01. Roll Call.

Ann Saunders, Chairperson.
Chris Payne, Treasurer and Membership Administrator.
Amanda Burt, Secretary.
Justin Macleod, Events Coordinator.
Carol Forrester, Executive Officer.
Catherine McManus, Executive Officer.
Andy Jinks, David Richards, Drusilla Insole, Elisabeth Standen, Gladys Taylor, Jackie Glynn, Jim Bradley, John Hinchliffe, John Wells, John Wilsher, Katie Myers, Keith Waters, Lee Garrett, Linda Tyler, Margaret Cooper, Mark Tyler, Martin Foden, Maurice Pothecary, Miriam Raymond, Monique Lannott, Ned Benton, Paul Smith, Peter Beasley, Peter Hallam, Rosemary Bradley, Sal Pitts, Stephen Hassall, Teresa Payne, Tony Bowers.

02. Apologies.

Richard Wilkin, Web Master.
Alicey Hartog, Andrew Payne, Billy Whitcome, Caroline Tobias, Charlotte Payne, Christine Brown, Christine Mason, Doris Schmill, Harry Mason, Huug Hartog, Ian White, Linda Arnott, Mags Silbery, Michael Brown, Michael Payne, Phil Hartog, Roma Creech, Shirley Grant, Steve Hyde-Dryden, Steve Pallett, Sue Buck, Sue Pallett, Trevor Franklin,

03 Acceptance Of Last Month’s Minutes.

There was a hitch getting last month’s minutes up on the web site so will be accepted at next month’s meeting.

04. Chairperson’s Report.

Ann said this was difficult for her, but she’s afraid, for the past 8 or so weeks, she hasn’t been well and didn’t realise what the problem was. It’s a bit more than she thought it was. Her blood tests were up the creek and all she wants to do is sleep and not concentrate on any of the work that she ought to be doing as chairperson.

She has discussed this with the Executive Committee, and as of now she has to resign as her health situation will not allow her to continue. She’s having more blood tests on Monday and hopes something can be resolved, because this is a nasty situation. Her doctor’s have never seen anything like it before and as she can’t do the job, that is what she has to do. And she proposes sending out a letter on the announce list so that Members who are not here will know.

For now Chris Payne will take over as Vice-Chairperson, but because there are 7 months before the next election, there will be an election for the job, and an email will go out about this with details of what the job entails. Watch this space is all she could say.

She is very sorry about this. She has enjoyed her time as Chairperson very much indeed, and she has had a great Executive Committee to work with and thanked them all very much for all the hard work.

Chris Payne: On behalf of all the Exec and Members Ann, we are extremely saddened that your health has come to a state where you feel you have to step down from the Chair, and all at TAFN wish you the speediest recovery and hope that things will be sorted in a timely manner, rather than being prolonged for a long period of time. He asked that she keeps us informed from time to time on how things are going, as he is sure the Members would appreciate that.

Justin Macleod: He would like to commend all the work Ann has done. It’s certainly not been the easiest one and a half years. He is glad that She took the position in the first place and very sorry to lose her. He hopes to see her on the Communicator, and wishes her well in her well earned rest.

Amanda Burt: She would like to reiterate what has been said. It’s been a pleasure working with Ann and she really hopes that her health starts to improve.

Mark Tyler: He thought others had already echoed what he was going to say. Ann has been an excellent Chairperson, but obviously, her health comes first, and Linda agrees.

Ann Saunders: She would like to thank all for the really kind words, they are very much appreciated. She’s not going off the Planet as far as TAFN is concerned, she will still be coming to events when she feels up to it.

Katie Myers would like to second what mark said and Sal pitts hopes for a speedy recovery as this is very, very sad.

Ann then Handed the rest of the Meeting over to Chris Payne as Vice Chairperson.

Elisabeth Standen hopes we will see Ann in the activities on the Communicator, because she is a fun person to have about.

