New Board Member
More than twenty years ago, Scott Imes told me that the function of the Board for Mnstf was to do the boring stuff so that it didn't have to interfere with the party. Welcome to the boring stuff! (The truth of this is born out by the structure of our “meetings” which tends to be eight hours of socializing with a five minute break to announce other opportunities for socializing. The other side of that is that while Board meetings are open to anyone, in practice almost no one but the Board ever attends.)
You are now a Board member! Yay, you. Probably, you haven't read the by-laws that govern our club. You
should. They are kept at mnstf.org/records Please be aware that the by-laws trump your personal views on how
the club should be run. On the other hand, they can be changed. On the gripping hand, you should know
what they are before you try to reinvent the wheel.
Board meetings are held as necessary, often about once a month. If things are complicated, more often,
if they're not, less often. Scheduling Board meetings is a major headache. Please, please attend. Also,
there is an email list for Board business, called BoardChat. While primary business is rarely conducted
there, some business is done there. If you are email averse, please address this problem at the initial
Board meeting, so that work arounds can be created. Also, various transparency laws require that this
channel of information can be made public, so please don't say things there that you wouldn't want to
appear in a court of law. No, I am not kidding.
The club has a number of officers, listed at mnstf.org/officers.php. Only a few of these officers have formally defined lists of duties. The president and vice president are described in the bylaws. The quartermaster has a page, linked from that one, that describes it. The treasurer does what you probably think a treasurer does. The correspondence secretary picks up mail from the PO box and distributes it to the people who need it. The recording secretary takes minutes at board meetings. The Einblatt editor edits the Einblatt, and also does everything else about the Einblatt. Similarly with the Rune editor, but much less regularly. The webmaster masters the web, but only the parts that are neither for conventions (mastered by the convention webmasters) nor archival (mastered by the archivist). The archvist is in charge of keeping physical and web archives.
There is a checklist of things which must be done annually on this wiki. Please look at this, as it will give you an idea of the kinds of things that the Board is responsible for.
The rest of the Mnstf wiki might also be worth your time. As in, you should spend some time here.
Mnstf has money. Not huge whopping gobs of money, but money. Which you, as a Board member, must exercise
reasonable fiduciary responsibility for. There are a bunch of laws, none of which are any of us
completely conversant with, but the gist of them is that we need to a) not waste money wildly, b) use
the money for the purposes of the club, and c) not embezzle. I figure that last is easy. The first two
are more complex, but also open to many interpretations.
We currently hold money in the following ways. <elucidate ways, also approximate balances>
At this present time, Mnstf's primary expenses are bi-monthly meeting and conventions. Minicon, the
convention most every Easter, is our primary fund-raiser and where we get most of our operating capital.
Fallcon, the name of which varies, sometimes breaks even, but often loses money. <insert some numbers
here for usual profits and losses> Mnstf meetings are held in members' homes, usually, and the members
are reimubursed <$$$> for these meetings. (Hosts usually spend considerably more than that, by the way.)
There are usually two or three meetings a year in other places, such as the annual picnic and the annual
pool party which are more expensive. Occasionally, meetings are held in places that require paying for
the venue, in which case that cost is also usually reimbursed. <need some hard numbers here. Hey, who
pays for the storage locker and the ASCAP fees, these days, is that a Minicon or a Mnstf expense. Also,
would someone please write out for me how the Mnstf/Minicon division of money is done? I find that I
don't really know, I just agree whenever Matt sounds sensible on the topic.>