Auckland Committee Meeting Minutes March 10th 2014

[b]NZLARPs minutes March 10th
Present: Clare Stones, Prema Cottingham, Dave Luxton, James Cooper, Hannah Jackson
Apologies from Nikki Brown and Dave Agnew

Note: These minutes are a record of the discussions and decisions that took place at the meeting. Discussions are not word for word.

Meeting start: 7:15pm[/b]

Minutes from last meeting:
Do we approve? Unanimous, except Clare abstains as she wrote the minutes.
Gear meeting minutes: not up yet, Clare to post to the committee forum. They need a last look through before publishing.

General Discussion / Actions from Last Meeting:

Gear: we approved gear usage for Vivian and Jack’s wedding, but the usage didn’t go ahead, and the amount of notice given was short. There was some confusion over who was supposed to be contacted to arrange going to the gear shed to pick gear up, people should contact Hannah or Nikki for the actual arranging of access to the gear shed in future.

Lands End: About 5 people have not paid for Land’s End yet. There may be confusion with these participants regarding the game payments for the Land’s End and Land Fall games; these two sets of games should be paid for separately.

Action Point: James to follow up by emailing these people to remind them, as they need to be warned that they are at risk of being charged a late payment fee.

America club: have contacted us, as Rebecca Chamley (Vice President) wants a copy of the original affiliation agreement.

Discussion of whether we actually have an original document – James thinks it might just have been a vote at the meeting. Clare thinks it may possibly be in the secretary box – she has searched for it before but only found references to the affiliation in the minutes from a few years ago. Possibly Malcom might have a copy, as he is the national secretary. Alternatively, Prema suggests just negotiating a new agreement if an old one cannot be found, given that we will be introducing gear charges soon anyway.
Discussion of who was involved in original meeting – Rowena , Craig Neilson and Steve Shipway, possibly Ryan or Adam Weller.

Action Point: Clare to check Secretary Box, to see if the affiliation agreement is in there. If it is not, contact Ryan, Craig and Rowena to see if they can remember if there was an official document.

Bank signatory access: not sorted out yet. James has contacted them, but the person he has contacted was not helpful. Now might be a good time to switch banks, James to investigate. Rest of committee suggests that James approach each bank to see which is most helpful and which has the best support for non-profits.

Easier to edit website: being discussed on National Committee forums. We feel that this is a fairly urgent issue, since we have been waiting for 2 years. Maybe we could create a new site using a website like Squarespace – it sounds like sites created using this are easy to edit, maybe a site could be created without developer help. We could possibly also make small edits to the existing site by editing the HTML text.

Budget requirements for games: There has been confusion around the process. Projects should submit their budgets to NZLARPs and have them approved before advertising upcoming games. The reason for this is that the committee needs to check that the budgets are financially sound before approving them, and this becomes much more difficult if the community has an expectation that upcoming games are going to go ahead on specific dates. Several games have not done this, we think the process needs to be more clearly available.

Action Point: James to post a sticky under NZLARPs announcements forum, to inform people about process. Post a draft in the committee forum first, so committee members can comment and suggest any amendments.

Bond for Land’s End hall hire: The council has paid this back to us.

Teonn website subscription: We don’t know if this has been cancelled yet or not, we need to ask Muppet.

List of emails passed from Teonn to Crucible: we think this has been done. There were some discussions on privacy on the Committee forums around this issue, as to whether it was appropriate (and legal) to pass email lists from one project onto another, given that the project receiving the list will be using it for advertising. We came to the conclusion that because the projects are both under the same organization (NZLARPs) and because the list was to be used to advertise a game that people on the list were likely to be interested in (Crucible, same genre of game as Teonn) that it was acceptable.

However – If anyone does not wish to be notified about future LARPs by email, we encourage them to tell us. In future, games should also make people aware when they sign up and supply their email address, that their email address may be provided to other campaigns within NZLARPs so they can be notified of other games they might be interested in.