Chris said that as he only found out about Ann’s illness in the middle of the week, he hasn’t devised a report as such. All he can say from the Chair, is that the Exec have been meeting weekly, and there are factors afoot that are being dealt with for Members and TAFN in general.

05. Treasurer’s Report.

Chris said these figures were correct untill 6pm, but if anthing went in after that it would be reflected in the minutes.

Opening Balance: £ 2,175.39
Paid In: £ 945.10 as follows,

• Auction: £ 369.00
• Bingo: £ 116.50
• Bonus Ball: £ 330.00
• Donations: £ 2.50
• Memberships: £ 227.10

Paid Out: £ 956.49 as follows,

• 1 and 1 Ltd/Technology: £ 327.16
• Auction: £ 37.39 (Postage)
• Bingo: £ 90.00
• Bonus Ball: £ 100.00
• Help Line: £ 5.94
• Transfers: £ 400.00 (PayPal)

Closing Balance: £ 2,164.00
Savings Account Interest: £ 19.33
Savings Account Balance: £19,424.66
PayPal Credits: £ 1,738.66
PayPal Debits: £ 1,170.25
PayPal Balance: £ 1,784.38
Grand Total: £23,373.04

06. Memberships Report.

We had 6 new guests during July of which, at least 2 of them have become full Members.

07. Secretary’s Report.

Amanda said she’s not quite back full time yet, and she would like to thank All the Committee for all the hard work that they’ve done, and for doing the work for so long. She never expected it to be this long. Obviously she will be involved in the elections for the Chairperson, and she will be slowly getting back to normality. Thanks to the Committee, not only for the work that they have done, but for the support they have been to her since her operation. And thanks to the Members who have also been very supportive.

08. Web Master’s Report.

Richard said that he is sorry about the length of this report, and he hopes that it’s not too technically difficult to understand.

Server:

Richard reported at last months meeting that now our new server is running smoothly and everything is going well, that we would begin to work on a backup server solution.The idea of the backup server is to ensure that if anything goes wrong on our primary server in London, all services would switch across to a different server, in a different location with no downtime.

The first step is to look at the viability of this solution. Richard listed each scenario and explained as clearly as possible the solution:

1. There’s a power cut at the hosting provider’s premises. We are renting hardware from a multi-national company. They have a near perfect uptime. The sites they operate have backup power generators because they maintain services for businesses that need this guarantee. In Richards own experience since 2011, he’s never known them to have a power cut.

2. Hardware failure at the hosting company. The company uses complex hardware configurations to allow for virtually no downtime. As we are hosted on a VPS, the most likely problem would be caused by hard drive failure. They offer RAID 10, which means our data is spread across at least 8 drives, making it near impossible to suffer from data loss or downtime as they simply swap over the drive and we’re back in business. Richard has seen one instance of hardware failure since 2011.

3. Someone hacks into the server. Remembering that we are talking about data loss, or server downtime, we simply recover a backup and reset all passwords. We would need to acquire a new SSL encryption certificate as well.

In the above 3 scenarios, we would suffer from no more than a few hours downtime, and the most data loss we would incur is 23 hours. This is more than acceptable for the size of our server and the amount of data we may upload in any 23 hour period, and the potential risk of these scenarios happening at all are very low. Therefore, the above points are not adequate reasons to create a live backup system.
The next 2 scenarios are real concerns:

1. The server is down, we have no website. This would be frustrating as all pages would be unavailable until the server was back online. With the implementation of a CDN, content delivery network, we can have access to worldwide caching of our site to see us through the few hours of downtime. In addition, our server would not be under such a heavy visitor load when the server is running, as pages and audio content are moved across the world and then provided to visitors from the CDN service directly. This has the added benefit of speeding up the download of pages and files for everyone.

