67.html) and 2) an image of the front cover (e.g. j67.jpg). All the work of presenting the data in a formatted list, announcing that an issue has been published etc, which you can read on the journal home page, is generated automatically by the scripts.

A HeyPhone discussion forum has been created on the BCA web site, see british-caving.org.uk/phpbb2. This is expected to be the vehicle for anouncements now that the HeyPhone site is no longer actively maintained.

As a footnote to Chris's report, we do eventually, plan to put PDFs of past articles on the web site. The preparatory work for this is being done by David Gibson, initially in preparation for the online version of Cave & Karst Science. Once the C&KS pages are running, the same software will be used on the CREG site to provide PDFs of articles.

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