RE: GSAS Board Meeting Minutes - August 27, 2002

["Rick Rose" <rick-rose@attbi.com>]

Thanks for the feedback Erik.  I'll incorporate and/all comments and
corrections into a final version and republish.

Please keep the comments coming!

Thanks,

Rick

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-gsas-board@thekrib.com
[mailto:owner-gsas-board@thekrib.com]On Behalf Of Erik Olson
Sent: Monday, September 02, 2002 4:04 PM
To: gsas-board@thekrib.com
Subject: Re: GSAS Board Meeting Minutes - August 27, 2002


Nice job Rick!

Some comments & corrections inline:

On Mon, 2 Sep 2002, Rick Rose wrote:

> Erika?s Response?
>
> So far I have received exactly: none. The purpose of the "My Fish's Summer
> Vacation" contest was to drum up some material for the first issue - the
> problem is that only a small fraction of the membership is actually on the
> GSAS email list. I would expect a printed call for articles to get a
better
> response rate.

I mentioned this to Erika, but it's worth repeating: There's actually 53
people currently subscribed to gsas-member, which is on par with our
current circulation of newsletters (once you remove inactive life members,
exchanges with other clubs, and free advertiser copies).  I have not
purged the membership database since our publishing schedule became very
erratic; it would not surprise me to find we only have about 25-35 "paying
members" at the moment.  A lot of people are coming to the meetings
entirely based on the website and lists.

That doesn't mean this is a bad thing; we get so little money from the
membership anyway -- it basically covers printing the newsletter (when we
print it).  Our real support comes from the two auctions.


> >From a broader perspective, I've been spending a lot of time thinking
about
> the newsletter over the past few weeks. Traditionally, the newsletter has
> pitched itself as a vehicle for general aquatic information. Articles have
> loosely fallen into two categories: informative articles about a
particular
> species of fish or plant, and abstract musings on the hobby in general.

My impression was that a certain percentage of our home-grown articles
were about "MY experience breeding fish X", or "MY trip to Y". i.e. it's
one of our members and how they did something.  Not some guy who's a
national columnist or otherwise a pro.  People read it, and go "hey,
that's Dave.  I need to ask him about his Xenotaca eiseni fry", etc..  So
the article's 1/2 about disseminating information on tropical fish, but
1/2 about promoting fellowship amongst the members.

Just something to consider in the perspective of the articles.

> Ideally, my "vision" of the layout for an average monthly newsletter would
> be:
>
>
> 1. Masthead
> 2. Notes from the board meeting
> 3. Small article summing up the last general meeting
> 4. Your aquarist profile
> 5. Small bits: store ads, info on the next meeting, and (if necessary)
> little "fillers" like small pictures, or a chart converting Celsius to
> Fahrenheit

It's funny, you're describing exactly how the newsletter looked
1985-1991!  It was about 3-4 pages long.  I'm scanning in my remaining
documents relating to this before I hand it all off to Rick, so I'll make
sure to send a copy of the CD-ROM.

>   5.. Erik is going to begin a project of transferring our "Video Library"
> to DVD. Several copies of the talks given by past speakers would then be
> made available for borrow by the membership as part of our library.

Sorry, minor correction, because I really don't want anyone to get the
idea that I agreed to make this any sort of priority... I said at some
point in the near future I would try to transfer a set of talks to VHS,
and MIGHT try some DVDs.  At the moment, it's very time-prohibitive to do
the DVDs, as it takes about 12 hours to encode an hour of running time.

I have located a VHS tape of our 2000 speakers that I will bring to the
meeting to start things off.

> **JAN 28th        Mike Schadel (sp?) (Kathy O.)

Clay is doing this one, working with Julie Zeppieri from GPAS.

> **JUN ?            Rusty Wessel (Kathy O.)

This is also Julie from GPAS -- Kathy isn't doing this one either.


> Note:  This document was originally developed in WORD and understandably
> lost some of its formatting in the transition to email.  Anyone on the
GSAS
> Board email list who would like to receive a copy of the original WORD
> document may certainly have one by sending a request to
rick-rose@attbi.com.

It looked fine on this end!

  - Erik

--
Erik Olson
erik at thekrib dot com

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