2. The server is down, there’s no e-mail. This is where the technical fun comes into play. Because we use IMAP, which is by its very nature stored on the server, access to e-mail would be cut off completely. The logical decision would be to create a backup server that takes over in the event of downtime, to cause zero interruption to the mail system. When the primary server comes back online, we can switch back across, and all is well.

This sounds great, however does not work in practice. This is because one server will not accept the e-mails from the other server as all files are given a unique ID on each server. Let us suppose that the primary server is working, and as each e-mail comes in, the server calls each e-mail number 1, number 2, number 3 and so on. Now the primary server goes offline, and the backup takes over. The backup server names the first email number 1, number 2, number 3 and so on. When the primary server comes back online, the backup server says to it, “Hey, I have messages you don’t
have. They are emails number 1, number 2 and number 3.” The primary server checks its e-mails and finding e-mail number 1, number 2 and number 3, responds with, Wait, I already have those messages… you’re a crazy backup server.” At this point, both servers have messages with different subject lines and different content, but because the server uses the ID numbers to check what’s there, there’s no way of the two machines agreeing. So if the primary server is down for 3 hours, all of those messages from the backup server for that 3 hour time period would be lost.

Large companies pay tens of thousands of pounds for hardware to deal with this type of situation, which TAFN doesn’t have the means to acquire. The research on this subject has taken quite a lot of time and mind bending thoughts, which to save complex technical explanations, Richard will go into if anyone asks specifically.

The only times we’ve had downtime was during the software configuration while we adjusted software, made improvements and fixed bugs with mail clients. Since our deployment of the spam software, we’ve seen no downtime or e-mail delivery problems. Furthermore, if there is a software configuration issue, which was the cause of the e-mail downtime over the last couple of months, all e-mails simply get held in a queue and are delivered once the system is working again.

In conclusion, a backup server would introduce a new problem that may not be easily resolved. The downtime we’ve suffered from has been during tweaks to stabilise and balance our server for maximum security and ease of use for our members. No e-mails were lost during the downtime; all were queued and sent once bugs were resolved. Richard therefore recommends that we do not provision a backup server, but spend the monthly fee on a CDN, content delivery network instead. We can acquire a service for the same price as a server, and the only expected downtime from tweaking is now behind us, making likely issues in the future, an out of the ordinary occurrence. What this means in practice is that only temporary interruption to e-mails is likely to occur during downtime. Everything else will be unaffected.

We’ve been working on the webmail calendar this month. When you log in to webmail, there should now be a calendar function that allows you to create events. Richard hasn’t had a chance to look at this in any detail, but it seems to be fully accessible. For those of you who might like to have a calendar on your PC but don’t use Office, Richard hopes you find this a useful addition to your TAFN mailbox.

Moving on to our 1 and 1 server where Communicator is hosted. One issue that Richard is currently dealing with is an e-mail he received this week from 1 and 1. They informed him that the server was involved in a DNS Amplification attack and that we need to fix the problem as they’ve had several complaints from other companies. The problem is that there is a misconfiguration of Windows that is opening up a vulnerability that could cause further attacks in the future. This may explain the ongoing Communicator crashing and lag. As you know, we don’t have access to this server as it’s audio was disabled. Richard is currently working with 1 and 1 to resolve this issue. Richard will provide a report on this situation in his next report.

This concludes the server section.

Website:

We’ve had one issue with the website recently. On Tuesday, one of our plug-ins decided to run riot and locked everything down. The solution was to log in to the server and manually disable it in the PHP functions. The site was unavailable for a few hours while the cause was identified. Richard must apologise for the inconvenience this may have caused. Other than this, everything is going well and proceeding nicely.

We now have our official policies page, which needs a few additions. The What Is TAFN link now has a series of pages to tell visitors what TAFN is all about, including an overview, history of TAFN, benefits of membership and some information about Communicator. We have some testimonials waiting in the wings, once we have agreement from the people who originally provided them to put them in the public area.

