Overview of Duties

Constitutionally the Secretary shall perform duties as defined in the constitution, including section 16.3.

Duties as proposed under the 2014 Committee KPI Document:

  • To record all minutes of club meetings in a detailed manner and in a consistent format approved by the committee.
  • To check the UCC mailbox on a regular basis.
  • To communicate with the groups and membership of the club on behalf of the committee, including all emails to the mailing lists.
  • Advertise all UCC Events through UCC and Guild communication channels. (Mailing Lists, Facebook, Guild Weekly)

Register of members

We maintain an online database called MemberDB. We also keep paper copies of all membership forms in the top drawer of the filing cabinet for each year. It is a requirement of being an incorporation that we keep these details, so it is important to make sure all members fill in a new form, even if they are rejoining.

If someone who is not a club administrator wants to view the register, they are only entitled to see the name and postal address of other members, in which case it is best not to create a user for somebody who wants to view the register. If a member wants to view another members postal address they may ask an administrator (wheel or committee member), or if they want the entire list they must ask wheel to extract the relevant information. Other information about a person cannot be given away without the permission of that person, which requires them to either accept the club privacy policy (which doesn't exist) or for the person in question to give specific permission on a per-case basis.

Correspondence of the Club

The club has a number of communication platforms that are used by its members.

  • Email and mailing lists.
  • IRC / Discord.
  • Facebook page and group.
  • Instagram page.

Most correspondence is by Discord and email. You can access ucc email at http://webmail.ucc.asn.au, or you can SSH to motsugo and run alpine, or you can forward your mail to another email address.

We have mailing lists. Most lists have archives, so you don't have to save copies. Mail sent to secretary@ should go to you, and won't be archived; forward it to committee@ or ucc@ if it is important.

You (and everyone else on committee-only@) should receive emails from mailman when a non-subscriber posts to a mailing list. Visit the URL and you can approve the message. Ask wheel or another committee member if you don't have the moderation password.

In addition to the list committee@, which anyone can subscribe to, there is a committee-only@. This is not actually a mailing list, and only the current year's committee members will get emails sent to the address. They will not be archived. Using this address is discouraged, but sometimes useful for sensitive conversations. Mostly we use it to give committee a chance to proof read important emails before they are sent.

We also have a post box with the guild. The address is: 

University Computer Club
Box 22, M300
The University of Western Australia
35 Stirling Highway
CRAWLEY WA 6009
Australia

This page should have that and other contact information if you need to supply it.

The mail should be checked at least once a week. To check it, go to guild reception, and tell the receptionist that you are the Secretary of UCC and need to check the mail in Box 22. The boxes are at the top of the stairs to the left of guild reception.

Carrying out instructions and decisions of the Committee

This means to do things like organise clean-ups, notify people of meetings and events, contact people outside the club relating to non-financial matters, organising the AGM and SGMs, etc as decided upon by the committee.

Normally anything important that needs to be done will be discussed at a Committee meeting, and it is important that Committee knows what you are doing.

You should also volunteer to do other tasks if you can, even if they are not administration related.

Maintaining the Constitution

The constitution is at https://www.ucc.asn.au/infobase/policies/constitution.pdf.

It is also the job of the Secretary to ensure that any changes to the constitution are sent to the appropriate authorities (ie. the Guild, the Commissioner for Consumer Protection, the ACNC and any other organisations that the club may be affiliated to), and that the constitution on the website is correct and up-to-date.

Custody of Documents

This means that you get to take care of the contents everything in the filing cabinet, except for the stuff in the Treasurer's drawer. There are a lot of old books and documents which are an important part of UCC's history, and being the Secretary means that you can effectively veto the throwing out of these things.

Any member can borrow any book in the book shelves. Get them to add the details to http://wiki.ucc.asn.au/TheftBook.

Minutes

Currently we use https://hedgedoc.ucc.asn.au to take minutes, as it uses markdown and updates in realtime. See agenda.readonly.txt for the minutes template.

Once the meeting has ended and you have finished checking the minutes for formatting errors, you need to upload them to the correct places. To do this, first go to the minutes HedgeDoc that you want to save.

Click the top right menu dropdown. From the options, select "Save as Markdown." This will convert the document into a Markdown file format.

