GAMERT (Gaming) Round Table

GAMERT Board Meeting | July 70 2020 at 10 AM ET

In Attendance (nine out of ten): 

• Tina Coleman (Staff Liaison) 
• Jennifer Bartlett (Past President) x
• Jessica Parij (President) x
• Thomas Vose (President Elect) x
• Erica Ruscio (Secretary) x
• George Bergstrom (Treasurer) x
• Tricia Boucher (Member at Large) x
• Jessica Spears (Member at Large) x
• Dan Major (Member at Large) x
• Rebecca Strang (Member at Large) x

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Meetings - we are required to meet quarterly, but we are looking to maybe also do a monthly meeting -- Jessica P will send out a doodle poll to see what works.

Finalizing the GameRT Handbook - Sections we discussed are bolded and topics are italicized

• We discussed the mission statement at the beginning and decided that going forward we would just select “track changes” and then Erica will do final grammar edits, but board will discuss ideas.
• We decided to come back to purpose.
• Everyone likes the History section!
• Membership - this is from ALA and cannot be changed.
• Committee Participation - can we add a link for folks?

• Division of Responsibilities - we suggested changing the following

• Vice-President officer title to just President-Elect

• Should we update the President section to specifying serving three terms? President-Elect/President/Past President? How do we list this? We decided to say each term is one year, but it is part of a three year sequence, and so to use the same language for each title will be helpful (we now have a President-Elect, President, and Past President section -- huzzah!).
• Members at Large - we fixed it to say two year appointment
• Midwinter comes up a lot -- we have not had a strong presence in midwinter and it is being rebranded. Do we want to control+F to remove the references? Most of the references to midwinter are in reference to meeting minutes -- does GameRT need a physical presence? Or can we just submit virtually?
• Committees - Thomas suggested they are chaired by board members or members at large to streamline communication.

• Secretary - new function to serve as chair outreach committee for now while interest in chairing committees is low? This will be handed over from Thomas who is currently chairing it. We are also changing the timeline of minutes from a six week turnaround to two weeks.

• Program Committee - will Rebecca S be the new chair? She has never been to Annual so she will need to touch base with previous chairs to make sure she has what she needs to be successful. Also, should this committee be establishing conference/convention presence be handled under (like how GNC has gotten free tables at Read Pop)? Does this committee look at programming outside ALA Annual? Annual would be first priority, but then do we look into webinars, etc? We may already have some recorded webinars that we can link to as a shortcut.  

• IGW Committee - IGW Backup - George is happy to help.

• Strategic Planning Committee - should the Program Committee or the Strategic Planning Committee poll members to see what they want? We decided to give this task, polling, to this committee. And to make the Past President the chair. We also want this committee to reach out to designers, publishers, etc. and to build those relationships. Board members are excited about the expanded function of making connections with the larger gaming community. We can be so insular sometimes and we can be bad at marketing what we do. If the bigger world isn’t seeing what we are doing, there is a lack of buy-in from the larger world. We also want to change this from an ad hoc to a standing committee. We need to get a list from Brian of existing contacts and also lists of contacts from Program Committee. This committee would also stay up to date on changes and trends in gaming.

• What we do - IGW, sessions at ALA, ALA Play, and now the gaming grants. These are open to ALA members -- what do we offer for our members exclusively? Should we also step up our professional development game (we charge for non RT members and RT members get free access)? We would need to make sure our webinars etc. are approved by CE state boards. 

• Nomination Committee - is staying ad hoc.

• Grant Committee - this is ad hoc, with President Elect as chair.

Links & Resources Mentioned

• toplayishuman.com - Rebecca’s podcast

***Action Items

• Jessica:
• Doodle Poll for August meeting (will discuss handbook further and cleaning up social media admins)
• Check in with Tina about committee questions. On the back end, all Jessica P can see is the Game On Grant - why can’t she see other committees? Also, we are still waiting on information on folks who applied to be on committees so Jessica P can appoint committee members! Also, we want to add Strategic Planning to the committee application form which was ad hoc until today. Also asking her about updating the website with a current board list.
• Jessica P will communicate with the whole membership - a League Post and a Connect Post once she gets the information from Tina on membership.
• Thomas will contact Erica for Membership & Outreach Committee Stuff
• Erica will hold off on the Quarterly newsletter until the next board meeting.
• Members at Large - how do they work on getting onto committees? Jessica P is doing all of the committee appointments. They will need to fill out the official form and then reach out to Jessica P.