We’ve been working very hard on Sue’s Kitchen, the largest amount of content of the entire site. We had a few issues after organising the content, and had a meeting to discuss how best to make the implementation as good as it can be.

To give you some idea of the work involved, the web team decided it would be a good idea to give you some statistics. Greg Hamilton spent 8 hours on one document alone, Mark Tyler spent 8 hours on 19 pages. Richard spent just over 4 hours on 20 pages. This is not a reflection of how fast a person codes a page, but rather that depending on the page, different work is required to make them ready for the web.

In order to ensure that we put these pages together correctly, with good, solid navigation, we are putting the site together one section at a time. The About us pages are one section, the official policies is a section. Sue’s Kitchen is one section that contains over 160 pages, and is almost ready after the changes we needed to make. Once everything of Sue’s Kitchen is linked together and online, it will be linked in the navigation on the main site. Because there is so much of Sue’s Kitchen, Richard created a navigation bar specifically for the Kitchen area.

As navigation is being planned, consideration is being taken as to how people navigate pages. Some people use insert and F7, skipping page content in order to steer with the links. Others use the letter H to jump between headings. Others simply use the down arrow key to read a line at a time, while others use the newer landmarks with HTML 5. For maximum accessibility, we are making it easy to use all of these options as we build the site.

Richard understands that some members are wondering about the slow progress of the rebuild. This is for two reasons:

1. We’re currently working on the largest chunk of the site and need to plan its navigation carefully and completely. We could put up 100 pages, then realize that we need to tear half of them down and start over. It’s best to arrange the content, then design a navigation system on virtual paper so you can see the problems before you have to tear it apart and start over.

2. If Richard made one error of judgement this year, it is that he should have formed the web team as far back as February or March. The reason he didn’t do this was simply due to the amount of planning and research into software options. This was required to ensure that every system we implemented was absolutely accessible to everyone. Not just the website, but also the behind the scenes interfaces such as the E-mail administrative interface, Mailing system management, web site and content management software. It’s important to remember that everything is possible with a screen reader, providing the correct software choices are made, and that’s exactly how we’ve built and implemented TAFN’s new solution. The time spent not working directly on software, but rather drawing plans, checking pros and cons as well as accessibility and usability considerations prior to work commencing was the reason that the web site was not affected sooner.

Richard would like to thank Andy Jinx for his assistance in testing an audio interface with us. Work on this will be continuing to ensure good accessibility, prior to every bit of sound being hooked up to the site. One benefit of using WordPress is that they have a dedicated accessibility team who ensure it is as accessible as possible. The issues are introduced when we use plugins not developed directly under the WordPress project. Testing is essential to ensure compatibility with as many screen readers and browsers as possible.

In conclusion, there is still a fair way to go. This includes a handful of administrative adjustments to make everything easier to manage and maintain, as well as the continuation of the web build. We are still on course to have the site finished by the previously mentioned time frame of the end of August to the middle of September. Everything is going well and Richard would like to thank you for your patience while we ensure TAFN has a solid and manageable technological future.

If anyone would like to ask any questions regarding the website, TAFN e-mail or Mailing Lists, please send an e-mail to the web team at: www.tafn.org.uk/contact

This concludes the webmaster report for July 2014.

Someone suggested a stiff whiskey for the lady. Teresa would prefer Lambrini.

Chris thanked Teresa for reading the report and the Web Team for their outstanding and hard work, and asked Amanda if there were any questions.

Amanda said she concurs with Chris and no questions.

09. Event’s Report.

Justin said unfortunately he also had a mammoth report as he was not in last month’s Meeting.

The first thing to talk about was the Auction, which might seem like an awful long time ago, but it’s worth putting in the minutes what a tremendous event that was. It was an excellent contribution from a lot of people. Particular thanks go to Chris and Teresa as always, it was an unprecedented event with an unprecedented number of donations, some from outside of TAFN, and it spanned 2 choc-o-block nights. Thanks to all donators. he forgot how many donations there were. If Chris wants to give out any details after this report, he’s sure he will.

