The Evolution of Groups
When you run an event, if it is successful and grows over time then you can expect the group that runs it to evolve.
This is what has happened with The Great Pumpkin Carnival.
History
The Great Pumpkin Carnival started with one person who had an idea, after the very first year I became involved and at the core of it 2 people organised and ran the event, sure we had a lot of help and a lot of people helped us every year, but at the core it was all organised by 2 people for the last 7 years.
We made a society
Due to various reasons we made the decision to become an incorporated society, this allows us to apply for funding ourselves and be 100% independent.
Our first AGM
Part of the process and it is noted in out rules, is that we have an annual AGM, which we just did for the first time just a couple of days ago. It went smoothly as was expected and we set up a committee to run The Great Pumpkin Carnival, something which is quite new to me.
While being involved in bits and pieces with various things over the years, I am always usually just helping out. I think this is the first time I am on a committee, and actually I am the vice president currently of the committee.
Members
We have a great collection of people that make up the committee and they all come from a wide variety of backgrounds. But are all very keen to help make the pumpkin carnival the best it can be.
The challenges
First off I’m going to have to get used to this whole committee thing, listening to everyone’s point of view and remembering that almost all of them have helped out over the years, a lot of them don’t understand everything we have done behind the scenes over the years.
Technology isn’t really most people’s strong point in the group, and I want to use it, to be able to work smarter and have everyone on the same page. Dealing with emails from one person is bad enough, let alone dealing with emails from a whole bunch of people.
What technology to use?
There is a whole bunch of things that people could use, there are many versions of products or services that people all over the world use. I’ve looked at a lot of them.
And for what we are trying to achieve, there are 2 services that I want to use to help improve efficiency with the committee.
Google Docs
Being able to create docs all in one place where everyone can write and at the same time is a great thing, this will be used for agendas for meetings, and later on follow up documents we may need. I am not expecting too much trouble getting people to use this, it might be slightly foreign to begin with, but everyone can write emails and use a word processor so this, in theory should be nice and easy. I’ll be using a shared link as I know not many people have a google account, and getting the sign up to something could be problematic.
Trello
I love Trello, and we have used it a little bit a couple of years ago when there was just the two of us. And I think it will work well when people get their heads around it, I will demo it at the next meeting and I hope we can use it with high-level planning and keeping a lot of the emailing down to a minimum. I’ll have to see how that goes.
I use Trello heavily for the podcast, and I will write a blog post about that in the near future explaining the process we use and how well it works for us.
