Engineers Without Borders

Board Meeting 1/21/09

January 22, 2009 at 7:13 pm | In Meeting Minutes | Comments Off

1/21/09

Agenda

• SLI offer to educate us about advertising.
• EWB-OSU domain name.
• Malia’s proposed El Salvador trip

1. SLI has offered to help teach us how to advertise for EWB. They want to know how best to help

• We will ask them if they could come to a board meeting. They might also be able to host a seminar in place of one of the general meetings this term.
• Brad: we should have an advertising person designated.
• Aparna will announce the position after we ask SLI about their schedule.

2. Web domain

• The website is currently owned by Doug.
• If we don’t renew it, the University of Ohio or Oklahoma will take it.
• Rob: we will need someone to manage it if ownership is transferred to the club. It can be designated to treasurer for now. He will talk to doug and see how to get it transferred.
• Aparna: we will reimburse doug for what he has already payed for

Rob motioned to transfer the domain name to the club and reimburse Doug for what he has already spent.

Aparna seconded. Motion passed, 9-0

• Aparna: we will also add this into the constitution at elections.

3. Wind turbine project:

• Data has been collected since last July, but we have not contacted the man who has the data and knows how to read it.
• Power companies might be willing to support this project. It would create a lot of publicity for them. Doug’s dad works at PGE. He might be a good contact.
• There is very low involvement in the project right now (1-2 people at most meetings) and information available right now within the club. The project should get more attention at the general meeting (with a possible presentation next week) and will also go up on the facebook page.

4. Malia’s proposed trip to El Salvador:

• Malia and her husband have asked to travel to El Salvador during spring break to conduct an assessment trip as part of a vacation.
• They would check up on the first potters for peace distribution (from 2 years ago) and take advantage of our last opportunity to work in the community with Aaron there.

Concerns:

• She’s technically a student member. We definitely don’t want to set the precedent that students can buy their way into travel.
• How can we approve travel when we are in debt? Do they donate the money to us to allow us to pay for travel, or do they pay independently?
• We don’t know national’s take on professionals going on trips individually with their own money. Rob has emailed them and is waiting for a response.

The precedent we want to set for an event like this:

• We want to follow all standard procedure for travel.
• The travel team has to propose a project to the board and ask for approval for funding.
• Next we have to get TAC approval.
• An open application for all professionals might need to be sent out.
• Finally the board has to approval traveler selection.
• Though we have not voted explicitly in the past, the board reserves the right to approve or deny travel in cases like this.
• Without approval, we would ask that no one enter the community we are working in or represent EWB.

In this particular case:

• Malia would first need to change her registration to professional EWB membership, then everything else should be doable.

At this point we will email Malia about what we have discussed. We can’t really approve the trip without hearing back from nationals and applying to TAC. Ideally the project team will make an official request, go through TAC then select travelers. In the future we will need to have an open application for other professionals.

5. New project voting results

• The Kenya project has won the vote. The next step will be to apply for the project. Eventually we will need to appoint a project coordinator.
• The new project selection committee will most likely do this. They should also form a project team to start looking at fundraising and coordinate with the existing fundraising team from the El Salvador project.