A couple of events that are offshoots from that, we had a sound design event from Justin, talking about the various applications of convolution revert that are possible. And that was much better attended than he expected, and he says that not to blow his own trumpet, but to re-enforce a point he made, that if you are interseted and passionate and know a lot about something, that you
would like to share, do come forward and do an event on it. It was brought up at an event he will discuss in a minute, that the Sunday night open mike slots, former music slots are quite derelict at the moment and need filling. They are the perfect slot for things like this. If you have a passion, interest, hobby, or a life transforming experience, do come and tell us about it. We’ve had some cruise events from Shirley and Steve, the sound design event from him, numerous jazz events from Ian. These have all come from our own interests and experiences and they seem to go down really well and you could do the same. That’s a big plug, you are more interesting than perhaps you think you are. So let’s make TAFN’s events calendar more diverse.

We also had a number of donations from companies outside TAFN, and individuals as well. One of those being Brian Hartgen who donated some scripts for station playlists studio, then came on with a colleague and did a demonstration on station playlists studio and how jaws can be
made to work with it, and that was really interesting. Quite a few people turned up for that, and he was due to do another presentation about an interface that the company he works for, aztec, have developed, between jaws and Dragon naturally speaking. Dragon Naturally Speaking is of course a programme where you can actually dictate to your computer and it will write what you say. He was due to do that in August, but Aztec have come up with some new software that might be of interest to you guys, so we’ve been asked to postpone it until the 4th Thursday of September at 7pm, so put that date in your diary.

We are contacting the other companies who donated to see if we can get them on. we have had some interest, for some people it’s not quite the right time, they’re busily embroiled in sight village and things like that, but we hope they can come on at a later date.

Throughout June Justin was busy securing donations and trying to secure these accessible devices presentations. We also had the start
of Ian’s jazz archive, which has got off to a very good start, and that takes place on the 4th Thursday of the month now.

There has also been a few changes to the Audio Theatre Schedule. Lee B took some time off for the World Cup, so John Pitts filled in with the Saturday Playhouses, commemorating various things, D-Day was commemorated from world war 2, so Stephen Hassall put on a play about Hitler, so there were a few rearrangements to the schedule to accomodate that.

Mark Tyler has covered for Jackie Glynn’s quiz. he doesn’t think there were any other covers, but this report covers a long period of time so he hopes he hasn’t missed anyone. Unfortunately the On An Island event had to be cancelled. There’s been a few cancellations, rescheduling and coverings as one would expect. The archers event is taking a break. some of Ian’s events have taken a break and will take another break while Ian goes on holiday, until the 10th of August.

And on to July. He was busy doing stuff for Talent Night. Conversing with the 2 excellent hosts Sandra Henshall and John Hinchliffe, who have done a brilliant job as ever. The server behaved better than last year and we had a Talent Night relatively free of technical issues. Thanks to Chrissie for providing the backing tracks, and also Lee for offering to do backing tracks. He is always struck afresh by the cooperation that goes on to put on these big events. Some work goes on that people aren’t even aware of. So Talent Night was another great Success, with a lot of positive feedback.

At the Open Events Meeting, we had some interesting discussions, about Member Participants Punctuality. If you want to attend an event, please could you make every reasonable effort, to make it in on time? We aske this, because it’s been reported to us that some events are starting up to an hour late. He would like to commend the event hosts who are prepared to wait for their participants that long, it’s not something he would
be prepared to do. He does worry that it fosters the belief that it’s ok. But we do ask that people do bare in mind that all our event hosts are volunteers. A lot of time and effort goes into preparing as well as running these events, so out of courtesy, if you possibly can, try to be there on time.

Also an interesting idea came up for a new event, a travel event which Paul Smith wants to host. We are in consultation with him about the best possible slot for that.

