December 2023 Board Meeting Notes
BAS Board Meeting Minutes – December 4, 2023
Present at the meeting:
John Blaesi
John Grismore
Evan Zorn
Denise Gregg
Craig Brockmeier
Agenda items:
Review:
· Review/Approve Members at Large - Brian Turner/Craig Brockmeier. This was approved by all present at the meeting.
· Review BAS Standing Agenda: Nod of heads to the affirmative
Items to Purchase (before January Club Meeting) - Approved - Leads John B, Evan - Budget up to $1000
· Two wireless microphones, one for the facilitator and one for speaker
· Laser pointer that works against the screen projection
· Laptop to monitor and run zoom meeting (aka via Tech Host). Will get something at Staples, a “known brand” like HP
· Review in future: Projector - in case library won’t let us hook up our own PC or for other venues
· Review in future: Possibly a second laptop if we can’t get the library’s to behave
By-laws - review and revise (before March Board Meeting) - Approved - Leads John B, John G, Evan Z
· Objective is to simplify, make clearer, bring up to date. John B will give the By-laws a “first pass” overview.
· Narrow number of voting board members since we only have 20+ members
o Five - four officers and one member at large
· Remove all non-elected officers’ roles
o The board as a whole will assume the roles that are removed or assign a club member those duties (such as Mike Woods as Newsletter Editor)
o The board members will be responsible for presenting or obtaining programs
§ Each board member should do a presentation at least once a year AND
§ Each board member should obtain an external speaker or presentation
§ Denise and Craig pointed out that they have arranged for more speakers than others have this year—they should get credit for this going into next year!
· Add Advisory Role (maybe not—having one or two members at large may be enough). If we do this, we would set this up to be:
o Non-voting
o Experienced club members
o Limit to two
Telescope Library - (before March Board Meeting) - Leads John B, Denise, Evan
· Update Inventory - better photos, serial numbers
· Establish a checkout process for telescopes
Club marketing and communications – Leads John G and Denise
· More radio, newspaper exposure
· Revamp Website – Andrew?
· Text Blasting - such as event go/nogo via text message.
o We will work on this.
o We need cell phone *and* mobile carrier used for those who would wish to participate in this program; we don’t have cell phone numbers for all members at this point, and some might not wish to give us cell numbers.
· John G mentioned that the Cable One/Sparklight broadcast channel for public service announcements may go away when Cable One/Sparklight change their programming setup. Denise will check into this.
· We still need someone to do Facebook.
Club invigoration - (before January Club Meeting) - Leads Denise, Brian
· Once a Quarter have a Dark Sky Night Party outside the city limits. Some options are:
o Osage Hills
o Mike Dutcher (NE of town)
o Caleb and Kat (Hulah/Copan Lake) Caleb and Kat aren’t Club members yet, but they live in the Hulah/Copan Lake area.
o Bob and Glenda Bollinger
· For our quarterly events, planning it for a night when we’ll have a new moon, no moon or crescent moon will be preferable.
· The Board as a whole is responsible for specific date, time and location of these events. We will review them on a quarterly basis.
· The club will have one standing public observing night per month on the second Saturday, somewhere within city limits. For now, we will continue having this event at Jo Allyn Lowe Park. We decided we would have this just on the second Saturday of the month (rather than have first choice be a Friday night with backup on Saturday night). If we don’t think we’ll see any stars on the second Saturday, or if we think it will be too cold (we didn’t define “too cold”), then we won’t have a star party at Jo Allyn Lowe that month.
· Other possibilities for in-town star parties are Spirit Church and First Methodist Church; Craig and Denise have visited those grounds and Craig made a follow-up visit to Spirit Church.
· Gatherings, road trips, parties, better communications, etc.
· Darker Skies - Tallgrass - no lead assigned - maybe 2nd quarter 2024
· Consider Outreach Coordinator - Leads Gil and Meg Greenwood
Other items brought up at the meeting not on the agenda:
Outside speaker meeting gifts:
· Resume the practice of outside speaker meeting gift - perhaps pre-buy three or four to have on hands. Coffee mugs were presented as an idea.
· Craig plans to look into the mugs he had made before.
PayPal:
Craig said that we need to set this up as a business account. Evan will work on this.
Google Group list for youth group:
· Rick Bryant has given his youth group newsletter list to Denise.
· We decided for now not to set up this Google Group.
· Denise is keeping track of requests to get the newsletter as they come in, where people say they would like to get youth newsletters.
Deleting Yahoo account:
Denise started to work on this, but stopped when she read that our Flickr account would go away if we deleted our Yahoo account. We still have our Yahoo account.
Other imminent star parties (besides Jo Allyn Lowe Second Saturday):
No other star parties are planned before the January Club meeting.
Request for Science Fair Judges:
Denise has information on this for anyone interested in being a judge at the 2024 student science fair.
Programs 2024
· January - JohnB and JohnG - Solar Eclipse (NOT) and A Solar Eclipse in Bortle 1 Skies
· February - Club Members - Need Program People - How to view and photograph a solar eclipse
· We need presenters for the following months - several ideas were presented:
o March
o April
· May - Great American Eclipse Pictures
· Several ideas were presented - may post ideas to Google somewhere - Google Forms?
Every board member is on every team, please support the leads.