Meeting Discussion–Secretary’s Report

Dear Ray,

Thanks for all of your hard work. Much appreciated!

Questions:

1. Does our agreement with Curtis Billue run through Dec. 31, 2013?
2. Do we anticipate keeping Curtis for other projects, such as the general reader survey mentioned in the PubCom Report?
3. I’m happy with the (overly flattering) member profile you created for me, but wouldn’t it be easier—more efficient—if those were set up with a password-protected mechanism so that individual members could personalize them? Plus, it would be less work for you. I believe this is how things are set up with H-Net (for contributors), and maybe with some other historical societies. …Perhaps this is all part of your plans for the members-only area of the site?
4. Do we have any annual membership goals? Do we want 200 regular members, or are we happy with our numbers?

Thanks in advance for your answers to these questions. Again, I *very much* appreciate all the hard work you’ve put into the Secretary position over the past two years.

Sincerely, Tim

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Tim:

Thanks so much for the questions–all good, of course.

Our agreement with Curtis will run through December 2013, but there will be negotiations with him about what will happen beyond that. The idea is to complete projects that still need to be finished, especially the members area. So we could negotiate with Curtis for other projects but we need a discussion about our plans first.

You are quite right about the profiles–in the future we will have a members area that will be password protected and will allow members to upload a good deal of material, from papers and profiles to videos and podcasts.

The perennial question regarding membership. Now that we are a non-profit we can apply for grants. I propose we do this in order to run research seminars in between annual conferences that will attract junior and senior scholars and cultivate new relationships between the society, the blog, readers, and conference participants. There are ways to determining the ‘right’ number of members for certain initiatives–we need revenue streams to do more than we have so far and running more things–from a journal to seminars to conferences to a more dynamic website–will bring more members to the society and allow us to do more for those members. My intention is to get the members area completed so we can create content that is useful and attractive to new members.

Thanks Tim!

Ray