We’ve also had an Open Exec Forum, where you’ve come to us with various suggestions regarding the TAFN Logo and the Web Site and Communicator 3 and various other things. We hope we’ve answered your questions adequately.

Two events that have grown out of other things that are going on lately. He has been heavily involved in, he doesn’t actually feel that he has done a lot of events coordinating, unless it’s been directly to do with the Talent Night or the Auction, because he’s been deeply involved in the list migration.

You’ll all be aware by now that we have switched to a new mailing system. We’ve abandoned google groups, and he’s been training Catherine and Chris to assist him in that. Obviously there’s going to be teething problems with any migration, and they’ve taken to it splendidly, and are a great assistance. And also he has done the list migration training for the Membership.

If any of you are feeling intimidated by the new mailing system, please don’t. While he was dealing with other people, and people were waiting to make enquiries, at these events, they actually managed to teach themselves to do what they wanted to do. he then mentioned a few names of those who taught themselves what to do and to say it really is a very easy system. There’s a few things that you need to bare in mind, but have a play with it, if you break anything, we will be glad to help you fix it. No changes you make to your settings is irreversible.
Under this new system, there are some things that you can deal with more efficiently and more quickly than we can.

He will have a meeting with Amanda privately, to train her so she can resume her list management duties. He has also been involved with Web Team work, specifically, coding for the minutes, putting the TAFN policies up online, Constitution and Wishing Well Guidelines, the List Guidelines, and so on.

We move on now to events coming up. We have Trust Me, on the 24th August, that is the third Saturday of the month. We have the panel set up which is different from last year. Last year we had the rogues and rascals of TAFN, with the likes of Trevor Franklin. This time we’ve gone for the butter wouldn’t melt image. That’s based on Call My Bluff, great fun.

Nearer to now, we have a couple of events to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the start of world war 1. On Sunday he and Tony will host a music-come-factual event, where you’ll hear some positive things that came out of world war 1, you’ll hear some music from 1914 to 1918, and he would like to thank Tony for his contribution to that event, because Tony has put it all together while Justin has been rushed off his feet doing other things. Thanks to his entire team who all have a lot going on.

Now he thinks he’s covered everything, but he may well have missed something. So he is going to give his usual thanks to all the event hosts and all those who contribute to events in whatever way, writing chains, scoring, timing, or supporting. For instance, Mark and Richard came in to help with his migration training, they know how to work the lists, and they were just on hand to help. And also to remind everybody to contact eventinfo@tafn.org.uk if you wish to cancel, reschedule or change the promotion for an existing event that you are already running. If you want to propose an event or contact us about an event, then you can contact events@tafn.org.uk or you can use our brand spanking new contact form at www.tafn.org.uk/contact and click on the events option. Thanks to Richard for provisioning that.

Chris Payne: Thanked Justin for his mammoth report.

He wanted to mention the new contact system, which Justin mentioned at the end of his report. Can we actually ask Members, when using this system, to use the combo box to start off with, and find the appropriate person you are wanting to send your email to. Because the one at the top is there for a purpose, as most people who want the helpdesk, would not really want to receive emails for membership or events, so please please use the combo box that’s there. It is an easy form for everybody to use, and obviously it’s there for your convenience.

Justin Macleod: Asked for the minutes to include the Members who got companies to donate to the Auction. They are: Katie Myers, Liz Jones, Sharon Bowell and himself. Katie especially deserves a pat on the back.

Chris Payne: Yes indeed. He said he hasn’t got the Auction Grand Total yet. He hopes to have that at the next Members Meeting, which will be the 2nd sunday of September. But he does have some interesting information about this years Auction. That is that 4 Auctions ago, we had a mere 75 items to Auction, at this years Auction, we had 145. So Thanks to you the Members, in 4 Auctions, we have almost doubled what we started with. We had 28 unique buyers and he did the other day have the actual number of bids, but it runs into the hundreds. He wants to thank the Members who donated, and participated, without whom there would be no Auction. He hopes to have the Grand Total of how much we raised by next month’s Meeting.

