Minutes of the ACMA 2001 Annual General Meeting

Held at the Centre for Contemporary Performance, University of Western Sydney, 14th July 2001.

President Andrew Brown opened the meeting at 6.40 pm. Fifteen financial members of the Association were present.


Attendance

Rodney Berry
Andrew Brown
Chris Cree Brown
Lea Collins
Paul Doornbusch
John Elmsley
Anthony Hood
Peter Mcilwain
Lisa Meridan-Skipp
Gordon Monro
Garth Paine
Greg Schiemer
Bruce Schneider
Ian Stevenson (non-financial)
Adrian van den Dries
Benn Woods

Apologies

No apologies were received from financial members.


Minutes of the previous meeting


Unfortunately the Secretary was not able to be present, and the minutes were not available. Andrew Brown summarised the proceedings of the previous meeting.


Business arising from the previous meeting


There was no business arising.


President’s report

Andrew Brown reported that ACMA had continued to function during the year (which had been a matter of doubt). Chroma had been taken over by Dan Horwood (following Warren Burt), and two issues had been produced, which were snail-mailed to everyone on the mailing list, whether they were financial members or not. The electronic mailing list acma-l had been transferred to Waikato together with the Web site, which were both being looked after by Ian Whalley.



Treasurer’s report

Anthony Hood presented a provisional report. It is provisional because there were some missing bank statements, and there was a discrepancy of approximately $140. However all the major items were correct. Anthony commented that the mail-out of Chroma was a major expense and that in future it would only be sent to financial members.

Motion: That the treasurer’s provisional report be accepted.

Moved: Andrew Brown. Seconded: Paul Doornbusch. Carried.


Membership Officer’s report

Peter Mcilwain reported that while before the conference there were only 6 financial members, there are now 26. He commented that there are currently no institutional members.



ACMA website report 2000/2002.

Throughout the year, the ACMA site was updated as new material was forwarded. Chroma has now been added up to the current No. 30. The site remains to be run free of traffic and hosting charges to ACMA off the Webserver at Waikato University. Connect West continues to register the domain name gratis. It takes me about an hour a week to maintain.

There was one glitch in the year (early July) were the site could not be accessed due to a DNS configuration problem. I am waiting on a reply from Connect West to address this problem at the time of writing. The site gets around 200 hits a day. The April stats are a good average, although the hit rate usually increases dramatically closer to the annual conference.

A summary of stats for Sun-01-Apr-2001 00:11 to
Mon-30-Apr-2001
23:20 (29.96 days) are below.

These patterns give an indication of what the ACMA executive might want to discuss/provide in terms of more information for the site so that it is more responsive to users.

Ian Whalley

General Summary

This report contains overall statistics.
Successful requests: 5,764
Average successful requests per day: 192
Successful requests for pages: 3,347
Average successful requests for pages per day: 111
Distinct files requested: 57
Distinct hosts served: 1,028
Data transferred: 122.784 Mbytes
Average data transferred per day: 4.097 Mbytes
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Directory Report

Listing directories with at least 0.01% of the traffic, sorted by the
Amount of traffic.

reqs: %bytes: directory
----: ------: ---------
4382: 72.30%: [root directory]
883: 26.80%: /Chroma26-27/
499: 0.90%: /grafics/

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Request Report

This report lists the files on the site.
Listing files, sorted by the number of requests.

reqs: %reqs: last time: file
----: ------: ---------------: ----
736: 21.99%: 30/Apr/01 22:31: /
592: 17.69%: 30/Apr/01 22:31: /main5.html
563: 16.82%: 30/Apr/01 22:31: /nav5.html
317: 9.47%: 30/Apr/01 23:20: /Chroma24.html
217: 6.48%: 30/Apr/01 17:39: /Chroma24.pdf
128: 3.82%: 30/Apr/01 19:31: /conferences.html
127: 3.79%: 30/Apr/01 22:32: /links.html
119: 3.56%: 30/Apr/01 22:31: /whats_on.html
114: 3.41%: 30/Apr/01 17:53: /Chroma26-27/Chroma26-27.html
86: 2.57%: 30/Apr/01 19:58: /Chroma.html
75: 2.24%: 30/Apr/01 22:31: /committee.html
71: 2.12%: 30/Apr/01 22:32: /ozcomp.html
62: 1.85%: 29/Apr/01 02:16: /Chroma25.html
48: 1.43%: 30/Apr/01 19:30: /application2.html
39: 1.17%: 28/Apr/01 13:48: /Chroma25.pdf
29: 0.87%: 29/Apr/01 12:26: /2001Waveform.PDF
24: 0.72%: 27/Apr/01 10:33: /Chroma26-27/evidence.html

