TriTrog Officers Meeting on March 17, 2009

Howard Holgate, Dave Duguid, Mark Little, Mike Broome, and Ken Walsh all enjoyed Guinness and pizza.

Dave first reviewed the action items from the last meeting. We have interconnections at the meeting place fast enough to support video links and WebEx. Howard has the sandwich board underway, and it should be ready blank by next month. Ken will contact Steve Simmons about ways we might attract Venture Scouts to the TriTrogs (and ask him about bringing the Vliminator to the August pool party).

With a few asides about outreach efforts, the conversation eventually turned to fully developing a calendar for 2009 programs. The TriTrog officers presented ideas for each of the upcoming meetings through November and will follow up with the speakers. December will mark the 20th Anniversary celebration for the TriTrogs. We will post the calendar when the officers have confirmed with the speakers.

On March 24 Howard will present the slides we once shared at an Exploris event. He will be seeking input from the grotto members about ways to share it as a canned presentation to other groups, such as a lunchtime presentation at Cisco or NetApp.

April will likely feature a discussion about bats and their threats. Dave and Howard are inviting several bat experts (e.g., Melissa Miller and the museum bat specialists). Along with the April presentation the TriTrogs will begin their matching collection for the NSS White Nose Syndrome Rapid Response Fund. The TriTrog officers have agreed to match up to $200 of the donations from individuals. The collection will run from the April meeting through the May meeting. This plan resulted after discussion about our budget, charitable donations from the grotto, and matching gifts from corporations. The officers decided to hold off on further helmet and lamp purchases because several members have volunteered their extra gear.

We briefly discussed outreach issues (bulletin boards, REI caving classes, college recruitment, etc.), but those discussions were tabled until we published our calendar and finished the canned presentation.

Members should look for changes to the web site now that the Tiger Technologies site is set up. Mike will be setting up an area to post upcoming programs as well as presentations from meetings past.

Howard also suggested that the web site should show photographs about how exactly to find our meeting room. Members should volunteer to help or look forward to an interesting production.

The photo gallery will be a priority for Mike to put up, but he’s not sure the folders will be associated with the archived photos. Mike will also handle posting events like regional and national events on the Google calendar when they’re posted in the NSS News. He’ll also fix the links on the new FAQs page, post the membership forms on the web sites, and add some links to the WNS info pages.

Ken will work on content for a web page describing the officers and providing contact information (probably through alias addresses for each officer). Mike will let the members know what other content he’s looking for.

The officers tentatively set the weekend of September 19-20 as the time for the grotto trip. Ken suggested that we consider a visit to Culverson Creek Cave during that dry season. We also talked about scheduling other trips in advance.

Ken is also looking into a Celebration to the End of Hibernation season on April 11. Hopefully the local party will include vertical work.