He then asked Amanda if there were any questions for Justin.

Carol Forrester: It was just to say that she was going to be doing an accessible devices event on the new Olympus DM7 Recorder, which also does other things. She just managed to get a daisy manual for it, so she will be doing that in the next few weeks.

Chris thanked her for that.

No more questions.

10. M. A. D. Report.

Monique Lannott: During July the M.A.D. Committee has received 1 complaint, which we were able to resolve fairly swiftly. In order to discuss the complaint, we organised 1 emergency meeting.

We have been continuing to work on the survey for technology and the future, and it’s nearing it’s completion.

The Members of the M.A.D Committee are: Stephen Hassall, John Hosch, Steve Hyde-Dryden, Ian McNamara And herself, And the Executive Representative is Carol Forrester. And you can contact them through the form that was mentioned earlier or with the old email address, mad@tafn.org.uk .

Chris thanked Monique and asked if there were any questions. There were none.

11. Any Other Business.

Paul Smith: He would like to say, on behalf of those on his side of the pond, how greatful he is, and maybe the gentleman from Georgia will concur, that we had the Members Meeting when we did. Because on a Sunday, when we usually have them, on that side of the pond, are in religious observations. So he thanks us for taking that into consideration. And he was glad to see so many people in the Meeting.

Carol Forrester: Says that we are very glad to have them here and they were most welcome.

Amanda Burt: She agrees and thinks it has been a success.

Chris Payne: Yes indeed. Not only do we have our friends from across the pond, but we also have friends from the other side of the world. So he does think we do need to do this again.

Obviously it needs to be discussed at Exec level, but as far as he can recollect, our next 5 week month, where there is a 5th Thursday, actually does have a slight problem to it, in that it will be on the 31st of October. Now the main issue there is that it is the last day of TAFN’s financial year. Where as any figures that came in after 6pm tonight, could be onto next months report, we wouldn’t be able to do the same in October. And of course, we don’t know if the Events Committee have anything planned for Halloween. So all he would say is watch this space, and from the Executive Committee, give as much advance warning time to people, so we will be able to do this again in the future, but obviously, we don’t yet know if it can be on the 31st of October, and he hasn’t worked out when the next one is. He’s sure someone in the room
has the knowledge, and will key up and let us know the date.

Someone keyed up and said they thought the 31st of October was a Friday, not Thursday.

Chris replied that Teresa was getting her diary.

Peter Beasley said that a diary was not needed. It is a Friday, the 1st of November was a Saturday and the next 5 week month was January.

Chris apologised for the mistake, and said that even the 30th of October would give the same situation, that the next day the annual reports, but it could probably be done, because then he would have a month and a bit to get the figures in and sorted. But watch this space, we will discuss it at an Exec Meeting, and report accordingly.

David Richards: Would like to know why it can’t be on a Thursday every month?

Justin Macleod: Just wanted to remind everyone to watch their emails for nomination notices if they wanted to stand for the chairpersons position, and election emails to do your voting.

Chris said he was coming to that. But in answer to David’s question, the reason we can’t do it on a normal 4 week month is because of our event scheduling. Unfortunately there aren’t enough Thursdays to go around. There are no events for a 5th Thursday, but the 2nd Sunday of the month is already on the calendar and everyone is aware of it.

Finally as Justin Mentioned, sadly we do now have to send out emails to ask who wants to stand for TAFN’s Chairperson, and then we have to vote. There will be a period of time when you can put your name forward, including presenting us with a resume – who you are, what you’ve done and so forth. And there will be a 14 day period where Members will be able to vote. If there is only 1 person puts their name forward, then just 20 votes are required to say people are confident for that person to do the job.

Chris reminded us that the next meeting would be on the 15th of September and closed the Meeting at just after 9pm.