Summary of the General Assembly 2008
On this page we could summarize the outcomes of the GA qnd put the result into our Joomla. (last entry is "First Open Source Project" from oct 07)
News
On 7/8 of June our 2nd General Assembly (GA) was hold in the Linux Hotel in Essen.
The GA is one of the highlights of the year, and a great way for everybody to work together, take decisions and socialize.
A total of 13 persons gathered physically at the conference center to have real life discussions about the past and the future of BeVolunteer. Among the 13 participants three were visitors and two of the ten BeVolunteer Members were not yet eligible to vote according to our Statutes. Additionally a group of online participants was connected to the conference room via a "Skype Group Call". These online participants contributed their ideas via a written chat which was projected to a wall in the conference room.
Our treasurer Jean-Yves presented the Financial Report for 2007/2008 and the Budget for 2008/2009 which were later on accepted by the participants via a online voting system. The voting was done online in order to give volunteers the opportunity to vote even if they could not be physically present at the General Assembly.
The next step was the election of the new Board of Directors. The candidates presented themselves beforehand in the wiki. At 11 am Sunday morning polls closed and the new Board of Directors was confirmed.
During further discussions we got to the conclusion that in order to make tax refunding possible for more members we are going to create a national branch of BeVolunteer in Germany during the next year. Most part of this process has already been finalized during the GA with a first meeting of the future 'Verein'.
Additionally the General Assembly [1] decided to use a Creative Common License for the Wiki content of BeVolunteer.
In order to put the financial base of BeVolunteer on a wider fundament we decided to launch a BeWelcome Shop. In this shop everyone can buy BeWelcome promotional material and choose whether they would like to pay a higher price with a higher donation part going to BeVolunteer.
Furthermore, the General Assembly discussed the posibility of an application for the European Volunteer Programm. Finally the decision about this issue was transfered to the BoD for later decision because at this time some aspects remained unclear about financial and labour burden for BeVolunteer.
Part of the new Verification Process was tested and implemented during the General Assembly, so that everybody present can now verify members in their local communities or during their travels. This feature is still available in the alpha-version, only, but will be put in production after some more testing and layout work.
During the General Assembly the participants did a lot of Brainstorming about several issues like the inactive member procedure for BeWelcome, Blogs, Forum, Ajax Chat [2] and the structure and tools for BeLocal. All this brainstorming does not imply any desicion making process. It is just a brainstorm of members on BeWelcome.
