Meeting of the Kingman Rotary Club: Apr 16, 2008

Announcements

• Please don't forget to pay your quarterly dues before the end of April. Having this information in before the end of April will help us with our annual tax prepration and next year's budgeting.
• Dan has agreed to take the program on April 30 for Eric. Thanks Dan!

Student Rotarian

Our outgoing Student Rotarian, Lauren Christensen, told us a little bit about herself. Aside from being involved in many school and community activities and service groups, Lauren has also maintained employment throughout her high school career. It was a pleasure hearing a little bit about what she's done so far and exciting to think about where she will go from here.

Thank you Lauren, we are proud to have you as a Student Rotarian and welcome you back any time!

The Documentation Project

This week's program was given by yours truly, Cullen. Being a relatively new member (less than two years in), I have seen that it can be difficult at times for a new member, even for long time members, to get really involved. A lot of times it boils down to lack of club operational or historical knowledge. I found that one way to learn about the club was just to jump in head first and take lots of responsibilities head on. In my talk I offer another alternative, which I believe is much less painful for new members - having club documentation.

Let's take a look, for example, at the golf tournament. During the planning and execution of this project, it seemed that lots of people knew bits and pieces of information, but we rarely had everyone with all of the information in the same room at the same time. Scott did a great job with the project and put in an incredible amount of time, and I'm sure that he can attest to the fact that it would have been nice to have a document that described all of the details that he had to discover and scrounge for himself.

To try and address this problem, I have begun a club documentation project using an on-line operational document management application. This tool is similar to a Wiki (if you are familiar with that term) in that it enables all of us to log in and put in our two cents on what we know or think. It also facilitates an editorial process that ensures that misinformation does not creep into our documents and enables everyone to post comments and perform revisions so the load of documenting our activities does not have to overburden a select few members. I will be creating user accounts for everyone with an email address within the next week and I encourage everyone to log in and help out.

For those of you that are interested, you can learn more about the tool at (yes this is my shameless plug since I wrote this software) http://ambitionality.com/, it is called the Op Doc Wizard. There are on-line video tutorials and FAQs.

Thanks everyone for listening to my talk and thank you in advance for helping out in making our club more new-member friendly and more easily innovated. :) Please feel free to give me a call or email if you have any questions or comments.

Guests

Thanks

Thank you to all of the members that helped with duties!

Mystery Rotarian

Rod

50/50 Ticket Sales

Bill

Invocation

Cathy

Song

Wink

Fine Collection

Mike