Question - What did you do last year?

[eusty]

This is to current committee members who are standing this year again.
There seem to be some members who are more visible than others, but that is probably due to the roles that they fulfil.

So what did you do? And also what difference do you think you made by being on the GAGB committee?

[countrymatters]

Seeker, edit and illustrate

Organised and attended events, including Morecambe Bay walk.

Contributed to constitutional changes, and general ongoing running of GAGB.

Currently developing geocaching on Mull and Skye.

Offered advice and encouragement to local new cachers, as well as on Mull and Skye.

Author of 'Geocaching in the UK'.

Encouraged a number of new cachers to join GAGB.

Negotiated land agreements for Skye and Mull estates.

Will continue to do the same, if re-elected, and work to effect changes in the way GAGB is run, by encouraging a more business-like ethos.

[JackieC]

I suppose the short answer is "not as much as I'd have liked".

It was my first year on the committee, and although you join these things with wonderful intentions of changing the world and making everything all peachy, it just doesn't happen.

Life gets in the way, work gets even more in the way, and you're also trying to get your head round 10 years of whys and wherefores.

I'm not a techy person, so I contributed little to the website, but I did organise a number of articles for the seeker (by persuading cachers to submit pieces, including some on CITOs in Ireland). I organised a GAGB10 event in Scotland too. I helped where I could.

I also took on the event calendar, which has been very busy this year with all the souvenir days, space days and GAGB events, and picked up the secretary role when it was vacated.

Like I said, not as much as I'd have liked.

[*geocass*]

I covered a few of them in my CV, but can expand here...

• General tinkering in the background and fixing issues with the website or adding minor improvements.
• Mailing out Seeker newsletters and a few other mail shots (Which was a long and very manual task when we had problems with our web hosting performance)
• Seeker contributions including an Oregon 600 review.
• Communicating (Negotiating? ) with our web hosting to sort out performance and timeout issues and get them to upgrade us to a faster server for free.
• Upgrading the forum + the plugins.
• Helping out on the GAGB stall at the UK MEGA while the map game was going a bit frantic!
• A lot of hours monitoring and sifting through web logs to get details of spammers and hackers trying to get into the site, eventually coding a script to automatically check these logs so that I could compile a list and block the worst offenders. These repeated attempts to spam the site were causing us to be charged by the web hosting for exceeding our bandwidth allowance. A waste of GAGB funds which I managed to nip in the bud before it started costing us too much by...
• Custom coding the user registration form which stops THOUSANDS of bogus registrations and hits to the site. This in turn saves hours of committee member work as committee members were having to sift through all of the bogus user registrations and pick out the genuine ones (When there are 100+ spammer registrations coming in each day it's not an easy task). This task was obviously very error prone and it's easy for genuine users to get denied and the odd spammer to get allowed. As you can see the new registration form is doing the job as we don't have a forum full of SPAM and we haven't received any additional bandwidth charges since it's been in place.
• 100+ (I've lost count now! Lol) hours on website dev. I know members are keen to have the new site in place, but I've had to do a lot of coding and recoding to get the site up to scratch. I can be a bit of a perfectionist at times and I've just been putting off releasing something until I'm totally happy with what I'm giving our members and until I'm confident that enough testing has been done to the site to iron out the obvious bugs. It is being worked on a lot though.

There are probably a few more things, but those come to mind first and I don't want to expand on it to make it too geeky for everyone!

[mollyjak]

Organised a CITO as part of the GAGB10.
Took the GAGB banner to Piratemania and displayed close to our caravan ( a difficult job but someone had to do it )
Spent the day ( after helping for an hour on Registration) on the GAGB stand at the WM Mega. Took part in the GAGB talk and Q & A session.
I reply to general emails and phone calls to the GAGB - if they are specific to another area of responsibility I leave them for the other Committee member to deal with. We CC each other so we are all kept informed.
The area which takes the longest time is as admin on the GAGB Facebook group. During the two years I have been on the Committee approx. 1,000 have been added with some being rejected.

People ask to join, I check if I know them.
If they have friends in the group I know.
If they have other friends in the group.
Then I go into their profile
Do they have family photos, scenery photos, pet photos?
Are they adverting items for sale as in phones?
What type of groups are they in? Other caching groups? Which countries? Some I have seen are in 500 groups.
Are they really a cacher???? or a spammer??
If I am not sure I then email them and ask for their caching name and area? Some come back with the info most don't.

We are having a lot of requests from overseas lately with photos of lovely ladies but they don't reply to me.

Some cachers do not use Facebook but it is Communication. Sometimes we need to moderate the group and we try to diffuse any conflict the best we can.
At the moment I am also shared admin on the new Facebook page.

[Cache on Wheels]

THANK YOU AND WELL DONE
I would like to say great big thanks to the committee for all the work they have done over the past year!!

It goes to show that we all have gifts in many different areas,
It takes people who have a variety of gifts and talents and willingness to learn and join in to make a good team

Some people do specialise in certain areas eg Geocass with her excellent skills in IT.
Some are good all round and able and willing to learn / turn their hand to anything.

The main thing is willing to work well as part if a team with all members for the good if the team / committee

Well done and thank you to you all who have given of your time freely as volunteers for the good of the committees and Geocaching - thank you