Upload to Discord

Next you must post the minutes to Discord. To do this you navigate to the #minutes channel in the UCC Discord server, upload the Markdown file and send it as an attachment.

After you have uploaded a copy of the file to Discord, rename the original file and replace the .md extension with .ucc.

Upload to the website

  • Locate the current year minutes folder under /services/http/infobase/committee

    • If necessary, create a new minutes folder for the current year

    • cd /services/http/infobase/committee/2024

  • Add or edit a file e.g. one of these:

    • vi 2024-XX-YY.ucc

    • wget https://hedgedoc.ucc.asn.au/AAAABBBBCCCC00001111XX/download -O /services/http/infobase/committee/2024/2024-XX-YY.ucc

    • Upload a file with with scp(1) or https://winscp.net/eng/docs/getting_started

      • Drag and drop the renamed minutes file (with the .ucc extension) into the minutes folder.

    • Once the .ucc file is in the minutes folder, make sure the styling script is copied at the top of the document. This ensures consistent formatting and styling throughout the minutes.

    • ( The minutes are then available on the website at https://www.ucc.asn.au/infobase/minutes/YYYY/YYYY-MM-DD.ucc )

  • git add 2024-XX-YY.ucc

  • git commit -m "commit message here"

  • Don't worry about minor errors, e.g. formatting that can be fixed later: an initial draft is important. Common issues include:
    • Nested bullet points not being sufficiently indented
    • Lists appearing all on one line
    • Random lines of text appearing bold and in large font
    • ...and so on
    • Read the markdown guide to fix this or just add more newlines as appropriate

During the Meeting

Committee members have the option of writing their own reports beforehand. Encourage them to do this, since it will save you time and speeds up the meeting.

  • Update the attendance section based on who turns up at the meeting, moving the entries to the appropriate headings (Present, Late, Apologies, etc)
  • Seperate the committee members present from ordinary members present.

  • Update the lines Meeting opened/closed at HH:MM to reflect the time the meeting is opened and finally closed by the Chair.

  • The layout for all the sections of the meeting should already be in the agenda.

  • Record what people say during the meeting, and try to keep a concise record of discussions that occur.

    • In meeting minutes, refer to people by their TLA like this: [TLA]

    • Where relevant, prefix what is said by the TLA of the person who says it.
  • Note times at which members arrive/leave the meeting.

After the Meeting

  1. Put any action items decided upon during the meeting as well as any incomplete previous action items in the section Current Action Items after General Business (and after the "Meeting closed" line).

  2. Edit the minutes.
    • You may want to remove:
      • Jokes that aren't as funny as people thought at the time.
      • Swear words (although those are often just left in).
      • Snarky comments that you wrote while everyone was shouting and not paying attention to each other.
      • Offensive comments (unfortunately people do make them).
    • You should also rephrase poorly worded lines.
    • Complete anything that you didn't have time to finish noting during the meeting.
  3. Publish the minutes. You should do this as soon as possible after the meeting finishes, ideally on the same day.

General advice

  1. The President is supposed to be the chair, but if things are not on track feel free to bring people back to the current topic.
  2. You can paraphrase people's words to make them clearer and more concise.
  3. Some people think the minutes should not be humourous. Others disagree strongly.
  4. Use indenting to show sub-topics: Markdown requires at least four spaces for each level followed by a hyphen '-' and a space.

  5. In meeting minutes, refer to people by their TLA like this: [TLA]

Editing Things

Taking minutes can be done on any computer. However occasionally you might need to edit a file after it has been uploaded. We generally use WinSCP on Windows to do this which has a built-in text editor.

Where are the files

All of the useful committee-related directories are available on motsugo or mussel (and a few other servers). Use SSH to login to a server, or you can browse the filesystem remotely using SFTP and any decent file manager on Linux/OS X or a program such as WinSCP on Windows.

  • Important directories are:

    1. /home/other/committee - All committee related stuff. Feel free to dump things in here.

      • There is a git repository in this directory which ignores everything except for bin/. If you make any changes to committee scripts, please run git commit -a and add a descriptive message.

    2. /home/other/committee/agenda - Agenda related stuff.

    3. /home/other/committee/bin - Committee scripts

    4. /home/other/committee/minutes/<year> - Symlink to the minutes directory on the website

    5. /services/http/infobase/minutes/<year> - Where meeting minutes go

  • Note that /home on motsugo or mussel is not the same as /home on a clubroom machine

    • If you store files in /home on a clubroom machine, you can get to it from a server by replacing /home with /away. From now on /home will refer to /home as seen by a server, not a clubroom machine.

