Title: View from the (Acting) Chair

Author: Martin Moene

Date: 01 September 2016 16:39:24 +01:00 or Thu, 01 September 2016 16:39:24 +01:00

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I’m starting this month’s ‘View’ in mid-July. By the time it is published, September will have arrived and summer will be almost over. The time lag between writing and publishing is something I’m going to have to get used to. Let’s tuck in to this month’s subjects.

Special General Meeting

As I mentioned in the last issue, the positions of Chair and Secretary are being held by caretakers; a Special General Meeting needs to occur to vote on the positions. Malcolm Noyes has been performing the Secretary’s duties, and I have been acting as Chair; we both are standing for election. As announced on accu-members at the end of June, the SGM will be held on Wednesday 28th September in Oxford in combination with the ACCU Oxford local group. The SGM is scheduled for 7:00 PM at St. Aldates Tavern, 108 St. Aldate’s, Oxford, Oxfordshire. If you plan to attend in person, you will need to sign up on ACCU Oxford’s Meetup site – watch for the announcements.

The last date for nominations for a position was July 30th, 2016 (the ‘proposal deadline’, section 5.3.3 of the constitution). As of the writing of this View, no other persons have volunteered or been nominated to stand for election, so, according to section 5.3.4 the nominations stand at Malcolm and me.

Diversity statement

Last issue I put out a call to anyone interested in participating in the drafting of a diversity statement for ACCU. I received feedback from both persons to whom I sent targeted requests; unfortunately, I haven’t heard from anyone else. With the committee’s agreement, I’m going to leave the process open to comments for another two-month magazine cycle, with the goal of finalizing the statement before the end of the calendar year.

Here is the draft Diversity Statement I shared with the committee at the May committee meeting:

ACCU is committed to a culture of diversity and inclusion. We embrace and encourage our members’ differences – including, but not limited to age, colour, ethnicity, ability or disability, gender identity or expression, sex or sexual orientation, language, national origin, religion or lack thereof, race, political persuasion, socio-economic status, and veteran status. ACCU will not tolerate discrimination, harassment, or bullying; in any form, for any reason. Our members deserve to be treated fairly, equally and with respect, and are expected to treat others the same way.

ACCU already has a Code of Conduct (CoC) for our conference. The Diversity Statement (DS) complements the CoC. Together they represent the values of our organization. Our next step will be to develop and publish a procedure to be followed if and when someone violates either the CoC or the DS, so that our response as an organization is appropriate and consistent.

Website migration

Jim Hague volunteered to migrate the ACCU website and associated software to a new platform. The new site went live in mid-July. I’ll have more to report in the next issue of C Vu, but this month I want to convey to Jim the thanks of the committee for all his hard work, and hope that you will join us in doing so. I expect that it was a bigger effort than Jim thought when he volunteered.

Also, please join the committee in thanking Tim Pushman for hosting the web site for more than 10 years.

Call for volunteers

We still have several positions in search of volunteers:

• We need an additional auditor to fill out my term. Please send me an email if you are willing to join Guy Davidson on the auditing team.
• We are still looking for volunteers to make improvements to the web site. In particular, Russel Winder, our Conference Chair, has some ideas for improving the conference section of the site, and has asked for volunteers. I’ll let him describe his ideas for the upgrade:

  Say ACCU was rearranging its Web resources. Say the ACCU Conference website was going to be separated from the main ACCU site in terms of the infrastructure used, but not the harmony and integration, clearly the ACCU Conference pages are an integral part of the ACCU website. Say we wanted to do the ACCU Conference bit sooner rather than later, not least because we want to set up the 2017 conference session submission system, and possibly the session reviewing system.

  I am thinking of using a Nikola/Python/Flask/MongoDB/Django/SQLite-type tool chain to achieve the goal, though I can easily entertain alternatives if there are any that are likely to be good and work solely with Debian packaged software.

  Given all this, is there anyone out there who might be interested in volunteering to assist in getting something together over the summer?

  Please contact Russel directly at conference@accu.org if you are interested in helping.

• We also have a more general request for anyone interested in serving on the conference committee. You would be working with Russel and Roger Orr on putting together the program for the April 2017 conference in Bristol.
• In addition to help with web site improvements, we are hoping to recruit someone to assist with the web site sys admin duties. Please contact me if you are interested.

In keeping with our commitment to value diversity, we encourage all members, including but not limited to members of under-represented groups, to volunteer for all positions.

Committee spotlight

Our Treasurer is Rob Pauer, back for another year of keeping our books. Rob has been treasurer since 2011, when he took over from Stewart Brodie. He has been a member of ACCU since 1987, shortly after its foundation. He joined so that he could learn about C programming (it seemed more useful than Fortran) but never took it up as a profession so he remains an interested amateur and if he can understand a solution to ‘Code Critique’ he’s quite happy.

Retirement from a career in insurance and pensions gave him an opportunity to help the Association in financial matters and he intends to continue in that role until someone else volunteers!

Rob put together the 2015 financials that were presented to the membership in the AGM packet. For those of you who didn’t read through the details, here’s an overview of our finances for the year ending 31 December 2015 (all numbers in British Pounds, rounded):

Income	Income Membership 28,160.00 Advertising 3,625.00 Local Group Sponsorship 270.00 Interest 6.00 Conference 5,952.00 Total Income 38,013.00
Expenses	Expenses Journal Design 8,400.00 Printing & Postage 21,744.00 Accountancy, Legal, Professional 743.00 Direct Costs, Office Expenses 774.00 Depreciation 175.00 Total Expenses 31,836.00
Net Income 6,177.00

As you can see, the association once again has run a surplus for fiscal year 2015. (The surplus is approximately the same as for 2014, which was £6,239.00). In general, membership and advertising income cover our expenses, and the conference supplies our surplus. The committee does not foresee a significant change to this situation for 2016.

Journals

Finally, please consider writing something for C Vu or Overload. Steve and Fran would love to hear from you. The content of our magazines is mostly member-generated – without you, there wouldn’t be an Overload or C Vu.

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