National committee reports 2018

Secretary’s Report

We have 114 members (60 in Auckland, 35 in Wellington, 4 in Greater Waikato, and 15 in the South Island), down from 143 last AGM. This is a significant decrease - about 20% across all regions, and more in Greater Waikato - and I am concerned that people are failing to rejoin. While the reasons for the drop are obvious in Greater Waikato - no projects, so no benefit from membership - they are less obvious in Auckland and Wellington, and I am hoping that the membership surveys will shed some light on it. If we can find out why people aren’t rejoining, we can move to correct things.

The membership system is working well, and most memberships are processed within a day (the exception being weekends). Apart from that, my time this year has been spent on supporting other committee members and the regional committees, providing information to them, and developing guidance on health and safety and privacy for GMs.

IT Officer’s Report

This term has again largely involved maintenance, upgrades, and improvements on our existing systems. We now have SSL set up across all the sites we host (and force redirect to https).

NZLARPS website

There have been minor incremental improvements to the site design, including the addition of a footer to give better access to some content.

Events are now able to be added by any verified NZLARPs member. This should make it easier to keep up-to-date, as many GMs will be able to add & manage their own games.

Project, affiliate, and event series pages (for recurring non-affiliated events) are also able to be edited by project owners. This should make these pages more useful in general, as they can contain more up-to-date links to project resources.

Forecast

There’s a lot of upgrade work on the horizon as PHP 5.6 is approaching end of life in December. The current plan is to upgrade all our Silverstripe sites to work on the latest 3.* version (which supports up to PHP7.1). At which point we can upgrade our server1.. Once the server is running PHP 7, we can look at the larger job of upgrading sites to Silverstripe 4. Currently the NZLARPS site has been upgraded to the latest 3.* release. There are 6 more sites to go before we can look at upgrading the server (though many share a lot of code).

The full backlog of work as it currently stands can be found here: https://trello.com/b/8DprkdhG/nzlarps-websites


1. Or more likely - spin up a new one and migrate our code, assets, and databases there.

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Marketing:

Not much to report overall. Regional marketing officers doing the hard yards with the ever-handy surveys have provided good insight into what we want as a community.

We have seen a significant drop in membership as per Secretary’s report, so next year’s agenda is to work with the secretary to see what we can do about membership numbers and perhaps provide more incentives if required for joining.

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Treasurers Report

The NZLARPS financial position improved overall with a gain in assets of approximately $4700 on the back of reasonable game profitability.

The gear pool decreased in value due to depreciation exceeding gear additions, with most gear purchases below the threshold to capitalise.

The society is in good shape to meet its obligations in the next 12 months, holding $17,638.46 in its combined accounts, and a prepayment for campaign venue hire of $9,695. The society had no outstanding debts.

Project income was near $20,000 up on last year, while costs to run increased in step. Overall gross profit for the year increased by just over $1000, and net profit up by just under $2000 on last year.

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