Council Meeting Recap:
February and March

by Debbie Kerr, President

Some of the events discussed in our council meetings have already taken place. If there is a description of the event elsewhere in this newsletter, it is not included here.

Finances

Of the membership fees that are paid to Head Office, we receive a portion of the fees based on the number of members in our chapter. We receive these payments in instalments and Lori Jankowski, our treasurer, discovered that we had not received one of our cheques. This omission has been corrected, and the funds were used to help pay for our annual Wine and Cheese.

We are splitting our GIC so there are three smaller ones, which we will set up so that one GIC will come up for renewal every year for the next three years. This will make more funds available to us each year.

February 3 Meeting: Ooops I DITA Again

Sherry McMenemy, Robin Dube, and Cathy McNair were the presenters for our February general meeting. The topic was DITA and a Content Management System, which had recently been implemented at Agfa. Sherry, Robin and Cathy were willing to share their first hand experience with other people.

Cathy approached us about doing the presentation. Agfa hosted and provided the door prize for the meeting. The meeting took place over the lunch period, and there were more people who wanted to attend than would fit in the meeting room. Here are some examples of comments that we received:

• Direct experience makes this type of thing useful.
• Excellent presentation. Exactly what I needed to know for overall picture.
• Great overview of hosted vs. non-hosted. Packed with info but well-paced. Good slides. I will be able to take these to my colleagues to this info.
• Love the location! Love the topic! Love the time slot! This was perfect for me.
• The system was very well explained. Interesting topic—challenges and benefits were very well covered.

Congratulations and thanks to Sherry, Robin and Cathy!

Website

Evan developed a new layout for our website and presented it to the group. He created a great first draft and he will be creating a few different versions that incorporate our feedback.

Membership

We have approximately 139 members at this point with approximately the same number of cancellations as new members. We discussed how to encourage people to renew their memberships, but felt that the emails from Head Office were sufficient.

This year, in recognition of the economy, Head Office has indicated that people can renew their memberships with a series of payments. You can get more details by going to Head Office’s website.

Bylaws and Chapter Affiliation

The chapter must have its chapter affiliation and bylaws completed by September. Debbie Kerr has been in contact with the Vice President of the Toronto chapter to see if they can work out some of the details together.

Final Meeting

We are planning on making our final meeting a social event that will be held at the Huether on June 2. Fei Min Lorente has researched some details, but we still need to work out some details. We hope that you will pencil us in so that you remember to attend our last social event of the year.