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Domain Report

This report lists the countries of the computers which requested files.

Listing domains with at least 2 requests, sorted by the number of requests.


reqs: %reqs: domain
----: ------: ------
1462: 25.36%: .au (Australia)
1067: 18.51%: .com (Commercial)
890: 15.44%: [unresolved numerical addresses]
794: 13.78%: .net (Network)
159: 2.76%: .nz (New Zealand)
77: 1.34%: ac.nz
25: 0.43%: tekotago.ac.nz
22: 0.38%: waikato.ac.nz
17: 0.29%: auckland.ac.nz
13: 0.23%: otago.ac.nz
58: 1.01%: co.nz
24: 0.42%: net.nz
144: 2.50%: .edu (USA Educational)
138: 2.39%: .nl (Netherlands)
138: 2.39%: .ca (Canada)
109: 1.89%: .uk (United Kingdom)
77: 1.34%: .jp (Japan)
65: 1.13%: [domain not given]
58: 1.01%: .es (Spain)
57: 0.99%: .cz (Czech Republic)
52: 0.90%: .fr (France)
51: 0.88%: .de (Germany)
48: 0.83%: .ch (Switzerland)
44: 0.76%: .co (Colombia)
39: 0.68%: .cl (Chile)
31: 0.54%: .br (Brazil)
31: 0.54%: .it (Italy)
26: 0.45%: .se (Sweden)
25: 0.43%: .at (Austria)
18: 0.31%: .dk (Denmark)
18: 0.31%: .il (Israel)
17: 0.29%: .be (Belgium)
16: 0.28%: .my (Malaysia)
16: 0.28%: .us (United States)
16: 0.28%: .gr (Greece)
15: 0.26%: .pl (Poland)
15: 0.26%: .no (Norway)
14: 0.24%: .ar (Argentina)
12: 0.21%: .mx (Mexico)
10: 0.17%: .ie (Ireland)
10: 0.17%: .sg (Singapore)
8: 0.14%: .fi (Finland)
8: 0.14%: .pt (Portugal)
7: 0.12%: .arpa (Old style Arpanet)
6: 0.10%: .pf (French Polynesia)
6: 0.10%: .ph (Philippines)
5: 0.09%: .org (Non-Profit Making Organisations)
5: 0.09%: .fj (Fiji)
5: 0.09%: .hk (Hong Kong)
5: 0.09%: .hu (Hungary)
5: 0.09%: .tr (Turkey)
5: 0.09%: .sk (Slovakia)
4: 0.07%: .tw (Taiwan)
4: 0.07%: .si (Slovenia)
3: 0.05%: .uy (Uruguay)
3: 0.05%: .gov (USA Government)
3: 0.05%: [not listed: 3 domains]

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Referring Site Report

This report lists which servers people followed links from.

Listing the top 30 referring sites by the number of requests, sorted by the number of requests.

reqs: %reqs: site
----: ------: ----
3021: 75.71%: http://www.acma.asn.au/
229: 5.74%: http://acma.asn.au/
223: 5.59%: http://www.google.com/
133: 3.33%: http://farben.latrobe.edu.au/
70: 1.75%: http://google.yahoo.com/
29: 0.73%: http://www.altavista.com/
20: 0.50%: http://www.csu.edu.au/

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Referrer Report

This report lists the referrers (where people followed links from, or pages which included this site's images).