Treasurers Report

  • Dave A has made posters to advertise Crucible at Orientation Week.
  • James – has looked at Department of Internal Affairs website regarding raffles, to see if it is legal to hold one for gear fundraising, and to find out the restrictions. As long as we can put a monetary value on the prize, it is fine. There are restrictions as to the minimum value of the prize in proportion to total value of tickets.
  • Discussion as to whether abstract items are acceptable as prizes (for example in game items) – it might be worth contacting Internal Affairs to ask about this, or simply placing a monetary value on the item.
  • Discussion of being able to buy expensive in game items with out of game money – the committee feels that this is something that should not be encouraged, but that a raffle is a good way of spreading the cost so that people can’t just buy their characters better, and making it fair.
  • Suggestion of putting NZLARPs membership into the prize as well.

    Marketing Report
  • Dave is not here, but we know that he did advertise Crucible at Orientation Week.
  • We have some brand new crew coming to Crucible, Anna Klein has been organizing transport for them.

Recent LARP events

  • Last landfall games – from what we have heard, they went well. We hear that some people did have issues with sand in contact lenses, when they lay down in combat.
  • Discussion about how this kind of hazard cannot really be avoided.

Upcoming LARPs

  •   Robin Hood larp – 4 females and 1 male have signed up to the morning run of this; more men are needed. Prema will advertise it as a cure for larpover after Crucible.
    
  • Hannah – suggestion of making a poster for the crew room at Crucible.
  • Discussion of people who could help out with the archery side. Might need to put out a call for someone to help. Maybe Linda or Jared?
  • Clare: Maybe ask someone associated with the Argent Lords, to see if someone who has some experience with archery would be willing to help.
  • Discussion of possible archery practice at Crucible

Crucible
We discussed the finances – at the time of the committee meeting, there were approximately 100 players and 30 crew signed up. At this level of participants, the game was slated to make a loss of about $1000 according to the budget, though this loss would be absorbed by the gear budget, as Patrick has indicated that he won’t seek reimbursement for gear at this time if the game makes a loss.

If we were to have 10 more players and crew, we would be into small profit territory. [Note as of 14-03-2014 - We seem to have achieved this, based on the updated paid player and crew numbers posted on the Crucible forum in Diatribe]
James and Patrick have discussed reducing the catering numbers, to bring them into alignment with expected number of attendees. The committee wants to ensure the number of people being catered for matches the number of attendees as closely as possible, to minimize the risk of the game making a loss.

Action Point: Hannah to follow up with Crucible GM team regarding catering costs, to cut back catering numbers to a level that is representative of the number of attendees.

Discussion about the size of the game – at the player and crew levels at the time of the committee meeting, the game is a bit smaller than the biggest Teonn in terms of numbers. We have seen a trend of the first game being a bit smaller than later ones in several campaigns – namely Teonn and Sabbat. The trend of lots of enthusiasm but less sign ups than expected also occurred for these games for the first game.

Discussion about budget costs – James thinks the venue cost per person at Camp Adaire is high, it comprises half the game budget. The committee has some concerns about props purchasing currently covered by the game GMs, as it makes it difficult to judge game budgets if we will be reimbursing GMs for props sometime in future based on game profits. It means it is hard for us to assess if a game would have made a loss, if the props budget included in the game was artificially reduced with the expectation that props might be covered later.

Discussion about possibly selling off any extra food at the end of the game (for example bread, bottles of milk), rather than just giving it away.

We’ve had several more player signups since the last information received by the committee, and a lot of Wellingtonians are coming to the game. Will have to wait and see how many crew are coming along as late signups.

We think the welfare form is a great idea, and James has found Jon Ball to be great to work with. The communication between the treasurers has gone well.

Dave Luxton attended the Crucible Quiz night, and found it good.

Action Points arising from gear meeting:

  • If we do get council funding for the gear, we may also need to get insurance for the gear
  • The action points can’t be actioned at the moment, as Nikki needs to document the different options for gear storage first. This is to be done by the May committee meeting.

Meeting closed: 8:36pm