The meeting was scheduled to begin at 7:00 pm via Zoom.
Present: Sue Fagalde Lick (President), Nancy Christopherson (Vice President and Adult Contest Committee Chair), Dan Liberthson (Secretary), Rana Tahir (Treasurer and Webmaster), Dave Mehler (Membership Chair and Publications Liaison), Lorna Rose-Hahn (Membership Co-Chair, Outreach Chair, Events Committee Chair), Priscilla Hunter (Historian), and Lauren Mallett (Cascadia Contest Chair)
Not Present: Rayn Roberts (At-large)
I. Sue called the meeting to order at 7:05 pm.
II. Approval of Minutes
Approval of the November 9, 2021 OPA Board meeting minutes was moved and seconded, and the Board voted unanimously to approve.
III. Officer Reports
A. President’s Report (Sue Fagalde Lick)
- The website revision continues with content revisions and a new president’s address. Release is planned for January.
- Verseweavers 2020 (Spring and Fall) is printed and mailing is in progress.
- Erik Muller, a popular Oregon poet, has died. The Salem Poetry Project will celebrate his life on Jan. 6. Sue will talk to Jennifer Rood about writing an acknowledgment.
- We received a letter from a mother thanking us for assembling a collection of student resources and putting it on the website.
- In compiling a list of Oregon poetry units/groups, Sue found that only Mid-Valley was still ac-tive. We hold funds and do accounting/payment for them. We got an email from the Nebraska Poetry Association requesting that we publicize their contest, so Sue put it on our website.
B. Vice President’s Report (Nancy Christopherson)
Nancy is getting to know the Board members and assembling for future outreach a list of colleges and universities in Oregon and a list of public libraries (there are 223). There are many small community poetry groups, Priscilla mentioned, and it would be good to get them into OPA.
C. Secretary (Dan Liberthson)
No report.
D. Treasurer (Rana Tahir)
OPA’s net worth is $47,727. Dan made a motion to accept the 2022 budget that Rana has developed (see last month’s minutes), which was seconded and unanimously approved.
E. Historian (Priscilla Hunter)
Priscilla submitted the following proposal for discussion regarding a strategy for archiving OPA history.
Step 1
The Board chooses a Google Drive basic plan over a DropBox plan to support the creation and implementation of an OPA digital Historian Book. Google Drive has many advantages over DropBox for supporting the number and type of files we foresee wanting to store in the Historian Book. Advantages include the provision of
• much more and much more inexpensive storage space
• a free “trial” that is unlimited in time (standard on Google Drive).
• support for a much greater variety of files and less cost of additional storage.
Step 2
The Board creates and charges a pilot design team. This may be a “team,” a committee, or a sub-committee as required in the Bylaws.
Recommended personnel: Rana (webmaster), Priscilla, and a past historian (Jennifer Rood?)
Recommended charge: Over the next months and up to one year, this team will carry out its charge to use Google Drive’s free 15 GB online storage for discovery and implementation, with a goal of (1) securing a working preliminary “Historian Book” that operates online and (2) integrating it as an anchoring platform into an already existing but scattered historical system of historian record keeping.
• Pilot Focus: current documents and artifacts.
• Target “Book”: the hub or centerpiece of Re-ports due at each Board meeting.
Step 3
The Board invites three or four interested OPA members (see recommendations above) to make the pilot historian book.
Discussion: The historian book will be a document vault on a platform that starts with the present year. We need to decide what the “historical year” (OPA year) will be and what to include in the vault. Suggested were minutes and other documents; motions made and results of votes on motions; conferences; and contests (e.g., who submitted and the prizewinners). Historian Book 2021 would be created first, and then 2022, etc., adjusting the organization as needed. Rana suggested that it might be simpler to put the archives on the OPA website. To organize the history from past years, it might be feasible to create an internship for a college student project to collect, organize, and place the materials. Sue suggested discussing the internship at the next Board meeting and launching the Historian Book project in February after the revised website goes live. A motion was made to es-tablish a Historian Book on Google drive beginning with 2021. The motion was seconded and unanimously approved. Rana will create a Historian gmail address and set up folders, starting with 2021 and working backward. Prior historians can dump any digital records they have on the drive for later organization by the Historian. Sue mentioned that a permanent place should be found to store a box of paper documents now in possession of prior ex-Historian Jennifer Rood.
IV. Committee Reports
A. Membership and Publications Liaison (Dave Mehler)
OPA has 363 members. Verseweavers 2020 books are being mailed out.
B. Adult Contests (Nancy Christopherson)
Nancy hopes to have contest judges lined up by the next Board meeting. She wants to end submis-sions by mail and go digital (i.e., Submittable only). Rana moved to end snail-mail submissions to the adult contest and this motion was seconded and unanimously approved. Nancy asked for ap-proval of her budget for the contests (see last month’s minutes). After some discussion about whether contest prizes should be greater than honoraria for the judges, Dan moved to adopt Nan-cy’s budget and the motion was seconded and unanimously approved. Lorna asked why the con-test has seven entry categories, which limits the prize amounts because budgeted prize money must be distributed among first, second, and third place winners in all these categories. Rana said that having so many categories provides enough poems to fill our Verseweavers publications. Merging the members and nonmembers categories and perhaps other changes may be discussed in the future.
C. Youth Contests (Lauren Mallett)
Lauren is compiling a notification list for Cascadia 2022. Sue suggested sending contest infor-mation to superintendents of school districts to disseminate, which would reduce the burden on Lauren of getting the word out. Sue asked for updates on the conference timeline. Having Board members serve as judges was discussed. It was decided that the Board is open to serving as Cas-cadia judges, and this option will be considered as part of contest planning.
D. Social Media/Events (Lorna Rose)
Most traffic is on Facebook, where OPA has 946 likes. Lorna is working on getting onto Insta-gram, where OPA already has an account. We need to find who started that account rather than opening another, to avoid confusion. Notices of news about local poets and OPA members engag-es the greatest number of Facebook users. Lorna tries to post a variety of items to attract a broader audience.
E. Webmaster (Rana Tahir)
Rana presented the revised website skeleton. She is filling in the content and expects the new web-site to go live in January.
V. Old Business
None.
VI. New Business
Verseweavers reading dates were set for February 1 and 3 at 7 pm. Lorna asked to be informed of who is reading when. We should try to entice those attending the readings to submit to the con-tests, so they will have a chance to read as well. Whether to set up other readings and events will be discussed at the January Board meeting.
VII. Announcements
The next Board meeting will be on January 18 at 7 pm.
VIII. Adjournment
The meeting was adjourned at 8:45 pm.
Minutes recorded and prepared by Dan Liberthson, Secretary