Title: View from the Chair

Author: Bob Schmidt

Date: 01 July 2019 00:39:06 +01:00 or Mon, 01 July 2019 00:39:06 +01:00

Summary: Bob Schmidt, chair@accu.org

Body: 

ACCU 2019

ACCU’s 2019 conference was held in April, and was a great success. Russel Winder, assisted by Felix Petriconi and the conference committee (Gail Ollis, Roger Orr, CB Bailey, Anastasia Kazakova, Jon Kalb, Francis Glassborow, Timur Doumler, and Guy Davidson), created a conference program with both depth (in C++, of course) and breadth (Rust, Python, Kotlin, Java, Git, Nim, and more). We had keynotes from M Angela Sasse, Herb Sutter, Paul Grenyer, and Kate Gregory; lightning talks; a welcome reception; and a tasty and entertaining conference dinner featuring Echoborg and Code Club.

We had approximately 435 attendees over the four days of the conference. Attendance was down slightly from last year’s record attendance of approximately 450 attendees; however, it was higher than expected given the uncertainties generated by Brexit.

Thanks go out to Julie Archer and the Archer-Yates team for their excellent conference organization and on-site management:

• Charlotte Tanswel
• Laura Nason
• Anna Munday
• Helen Wormall
• Marsha Goodwin

Thanks also to the conference sponsors for their support:

• Bloomberg
• Undo
• QBS
• JFrog
• Mosaic Financial Markets
• Riverblade
• Graphcore
• Jump Trading
• #include <c++>

ACCU Autumn 2019

ACCU is putting on a two-day conference in Belfast, Northern Ireland on the 11th and 12th of November 2019, in conjunction with and immediately following the November WG21 (C++) standards meeting. The conference will be held at the same Hilton Hotel being used for the WG21 meeting. Registration information will be posted to the ACCU website [1], so check there for more information when it becomes available.

2019 AGM

ACCU’s Annual General Meeting was held on April 13, 2019. Results of the election were announced – there were no surprises, given that everyone was running unopposed.

• Secretary – Patrick Martin
• Local Groups Coordinator – Phil Nash
• Membership Secretary – Matt Jones
• Standards – Guy Davidson
• Publications – Roger Orr
• At-Large – Ralph McArdell

There were two motions on the ballot, both of which passed. The first gave authority to the committee to enter into insurance arrangements; the second allowed for the nomination and election of officers at the AGM (because there were no nominations for Chair or Treasurer).

I asked the members attending the AGM if anyone was willing to stand as Treasurer; there were no volunteers. Rob Pauer had indicated that he would be willing to stand again in the absence of a new volunteer, and pursuant to the authority granted by the approval of the motion to allow election of officers at the AGM, Rob was nominated and re-elected Treasurer by unanimous vote.

I also asked if anyone was willing to stand as Chair; again, there were no takers. I volunteered to serve for an additional year, and was nominated and re-elected. Thank you.

Finally, we needed to find two new auditors. Guy Davidson has taken a position on the committee, so we needed someone to finish his final year, and Niall Douglas concluded his two-year term. Alan Griffiths volunteered to finish Guy’s term, and Dietmar Kühl volunteered for the two year term.

(The AGM Pack [2] and draft minutes of the 31st AGM are available online [3]; members must log in to the website.)

Thank you to everyone who came to the meeting; our new committee members and audit team members; and to outgoing committee members Nigel Lester and Emyr Williams; and auditor Niall Douglas.

Reviews

Ian Bruntlett has volunteered to try his hand as Reviews Editor. He has plans to expand this CVu feature from just book reviews. As he said in his introductory email, he would like to include “anything that helps a software developer cope with things […] – the traditional technical stuff, favourite old books, podcasts, e-books, the humanities, [and] fiction…”

We have a new(ish) email address for ideas and submissions: reviews@accu.org. Please use this address to send your ideas and reviews to Ian.

Please join me in thanking Ian for volunteering for this role.

Advertising

Seb Rose has notified the committee that he is stepping down from the advertising position after many years of service.

The committee and I thank Seb for his years of service to ACCU.

Call for Volunteers

We have several open positions on the committee. Please consider volunteering for one of the following:

• Publicity
• Study Groups
• Advertising
• Social Media
• Web Editor

Also, we need a new treasurer. Rob Pauer was kind enough to continue in the role when no one else stepped up in April, but he wants to retire, and he should be able to do so. This is one position that requires residence in England, in order to have access to the bank with which we do business.

References

[1] 2009 Autumn Conference: https://conference.accu.org/

[2] 31st AGM Pack: https://accu.org/content/agm/AGM-2019-Pack.pdf

[3] 31st AGM Draft Minutes: https://accu.org/content/agm/AGM-2019-Minutes(Draft).pdf

Notes: 

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