Conference call

ExCom Meetings

AFS Fisheries Information and Technology Section

Executive Committee Meeting Minutes

January 19, 2018

 

Attendees: Kayla, Rebecca, Julie, Paul

  • Officer Reports
    • President (Rebecca)
      • We are currently trying to use new website forum. You should be able to subscribe to a forum and reply via email, but not sure if this function is working. This is something we should verify and then may want to bring up with the website design team.
      • Using the forums on the website are good for cataloguing the conversations about particular situations which could be useful for future officers.
    • Secretary-Treasurer (Kayla)
      • We are currently looking into other banking options to make our banking more manageable.
      • We currently have 237 paid members which may be low. We usually have somewhere around at least 500.
      • We want to start communicating with the membership/past membership soon to drive them to our new website and hopefully increase membership.
  • Committee Updates
    • ESAB (Rebecca)
  • This committee is focusing on membership services. They are developing a new survey to get feedback on journal access, managing your own membership, etc. They hope to send out the survey in early spring.
  • If anyone has any issues, please send to Rebecca so they can be included in the survey.
  • Journal online access issues: slow/spotty, hard to find on general searches.
    • Communications Committee (Julie)
  • This committee is focusing on updating social media guidelines, promoting the journal, and a motion to establish as a standing committee.
  • Reviewing past minutes comments
    • New Website has meeting minutes that are private to ExCom. We would like to make these open to our membership.
  • Old Business
    • Fishackathon (Rebecca/Paul/Julie)
  • Website: https://hackernest.com/fishackathon
  • Date: Feb 10th and 11th
  • A lot of international participation.
  • Challenge set that FITS contributed to:
    • Sustainability-> Freshwater monitoring and communication
  • We would like to let members know about our involvement in this event
    • Post to our facebook page.
  • Do we have a social media person? No, Julie currently in charge.
    • Downside of funneling posts through MailChimp (our newsletter manager): posts a generic link to the latest newsletter rather than the post title and feature image – less eye-catching for Facebook followers
    • Is there a better way to automate, or do we want to manually post? Julie will check out Hootsuite or Website to Facebook options.
    • New FITS Website
  • org is down. Hostgator shut it down because it got hacked.
  • We have already downloaded our information on this website.
  • Next step: Finishing our fisheries.org website to be ready to share with membership.
    • Add past meetings, files from past symposia, past workshops
    • Add paid members onto the website and newsletter. Use newsletter to show them our new website.
  • Contact Hostgator to set up redirect to new site
    • 2018 Symposium (Julie/Paul/Kayla)
      • Julie to send out draft abstract to ExCom soon.
    • 2018 Workshops (Kayla/Rebecca)
  • GIS workshop in works
  • Website management in works
    • Partner Meeting Travel Program (Kayla/Rebecca)
  • Rebecca to make progress before next meeting. Julie to send OFWIM’s as a guideline.
  • OFWIM open and willing to work with us on the program.
  • New Business?
  • (Julie) Symposium: Electronic recording in recreational fisheries. Julie is involved and wanted to know if we want to tag our name to it. We are not providing funding, but it could help them with advertising the symposium. We could also help by providing a moderator. Meaningful assistance with symposium planning would lead to us helping “host”
  • What else can our section do that would be useful to our members?
    • We talked about having a meeting for standards for fisheries data exchange.
      • This meeting would be best if it coincided with another meeting (travel fund purposes).
      • Where can we get funding for this? Reaching out to LCC?
      • Need to talk to wider variety of potential users to get understanding of what matters to them, what doesn’t matter, etc. What product do users want to see? What do we need money for? Do we need money to build something? Meeting costs? Building a publication?
      • Bench for next meeting.
    • Revive the “Applications of” series idea – Rebecca to solicit member assistance after mailing list is updated
  • Action Items
    • Julie: Share Fishackathon on Facebook page
    • Website
      • Kayla: ExCom meeting minutes to be made public
      • Julie/Rebecca: Add past meeting minutes, past symposia, past workshops
      • Rebecca/Kayla: Add paid members and last year’s members
      • Rebecca: Once website is ready, send out to our membership
      • Kayla: Work with hostgator to get a redirect to new site
    • Julie: Symposium proposal
    • Rebecca: Partner travel program guidelines
    • Kayla/Rebecca: Continue work on workshops

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