Just now was the Annual General Meeting(AGM). Basically this meeting is to select incoming members to run the committee for the next coming year. And there was quite some heated exchanges, and i'm here to share my thoughts.
ok some brief history. Just 2 sems ago, a new boardgame club emerge from the shadows to hope gather boardgamers(casual and hardcore) as an interest group to promote boardgame culture in NTU. A group of boardgame enthusiasts went to SAO(Student Affairs Office) to officialise the club. SAO say "ok no problem", BUTTTTT, there is a conflict of interest with the current club, LnH(leisure and hobbies), therefore this boardgame club will be a sub-club under LnH. Boo!
LnH is a very small club(20 strong members) that ONLY run events like holding scrabble, weiqi, chinese chess competitions for the whole freaking year. PERIOD. And to my shock, for the past 10 yrs or so, it was run by an Hall2-majority committee. To just the get the hall points for doing so little?? well, I'm not here to judge. A hall2 tradition? crap....
Having some internal delays with SAO only saw the boardgame SUB-CLUB started its operations just last sem. The boardgame SUB-CLUB then was prospering in its own ways, holding weekly gaming sessions, gathering liasons with external sources(Pitstop, Settlers, Paradigm Infinitum, NUS, SMU), effectively having its own branding so as to be more recognize as a known club in NTU. And it was where the PLAY, EXPLORE, CREATE spirit emerge as a powerful force in NTU. We call our club, FASTFORWARD. BUTTTT we are still a SUB-CLUB, hmm...and y is the sub-club doing more stuff than the main club? More rantings below.....
This year's recruitment drive: no signs of LnH booth at all showing wat they are doing to the freshies. Fastforward was way ahead... getting more than 200 members on our mailing list. You can see in the previous posts la. a world record in my books....
Members: Up till date, 60 plus members paid us 5 bucks for the membership fees. LnH? Only recruit its own hall 2 members with no money. sadly only 20 odd strong? ya i think its quite ok to hold traditional games for a year. :)
Recognition: A survey response from Year 4 friends: "Is there such a club call LnH?" Obviously for a 10-yr old club, the publicity portfolio is ........ (fill in the blank yourself) up.
Publicity: FASTFORWARD has its own SUB-CLUB logo, tagline, banner, blog and forum. PERIOD.
Y all these rantings? Well, we lost the votes during the meeting, and we felt injustice. LnH has an advantage here. All its members and followers stay in Hall 2, so they can afford to SLOWLY walk down from their hall and vote. Our members of course dun have the luxury to do that, most went home already. And did i mention that late comers shouldn't vote? wait for the whole damn day just to wait to get their votes... piece of shit. We got our votes through honest membership, not some last min "eh-u-free-ah-come-down-vote-for-us-leh" votes. We paid our membership so early on and as for their voters, they paid on the spot. Some paid, write their votes and left the LT in 10mins. wtf? might as well just call up or sms or do fund transfer.....
basically our aim here in this AGM is to get our guys to be on the majority of the LnH committee, so we can do our own stuff more freely, not tied down as a sub-club. We have already suggested to SAO that we break away from LnH and of course, was rejected.
it was only during the rallies, where the action starts. it was actually quite peaceful until weixiong(going for vp) starts to give frank comments on the current situation. seriously i din know that was coming, if he din't started, i think the whole thing would have ended earlier. but we all know we have lost and he was damn rite to say how we felt. we stood up and gave him the applause. the oppositions, shot wx on what he said, but he handled it perfectly, catching all the bullets unhurt. on the other end, our machine guns shot the opposition until they have to play with words to come to an agreement. quite chic i must say. they make good politicians though. actually quite admire their determination.
they mentioned to join us and come across as a combined effort. y? cos we are good. we mentioned all the objectives of what a club should do and aim. and they want to grab hold of us. we have all the concrete ideas, holding inter-varsities, collaborating with national events, liasing with external resources. as for theirs, "we dun have any ideas, means that we are open to ideas." know what i mean when i say they like to play with words....... and we din even mention to do a combine effort with them. ha.
so in order to give us an impression that they are not losing, they mention not to forgo the traditional games if we were to run the club together. and that we should continue. in my opinion, its just a way to say that they still want a foothold/tradition in the club... and that they don't want to give up.... we already mention that the games will only run by popularity. if weiqi is more popular than blokus, so be it, then we will of course hold weiqi competitions. but i see it as unlikely, from the membership you can see obviously, pple are more interested in newer games. and to become successful we ought to go with the trend, isn't it? y still stick with the old traditional games? yes we can still take them out and play them, but y not broaden the variety? thats our point.
they did mention we might not find new blood replacing our current passionate committee if we have graduated because their new blood is always from hall2 freshies. i dun see that as a problem with 60+ members really. you guys only get those freshies to fill up the positions and get the points and of course not to mention the joke of the day, as a "personal favour to teresa". o.... how noble! do i see any passion from your new bloods......? all are just "personal favour" and "want to get points" reasons......
ok enuff ranting.. now is nearly 3 am and i still have work tmr...... my hope now is just to take a break from LnH la...... let them live their own freaking hermit world and we have our fun.
cheers and thanks for reading ")
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