Minutes of the committee meeting on Tuesday 3rd Week, Trinity Term 2019.

OULD Committee Meeting Agenda TT 2019

Present: President, President-elect, Treasurer, Secretary, Campaigns Officer, Communications Officer, Social Secretary, General Committee (R. Kaya at 5:06, L. Tillmanm-Morris at 5:29)

Apologies: General Committee (O. Harriman, J. Scragg)

Opens: 5:03

Closes: 6:13

Action points are in bold

President

1. Campaigns so far and overview of the next few weeks

The Campaigns Officer gives an overview of future campaigning: college delivery later today, action days in North and West Oxford this coming weekend, and the Thursday after that is polling day

The President adds that our polling day plan will be previous to past years where we stood by the central polling stations, gave out leaflets, and asked if people had voted yet

1. Appointed office ratifications

The President has received interest in some of the appointed positions but has yet to receive formal application so he will chase them up

1. Event invites

The President states we should adopt a more uniform policy on event invites and asks the Communications Officer to take charge of keeping track of that

SDs is the most important for invites, but committee should be inviting at least 10 people to other events like speakers as well

1. SD at Catz

The Communications Officer suggests dividing up the post-SDs rubbish at Catz and disposing of it in individual staircases rather than trying to use the skip

The Spirits Officer suggests we get a delivery of supplies to Catz on Tuesday in order to help exercise discretion and reduce overall noise

Regarding the various delivery services, the Spirits Officer reports that Amazon Pantry is competitively priced and has more options than Aldi, so we can use Amazon’s service and supplement with a few people doing a shop in town, the cheapest alcohol Amazon Pantry stocks is Gordon’s and Smirnoff, which cost about 40p more than the spirits we buy currently

The Communications Officer offers to store non-perishables from a large delivery in her locker

In response to the President’s request for a cost estimate, the Spirits Officer reckons it could be the same cost if you order enough to get free delivery (the threshold for which is any order over £90)

The Treasurer voices concern that this will make us unable to edit the shop from week to week, and the Spirits Officer states this is why we’d have a few people on duty to shop in town

The Treasurer recommends we work with a conservative estimate of about 50 as this will be our first week at Catz

The Spirits Officer will work on compiling an order to get a price estimate - potentially for this week

The President-elect states he will consider the possibility of deliveries if we move back to a more central college in the future

1. Oxford Entrepreneurs

The President reports on his meeting with the Oxford Entrepreneurs sponsorship officer who informed him that they would be interested in holding a joint social with OULD, likely along the lines of something casual like drinks or possibly a panel or workshop

They mainly seem interested in a joint social in order to rise their profile – we might give it a mention in one of our weekly emails

The President is to liaise with the Social Secretary on this further

To a question posed by the Treasurer about what overlap we might have with them, the Spirits Officer suggests something in our policies on small businesses

1. in camera discussion

President-elect (Olly Besley)

1. General discussion on Comms and IT for next term such as too many emails, which social media use is effective, blog/journal/use of social media, value of a standard termcard/website model

The President-elect notes that we currently have an email for each senior officer, which isn’t very functional, and recommends that a system with one OULD email and one alumni email might be preferable

The President-elect also questions of Twitter live tweets are time well spent for Comms Officers and that the tweets could potentially be taken out of context

The Treasurer and the Secretary both state that a system with people requesting specific tweets to be taken down has worked well in the past

Regarding the blog, the President-elect argues that converting it to a published set of essays like OULC does might be preferable as topical student-produced content is easily published through outlets like Cherwell and Oxstu, both of which get a wider circulation than our blog

The President agrees that the blog is not being used well in its present form, particularly because content is not being uploaded in a timely manner, and agrees that a collection of articles is worth looking into but will have to be done, if at all, next term

The Treasurer voices concern that changing to a published set of essays will remove our ability to write on topical issues, to which the President-elect argues it will be better off in the student press anyways as it reached more people, but he is open to suggestions on this topic

The President-elect questions the utility of printed termcards seeing how much our schedules change over the course of a term and considering that most people learn about our events through Facebook

The President notes that physical termcards are very useful for Fresher’s Fair and are useful as a hard record of the society’s history

The Treasurer points out that physical termcards could easily be dropped if money is tight, but currently we do have enough funds to put towards them

Treasurer (Shreyus Ganesh)

1. Agreeing to open a Metrobank account

The President moves for a vote of agreement on opening an account with Metrobank

The motion passes unanimously

1. Key officials of the society

The key members of the committee are to sign a hard copy of these minutes

1. Controllers of the account

The President moves to ratify the President, who changes by election once a term, and Treasurer, who changes by election once every two terms, as controllers of the account

The motion passes unanimously

1. Signing rules

The President moves to vote to make the account one to sign

The motion passes unanimously

Secretary (Lauren Evans)

1. Weekly email check

Spirits Officer (Ben Harris)

1. General points on running SD

The Spirits Officer notes that there was a 3-way tie in the motion vote this week so announces we will drop the equality v. freedom motion as it has been covered more recently at a prior SD

The Spirits Officer also welcomes suggestions on non-alcoholic beverages such as bottled water and smoothies

As was discussed at the prior committee meeting, there are plans to invest in reusable plastic cups, which R. Kaya (General Committee) agrees to wash and store at Catz each week, and the Spirits Officer might reach out to J. Scragg regarding where to purchase said cups from

Campaigns Officer (Ben Phillips)

No formal business

Communications Officer (Hannah Kidner)

1. Slack

Several committee members note having experienced issues with Slack not providing timely notifications and how creating event-specific channels often leads to losing potentially valuable input from the rest of committee

The President and the Communications Officer agree that creating more threads rather than channels is a better way to use Slack

Social Secretary (Joseph Hayat)

1. FIXR

The Social Secretary reports that some members have reported having issues with buying CULA crewdate tickets on FIXR due to the event being private, which was done to prevent non-members from purchasing tickets

The Treasurer suggests we can avoid this issue by making the event public and searchable but also including a question in the app

The Social Secretary reports he is chasing up some people in payments for the CULA crewdate and will consider the issue of FIXR’s booking fee

General Committee

No formal business

Other Business

1. College delivery logistics from the Campaigns officer

The President reminds everyone to let the porters know that our leaflets are individually addressed before pidging them