  • A useful place to upload files for other people to view is your web directory in /home/ucc/username/public-html

  • Upload and download files to and from servers with scp(1) or sftp(1).

TLA

Any member who participates in a Committee or General Meeting should have a Three Letter Acronym (TLA).

If they don't have a TLA, try and get them to choose one before the meeting. If that isn't practical (say at a General Meeting where there are 20 people without a TLA), refer to them using their full name, get them to pick a TLA later, and then replace the name with the TLA.

The TLA list is here.

It might be faster to run tla on motsugo or mussel to check TLAs.

To learn how to add new TLAs see /services/http/cgi-bin/ttdat/.tla on motsugo or mussel. Unfortunately it is a bit complicated, you might want to get a past Secretary to demonstrate.

Agenda

  • The agenda serves as a template for meeting minutes. The draft outline for the agenda can be found at /services/http/infobase/committee/agenda.readonly.txt

  • Any member may add items to the agenda on the HedgeDoc. Committee members may also edit the agenda to insert their reports manually.

  • If Committee decides to remove or add sections from all meetings, you will need to manually edit /home/other/committee/agenda/agenda.default on motsugo or mussel.

Scripts

There are a number of scripts that automate secretarial tasks. These can be found in  /home/other/committee/bin  on motsugo or mussel.

Lots of them no longer work and we don't generally use them anymore but feel free to use them if you can get them working.

Most of the scripts are written in bash or zsh (which is pretty similar).

If there are problems with the scripts and you can't fix them yourself, ask a wheel member.

The scripts are all in  /home/other/committee/bin  and are part of the committee git repository.

Other Scripts

  • tla - Enter a username, TLA, or full name to find out the others

  • account-whinge.sh (and variants) - Alter this and run it to complain at people who haven't paid up membership fees

  • locking.sh (and variants) - Alter this and run it to lock accounts when people still won't pay the membership fee

Meeting Reminders

The script meeting-reminder will send out a single email reminder.

Cronjob

The Secretary is required to give four (4) days advance notice of meetings. It would be tedious to have to send an email manually every week. This is what cron is for.

  • Run this on motsugo or mussel to edit your user crontab. 

  • crontab -e
    • For example, a meeting at 5PM on a Thursday afternoon could look like: 
    • # Meeting reminders:
# 4 day warning
0 17 * * 0 /home/other/committee/bin/meeting-reminder Thursday 17:00
# 24 hour warning
0 17 * * 3 /home/other/committee/bin/meeting-reminder Thursday 17:00

    • Crontabs are incredibly confusing, note that the lines starting with # are comments. The other lines are formatted as a space or tab separated list of fields:

    • <minute> <hour> <day of month (1-31)> <month (1-12)> <day of week (1-7)>  <command>

Timetable

Something like WhenIsGood is a good way to find times that everyone (or noone) on committee is available for a meeting.

  • There is in fact an account for [email protected] available in uccpass. Ask a wheel member if you aren't sure what this means.

UCC does have a timetable script of its own, however it is relatively annoying to use. Look in /services/http/cgi-bin/.timetable for details on how to use this if you are interested.

Events

UCC Events Page

The current year's events page should be available on the wiki. It should be updated to redirect to the correct year's event page.

Facebook Events

  • Other people probably know more about these than [SZM]

  • There is a UCC Facebook Group that you should be an administrator for.

    • Once you are, you can create events there. Be sure to add a link from the UCC Events page to the Facebook one.

Guild

  • You can advertise events in Pelican or G-News, but we rarely do this
  • There is a requirement that General Meetings be added to the Guild Calendar. [SAS] and [GOZ] know how to do this.

The Club Seal

As an incorporated entity, UCC has a club seal which is supposedly kept in the custody of the Secretary, and used on all mail sent by the club.

The seal is actually kept in the safe. The Treasurer, Vice President and President will have keys.

Things don't work because I don't have permissions

Tell a wheel member!

I need more help!

Talk to a past secretary and/or wheel member.

uccwiki: HowToCommittee/Secretary (last edited 2024-08-26 20:42:14 by NickBannon)

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