Action Items

• Reports of missing pages in latest Journal: Office Manager Marie Van Schoonhoven is working closely with the printer to make sure replacement copies are sent out to members who contact her. At present, a very small percentage of the membership (less than ten) has received defective copies. .

Officer/Staff Reports

Ron Bell, President

• The current C&BL does not specify any minimum number of meetings nor a meeting schedule for the E-board. With the advent of electronic almost instantaneous communication, the members of the E-board are now able to interact on a daily basis, handling the routine business of the society without a formal meeting. However, it is still a good idea for the group to get together on a regular basis in a more formal setting, so accordingly, the E-board will now meet via conference call three times a year and once in person at the National Convention, yielding a quarterly meeting schedule. On the off months, we will publish an E-board Action Update, which will look very much like the current minutes, on the Forum and in the Journal if the publication schedule allows. In this way we will be able to conduct the Society's business in a timely fashion and keep the membership advised of what is going on.

David Morrissette, 1st VP

• Review items slow.
• Need to set up reviewer corps get together and manufacturers' dinner at Nationals.

Mike Van Schoonhoven, 2nd Vice President

• I have 3 confirmed bidders for the 2018 Nationals. All are still working on their bids and should have them for review two months before the 2016 convention.
• The contractor we hired to work on our Convention Management Software has signed a contract for the project. Work has been progressing on the CMS to get updated and ready for the Columbia Nationals. Target date to have it ready to go is May 1, 2016. I'm very impressed at the quality of work that our contractor has put into it thus far. The system definitely works a lot smoother.

Mike Oberholtzer / John Shimek, Treasurer

• Still waiting on confirmation that Mike O, Dave M and Marie V have sent in the completed signature forms so I can officially pass on all financial records and account papers/paraphernalia.

Dennis Tennant, Secretary

• I received an email from the widow of a former member (Mrs. Cappas) who wanted to dispose of his kit collection. The DLC helped by forwarding her contact info to a chapter closest to her home to help her dispose of his collection to local veteran's groups.
• The update of the directory of local hobby shops is underway! Webmaster Eric Aitala has created an online form for members to share info about their local hobby stores with the other members and this info will be put onto a map similar to the one we use to show chapters and upcoming model shows and contests. So far, we've received a handful of submissions but, once the word gets out, I'm sure more members will participate. I feel this will be a very useful feature for our members.
• We have successfully set up a shared cloud folder for E-board use to allow the sharing of large and small sized documents among board members. The contents of the old membership recruitment CD-ROM was one of the first collection of files uploaded to this secure cloud storage.

John Noack, DLC

• Chapter rechartering has been completed.
• A group of Centennial chapter members in Colorado Springs has requested chartering information ' after viewing the correspondence and coordinating with RC-10, I have provided them with charter info.
• Region 1 Coordinator 'Doc' Wiseman has resigned ' despite numerous requests to Chapter Contacts, no new candidates have come forth at this time.
• Thanks to Office Manager Marie's help, all chapter recharter stickers for 2016 have been mailed out. Thus far, none have bounced back in the mail.
• I generated a PowerPoint version of chapter charter form and have mailed it out electronically to chapters who realize that they now have recharter stickers but can't find their original charter.
• I have set a cut-off for regional nominations for Chapter, Newsletter Editor, and Webmaster of the Year. I have about 60% participation from the Regions.
• I retrieved the Annual CoY trophy cup from Ron Bell at the R4 convention and got it restored to its former state. The same firm gave me good prices for 4 new plates for the base of the trophy; I am working to get a valid list of CoY winners (the one on the website is grossly inaccurate) so we can get 24 years' worth of CoY winners engraved and attached to the trophy, which will be given to the CoY winner this year for one year retention.

Jim Pearsal, Historian/Publication Dir.

• I've had three requests for Quarterly articles this month. I'm glad someone notices that we provide this service.
• I've received no complaints about the Journal. I'd like OM Marie to send me an email next month with a report on how many responses we got about missing Journal pages.

Marie Van Schoonhoven, National Office Manager

• The PO Box has been officially moved and is up and running smoothly.
• New merchandise will be added soon to our online special products store, at no additional cost to us.
• Pitney Bowes came out and trained me in the use of their postage meter and everything is running smoothly.
• Still need to order envelopes, membership cards etc with the new PO Box information, hoping to complete that this weekend.
• The Remote Deposit Capture is working very well and allows us to keep our bank accounts with Huntington Bank following our change of base to Florida. Thanks to John Shimek for getting this set up! Canadian Bank checks will be mailed to John Shimek until Mike Oberholtzer officially takes over checkbooks, as they cannot be processed via the Remote Deposit Capture.
• Credit Card orders are still trickling in. It's not a big deal to handle, for the most part, so I will continue to do so for member convenience.
• I am preparing to order the award plaques for the National Convention and the Chapter Awards for each Region.

Eric Aitala, Webmaster

• Areas I plan to focus on
  • Finishing up the Hobby Store Map / Database.
  • There is a major update to the Forums which will need to be done. The current version will reach end of life status and may not get any security updates.
  • The Gallery software will no longer be developed, so we may (will) need to move to new software at some point.
  • The Reviews site will need a major update sometime this year. The software it was built with has reached end of life and the update to the next version is very complicated and will require downtime longer than normal maintenance. To make life easier, I have been slowly moving all non-review content and forms to the 'new' Calendar/News/Members web space. Once that is complete, I can start testing the upgrade to the newer version.

Submitted by Dennis Tennant, Secretary