Listing referring URLs, sorted by the number of requests.

reqs: URL
----: ---
947: http://www.acma.asn.au/main5.html
594: http://www.acma.asn.au/Chroma26-27/Chroma26-27.html
468: http://www.acma.asn.au/
407: http://www.acma.asn.au/nav5.html
301: http://www.acma.asn.au/Chroma24.html
222: http://www.google.com/search
210: http://www.acma.asn.au/Chroma25.html
132: http://farben.latrobe.edu.au/ACMA/
70: http://google.yahoo.com/bin/query
68: http://acma.asn.au/main5.html
46: http://acma.asn.au/nav5.html
45: http://www.acma.asn.au/Chroma26-27/evidence.html
45: http://acma.asn.au/Chroma25.html
43: http://acma.asn.au/Chroma24.html
33: http://www.acma.asn.au/Chroma.html
28: http://www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query
27: http://acma.asn.au/
19: http://www.google.de/search
16: http://www.csu.edu.au/australia/culture.html
11: http://search.ninemsn.com.au/results.asp
10: http://www.audiomulch.com/links.htm


------------------------------------------------------------------------

File Type Report

This report lists the extensions of requested files.
Listing extensions with at least 0.1% of the traffic, sorted by the amount of traffic.

reqs: %reqs: Mbytes: %bytes: extension
----: ------: -------: ------: ---------
2326: 40.35%: 45.549: 37.10%: .html [Hypertext Markup Language]
1896: 32.89%: 40.951: 33.35%: .gif [GIF graphics]
256: 4.44%: 26.438: 21.53%: .pdf [Adobe Portable Document Format]
521: 9.04%: 9.399: 7.66%: .jpg [JPEG graphics]
29: 0.50%: 0.227: 0.19%: .pdf [Adobe Portable Document Format]
736: 12.77%: 0.218: 0.18%: [directories]

------------------------------------------------------------------------




Operating System Report

This report lists the operating systems used by visitors.
Listing operating systems, sorted by the number of requests for pages.

reqs: pages: %pages: OS
----: -----: ------: --
3542: 1858: 55.98%: Windows
1882: 1011: 30.46%: Windows 98
501: 250: 7.53%: Windows NT
418: 223: 6.72%: Windows 95
387: 202: 6.09%: Windows 2000
321: 158: 4.76%: Windows Me
27: 13: 0.39%: Unknown Windows
6: 1: 0.03%: Windows 32-bit
1252: 788: 23.74%: Macintosh
1233: 780: 23.50%: Macintosh PowerPC
19: 8: 0.24%: Macintosh 68k
625: 461: 13.89%: OS unknown
188: 167: 5.03%: Robots
126: 44: 1.33%: Unix
93: 34: 1.02%: Linux
32: 9: 0.27%: SunOS
1: 1: 0.03%: IRIX
3: 1: 0.03%: WebTV


Election of committee members

All of the office-bearers listed were elected unopposed.

Executive officers

President: Andrew Brown.
Nominated: Peter Mcilwain. Seconded: Gordon Monro.


Vice-President: Lisa Meridan-Skipp.
Nominated: John Elmsly. Seconded: Chris Cree Brown.


Secretary: Peter Mcilwain.
Nominated: Andrew Brown. Seconded: Garth Paine.


Treasurer: Anthony Hood.
Nominated: Greg Schiemer. Seconded: Iain Mott.


Non-executive officers

Publications officer: Dan Harwood.
Nominated: Peter Mcilwain. Seconded: Chris Cree Brown.

Web officer: Ian Whalley.
Nominated: Lisa Meridan-Skipp. Seconded: Chris Cree Brown.

Membership officer: Peter Mcilwain.
Nominated: Andrew Brown. Seconded: Anthony Hood.

Public officer: Ross Bencina.
Nominated: Andrew Brown. Seconded: Peter Mcilwain.

Promotions officer: Adrian van den Dries.
Nominated: Lisa Meridan-Skipp. Seconded: Chris Cree Brown.

