Council Meeting Recap: October

Finances

It is challenging to plan for upcoming expenses right now because many events are still up in the air.

We have the expense of the Student Awards this year, so we will budget for those.

We are looking at possibly offering four half-day seminars, so we are investigating the associated costs.

The cost for webinars is still unknown because Head Office has not yet provided a list of topics or rates.

Website

Ted reported that the migration of our website to a new provider is now complete. Ted confirmed that we will be able to add a location to the job bank; we will need to add a field for the employer to specify where the job is located. We will look into whether we can offer a service whereby people are notified when new jobs are posted. We will add an "email the webmaster" link to the bottom of the job bank page to make it easier for people to report issues.

The STC Head Office website has a forum area. Debbie will look into having a community forum created for our chapter.

General Meetings

After some discussion, we agreed that people who are not members of our chapter will be charged $5 to attend general meetings.

We have a panel of contractors lined up for November's meeting and a panel of managers for December's. The Upcoming Chapter Meetings page has more details.

The first general meeting in 2008 will be in February on Wednesday, February 13. The shift from the first Tuesday of the month was done to accommodate travel arrangements for guest speaker Dan Beall.

Education Seminars

Ryan has contacted Peter Vogel about potential topics and presenting at our workshops. Peter is enthusiastic, and has at least five topics for us to choose from. We asked Ryan to also inquire about whether Peter might also be able to offer a session on Word 2007.

Ryan will also be contacting someone at Front Runner. The Front Runner website lists half a dozen topics that may be useful to us.

Competition and Student Awards

The Chapter Technical Communications Competition is underway. (See the article in this newsletter for more details.) We will begin organizing and promoting the Student Awards soon.

International Chapter Affiliation Agreement

Head Office wants us to become an official not-for-profit organization. Ted and Debbie will be looking into what we need to do to achieve this. Debbie will also be participating in a conference call with Head Office to get more information.

Distinguished Chapter Service Award

The deadline for council to submit a nomination for this award to STC Head Office is November 30th.