Meeting Date: March 24, 2020
Re: Division Activities, Second Quarter
Present: Paula Arturo, Admin.; Liz Herron-Sweet, Assistant Admin; Ana Gauz; Arnold Winter; Graciela Izaía y Ruiz
Call to Order
The meeting was called to order at approximately 2 p.m. EST by Paula Arturo.
Items on the Agenda
A. Purpose of the Meeting
This meeting of the Law Division has been convened for the following purposes:
- To ensure that all Leadership Council (LC) members are aware of division activities
- To ensure proper consultation of the LC before moving forward with any such activities
- To foster a healthy dialog among LC members on all matters pertaining to the division
- To update the LC on recent developments
B. Recruitment Efforts
We have too many volunteers for the law journal, but not enough volunteers for the blog and social media. We thought we had someone on board for the blog, but that person didn’t come through. We discussed that if we have to push volunteers too hard to actually do the volunteer work they signed up to do, we’re better off investing our time in finding volunteers who are more proactive. Arnold Winter suggested we use our social media channels to identify and recruit volunteers, please see item I below.
C. Education Survey
The education survey for division members is almost ready to be distributed by ATA. We realized it didn’t include questions about social media preferences. We think it might be a good idea to run some short polls on Twitter, Facebook, and the listserv.
D. Webinar Proposals
The members present agree with the education sub-committee that the proposal we received is not the best option for our first webinar. It occurred to us to reach out to specific members with specific ideas and try to persuade them to teach a webinar for us. Some names came up. Paula will start an email thread for the LC to propose names and topics.
E. Monique’s Proposal
Since Monique was not present, we put this on hold.
F. Journal Proposal
Arnold suggested we mention that the journal will be open access. Other than that, members present approved the proposal (with some minor corrections of typos). Paula will submit an amended draft on Wednesday the 25th for the LC to review. We will try to wrap this up by Friday, the 27th at 8 pm EST.
G. Website/Blog Revamp
Our new webmaster is waiting on some revised information from us; Paula and Grace will work on the new text and sections over the weekend. If other LC members who were not present want to volunteer to help, they are encouraged to do so.
H. Conference:
H.1. Distinguished Speaker (DS)
We reviewed and recommended that our DS’s proposal be accepted.
H.2. Conference proposals
The following criteria were followed: proposals with typos or linguistic errors were automatically rejected; proposals we thought were interesting but too niche were waitlisted; proposals we thought were outstanding were approved.
I. Social Media
Arnold suggested that we use our social media channel to update members on board activities, tell them about our meetings beforehand, give them a chance to give us feedback, report to our members after our meetings, and use these channels as a recruitment tool.
We also thought each LC member could try to send Paula one article or item of interest per week in their language pair to be posted on our social media. Amongst us we cover Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, Hebrew, and Spanish, which could potentially make for an interesting mix of languages and topics. Paula will then schedule it on her Hootsuite planner and that way we’ll share relevant content in more languages every week.
J. Board Report
We skipped this item on the agenda. We’ll discuss it by email instead.
The meeting was adjourned at approximately 4:30 pm EST.
Submitted by Paula Arturo
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