Andrew Brown noted that the Public Officer is required to be a resident of Victoria. None of the other positions have such a requirement.


Other business

The inclusion of ACMA membership in the conference fee

Motion: That the membership fee be automatically included in the full conference attendance fee.

Moved: Garth Paine. Seconded: Gordon Monro

Note: The word “full” in the motion was added during the discussion by Garth.


Garth spoke to his motion. This proposal will boost the membership, and since these people will automatically get Chroma, the community will be strengthened.


Paul Dornbusch raised the question of people who are given free registration at the conference because they are not otherwise able to attend. It was suggested that they would be given free student/unemployed membership.


Lisa Meridan-Skipp said that a snail mail reminder about membership would need to be sent to members who do not attend the conference.


Peter Mcilwain said that a lot of people are reluctant to join ACMA at present.

Anthony Hood said that the benefits of membership are Chroma and a discount on conference registration; if the motion is passed this second benefit will disappear.


Lisa Meridan-Skipp suggested that people who registered for only one day of the conference would not get the membership included. This was accepted by Garth.


The motion was carried.


(2) Membership fee increase

Motion: That the membership fee be increased to $30, but that student/unemployed membership remain at $15.

Moved: Anthony Hood. Seconded: Peter Mcilwain.
Note: The effect of this motion is modified by the one in (6) below.

Peter Mcilwain suggested that the fee should be $35, but neither Anthony Hood nor Andrew Brown supported this suggestion, and after a brief discussion the motion as above was carried.


(3) Timing of conference


It was reported that Greg Jenkins and one or two other people had indicated that the Thursday-to-Saturday timing was bad for them, as they could not take time off work and were not willing to travel interstate for just one day of the conference. A Friday-to-Sunday conference would mean that they could attend for two days. Chris Cree Brown said that the New Zealanders were currently in teaching time and would also prefer a Friday-to-Sunday conference.


Garth Paine said that people with installations needed a day to disassemble them, so for him the Thursday-to-Saturday timing allowed him to dismantle his installation on Sunday and still get back to work on Monday.


Andrew Brown said that he and Julian had discussed the issue. The meeting did not issue a direction, but it was agreed that the points made in discussion should be brought to the attention of future conference organisers.


(4) Location of future conferences

A proposal having fallen through, there is no firm offer for the 2002 conference. Several possibilities were discussed, but in the absence of the relevant people it was agreed that this should be pursued by the executive.


Similarly, for 2003 there were several suggestions but no firm offers.

(5) Members’ URLs on the Web site

It is a benefit of membership that member can have a link on the ACMA Web site. Peter Mcilwain asked for clarification, and Andrew said that a member can nominate any URL he or she chooses. It was pointed out that institutional members also get this benefit.


(6) Currency problems for New Zealand members


Lisa Meridan-Skipp said that there were horrendous bank fees for New Zealand members trying to pay the Australian dollar membership fee.


Anthony Hood listed two possibilities:

  1. The Association could obtain credit card facilities. This had been investigated, and proved too expensive (something like $500 per year).

  2. The Association could set up a New Zealand bank account.

Chris Cree Brown suggested a third:

  1. A New Zealand member could act as a central collection point, so that only one bank transfer fee would be incurred.


After some discussion it was agreed that the third possibility should be tried, and that ACMA would pay the transfer fee.


After further discussion about exchange rates, the following motion was proposed.

Motion: (1) That the membership fee for New Zealand residents be $NZ 30; with a student/unemployed rate of $NZ 15 and institutional membership of $NZ 100.
(2) That residents of countries other than Australia and New Zealand pay in Australian dollars.

Moved: Paul Doornbusch. Seconded: Lisa Meridan-Skipp.

The motion was carried.


(7) Attendance of students


Andrew Brown commented that in general it has been difficult to get students to attend ACMA conferences, despite cheap registration. This year a group of eight students came down from QUT. Benn Woods said that the students had their attendance partly supported by a grant from the QUT student guild, and suggested that similar grants might be obtained from student guilds or unions at other places.




Andrew Brown closed the meeting at 7.45 pm.