Engineers Without Borders

Board Meeting 10/15/08

October 16, 2008 at 3:37 pm | In Meeting Minutes | Comments Off

General:

1. Banquet planners need access to EWB email so they can read email rsvp’s.  So far no one has replied by mail.
2. Nikhil is becoming increasingly busy with the FIji project and will be coming to fewer EWB meetings, however he wants to send a liaison.
3. Next week is engineering week. We were supposed to have booth, but we ran out of time, and won’t be able to.
4. Kai Sigma Pi (a forestry fraternity) wants to coordinate OSU clubs for volunteer work and have asked for our participation.

• They want to work on local projects.
• Monthly meetings with member from each club will be planned. Nick will attend these.

5.  Diana underhill is the replacement for Tammy Wergen.  Her contact info is:

Diana.underhill@ewb-osu.org

720-204-3195

6. There is a new online database for OSU club reregistration. Any club event open to public needs to be on  the website. Rob will take care of registration

7. Aaron Phelps, a Peace corp volunteer will be on campus next week and wants to speakat our general meeting (10/22). Carl already has a speaker, but can he can be moved to another week.

The board decided to let ask him to speak and reschedule the other speaker.

8. There are two people interested in coordinating the wind turbine project in Jesse’s place.

El Salvador project:

1. Update:

• There have been very large meeting turnouts with lots of public health people.
• We are working on our TAC presentation with plans to turn in on Sunday.
• Plan for next trip: Rainwater catchements will be installed in Cerro Caballo, laundry stations will be finished up from last time. There will also be health and education components.  We estimate there will be 5 travellers plus a professional.

2. Funding request: Aaron asked us for $200 for legal proceedings for lower La Cumbre gravity system. This would be a very technically difficult project. The people there are very interested, however. They are working on getting water rights, doing hose test, etc.

• Vote: 13 for, Kelly and Scott abstained, 0 against.
• This will be good to keep up the community’s enthusiasm, and allow them to build in the future even without them.

3. $1500 is coming from ISA Mundo, and they are asking the best way to send it.

Rob: they should send a check to the club’s mailbox

4.  Public health: Last time did hand washing and diarrhea surveys. This time, they want to focus more on health education. They aren’t sure what will be needed, so they will prepare for various scenarios.

Ana Harding wants to be an EWB faculty advisor (she is a public health prof.).

• We will ask her to come to a few board meetings and introduce her to Kevin and john.
• She can be involved as much as she wants, we will just add her to our advisor list with the MU.
• John thinks there is a limit to the number of advisors we can have before we have to pay more
• Evan: we get a certain number without paying extra, then we have to pay $100 for them to be EWB national members.

Website:

• Evan: we should send an email within board to see what people want to improve. We should probably just edit it for now, with no major changes.
• Kelly/Brad: There are a few broken links to project reports and photos.
• Evan: we should reorganize some information to make it more accessible.
• Aparna: We should add more pictures in general to make it less boring. We could also include current and past officer bios and contact information.
• We should make joining list serv’s from the website more easier and more obvious.
• Evan: We could separate current and past work on the project page to show progress.

Kelly: Thank you notes?

• We should thank ISA Mundo for their donation. PR will take this up.
• We need to be sure we thank school departments every year for their money as well.
• Donor information could be included on wiki or we could add a spot on the website for donor/volunteer recognition. This would allows other members to contact these people in future years. We have had trouble finding old contact information for banquet mailing lists.

New Project Selection committee:

3-4 people.

• One of the members (and Evan) has gone through process before.
• We need to consider what direction we want the group to go in. Evan wants to know if the wind turbine project is going to get going? It would be better to work on something beneficial to chapters direction if there aren’t enough people to keep this project going.
• The committee will present possibilities to board on Nov 19, then present a narrowed list of option to the whole group next term. We will probably start a smaller, short-term project.
• We also need to make sure to represent diversity within chapter.
• Membership is growing rapidly, and we need to have something that will keep everybody interested and busy.

1. Kelly wants to add a fund raising group during el Salvador meetings. Evan: We should work that in.

• This will be a good opportunity for health people to stay involved.
• Where would money go? Evan: We must make sure that if multiple groups do separate fundraising activities, we can’t ask donors twice. We should have money go to the main club, not just the project, then let the board distribute it.
• When we get another international project, we should move fundraising outside of the El Salvador meetings. Right now it is biggest spender so it makes sense to include fundraising, but later on it might not be.
• We could add a fundraising coordinator to the board, then have fundraising people within each project group.
• The board (at least executive and project leaders) needs a better idea of our funds in general.

Next general meeting: We will have a quick update from the workshop last weekend.