Posts Tagged ‘meetings’

This month’s Humanist Community of Leeds was looking very promising with the glorious sunshine that the weekend had experienced. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite last until Sunday evening, but it was an enjoyable evening none the less. With food now served until 10pm we were a little less under pressure to get started and enjoyed a long evening of discussions that was arguable even more political than normal.

There are only two places you are allowed to sing in public – church and karaoke bars. Unfortunately, many people feel uncomfortable doing karaoke and you never get to sing anything good at church.

The solution – karaoke congregations! It’s a meeting, where you all turn up and do karaoke as a group. There are a number of different songs to suit people’s tastes (or as the movement grows separate meetings with different genres) and you come along and everyone sings along together. This way, you can sing popular songs and you don’t have to be embarrassed because everyone is singing so nobody can really hear you anyway.

It’s also important to point out that it is karaoke. That is an important term because it stresses that it is fun and you don’t need to be able to sing. As opposed to a term like choir where there is a focus, or at least an interest in signing properly, in a formal way and performing together, these meetings would just be fun meetings where you can turn up and sing badly because it’s just about having a laugh, just like when you go to a karaoke bar with friends.

Thoughts?

Last Sunday I spent five and a half hours in meetings. I think that has to be somewhere near a new record for a Sunday.

The day started with a Reason Week planning brunch, which was productive, though didn’t actually include any food which was disappointing. Things are starting to fall into place for the week, which is promising given how close we are to it lol.

The second meeting was a Foundation trustee meeting which produced some interesting results – more on that will be announced soon, I’m sure.

HCoL was always designed to be a pilot project that we could use to gauge the success of such ventures and as such we were keen to play around with the format and see what worked and what didn’t. As such, last month we moved the meetings to the evening and this month we played around with the format.

Instead of having the traditional group, but never the less front led, discussions, we arranged the room into a boardroom style arrangement and skipped the news, taking us straight into a discussion looking back on 2010 and forward to 2011. This gave everyone a chance to talk a bit about their previous year, as well as going over the major events and news from the Humanist perspective.

Feedback was on the whole positive though whether we will pursue this as a regular format we’ve not yet decided. Interesting to see it in action though.

Wednesday saw the first official meeting of the trustees since formation.

It was most productive with us talking long into the night over possible ideas and strategies for the organisation and out of it has come some really productive action points. I can’t talk about what these are yet but hopefully we’ll have more news on these soon!

We have also established regular trustee meetings now also so things should start moving forward at quite a pace.

Having presumed I had made it through the weekly bout of A-Soc events I soon found myself up two hours early on Friday morning to attend a design meeting because there was opposition to continuing the discussions in the main committee meeting the night before.

So myself, Zoltan and Michael met up in Tasty for a breakfast meeting at which I thought was rather productive though it later turned out this was not a view held by all parties.

This resulted in A-Soc work dragging on long into the night as we are still trying to work out an effective logo we can use for the society this year. I also spent a large amount of timing implementing new features on the website and checking over everything, updating copy, etc. Let it never be said the society doesn’t keep you busy!

Wednesday night saw the A-Soc craft session to try and figure out what we were going to do in terms of our public image and branding as well as making some stuff for freshers’ week. We spent a good hour or so debating how to turn a large piece of cardboard into a box before Norm turned up and pointed out we could just use a ready made cardboard box which would be significantly easier.

Thursday saw our first proper committee meeting of the new year at which we worked our way through almost twenty points in a bit of a marathon meeting which went on for 4 hours.

Having been up until 2am for the meeting the day before and at the social the day before I was glad get to bed on Thursday night having done nothing but be at work or at some kind of A-Soc meeting since Monday! Fun times.

Last night saw the first of the end of year planning meetings for Atheist Society. It has been a while since we have had a real hardcore planning meeting but last night we bashed out ideas for next year for a solid three hours and will no doubt be doing something similar next week too.

We got plenty of good ideas down and the vision for next year is starting to take shape so it should be another great year for the society (as if we have anything else :p ).

Afterwards we headed down to The Old Bar for the usual Tuesday night social which was well attended given so many people have gone home. Plus George was there so it was basically win win.

Tuesday evening started off with the usual A-Soc committee meeting which brought up some interesting discussions, followed by the usual A-Soc meeting which this week was Michael’s talk which by all accounts was excellent.

Unfortunately I missed the talk as I was down at the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire attending their event on Ashley Montagu as a critic of Darwin which was also very interesting. Too many choices on Tuesday!

This was followed by hitting The Terrace for a few drinks at which we bashed out some great ideas (or as a titled the sheet at the time, ideas that seemed great when we were in the pub 😉 ) for Rationalist Week so hopefully some of them will actually be useful!

Last Friday saw the first planning meeting for Rationalist Week 2009. While the event is still over two months away things are finally starting to fall into place and we’re about half way through our fundraising drive for it so we need to keep the momentum going on.

The first meeting was really just to throw around ideas but the week is starting to take shape now, at least as outlining the events we want to do. Exciting stuff!