h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I finished my last rant saying it was time for me to put my money where my mouth was and turn this branch around. Am I doing that?

I think so.

At the agm, the regional director let us know that the branch he's from have arranged a small pub crawl around here. News to us, they didn't feel the need to let us know. I can't say that I blame them however as this branch hasn't been to a regional meeting in recent memory. They probably forgot that there was a branch here. The RD had a copy of a booklet detailing where to drink here, this booklet is free to download from the branch website and is rather quite good. Small problem though, it's three years out of date. Since it was done, about half the pubs have stopped serving ale completely or it's so bad they're not worth including. That is a lot of pubs lost to this area. On the other hand though, there are several new pubs that are really worth visiting. So, the booklet's out of date. It was kind of lucky then that I'd just been working on something, a city crawl guide. Nine of the best pubs, all within easy walking distance of each other, and had the first draft on me. The RD took this away with him, and yesterday I phoned up the branch that are looking to visit to let them know we had these now and that I could send them down some. They seemed quite eager. Mostly I think that was shock though, "There's a branch there?" you could almost hear his mind thinking. The one problem with this is that I've not had a go ahead from the chairman here. He was supposed to get in touch with me yesterday over a seperate issue and didn't. I tried to get hold of him and couldn't. I know he's busy so I'm just going to have to send these off and hope he's okay about it.

Another that got done yesterday was the distribution of some of the branch newsletters to the pubs in the city, and letting the landlords know about the new committee structure, and then reassuring them that the new pubs officer won't mess up or he's off the committee very quickly.

Talking of him, it's kinda disturbing as he's actually started to do some of the secretary work he was supposed to be doing last year and didn't. Problem being he's no longer the secretary. He's supposed to keep a record ofthe pubs in hte area, make sure it's up to date, keep in touch with the landlords and report anything to the committee. There's not much to this job really, but it does take a bit of time. He seems however to be trying to hi-jack the new cluster system that we're introducing. His theory is, and I can see why, that the people running the clusters will be keeping an eye on the pubs in their areas and should therefore report back to him. Fine. Not fine is that he has decided he's running the cluster scheme because of that. The cluster scheme does so much more. It has aspects of the social secretary in it's role, they should try and organise pub crawls around their cluster. It has aspects of the chairman in it's role, they provide the point of contact, the face to face approach and diplomacy where needed to the landlords. There's aspects of membership secretary in it's role, encouraging new members in their cluster, talking with current members and making sure that their views are heard. It has aspects of media secretary, making sure that the pubs have copies of the newsletter, writing articles/reports for the newsletter. In a way, a person responsible for a cluster is doing the job of the entire committee but for a much smaller area. So, I can't see how they should report to the pubs officer. I'll have to make sure that for the first committee meeting of this new committee I've drawn up a set of guidelines/rules for the cluster system. I don't want any one person on the committee being "in charge" of the clusters. If there has to be a point of feedback it should be the chair/vice-chair or the branch secretary. It helps that the vice and the secretary (me and the missus) have both recently moved up from a branch that had a successful cluster system and know how they're supposed to work. Ideally though, the clusters should be pretty much self governing. With them deciding amongst themselves who, from their own ranks, will represent them at branch meetings. They will need to feed certain information back to individual members of the committee, such as changes to a pub will need to go to the pubs officer, but things like a pub having a beer fest should go to the social secretary. If the pub has decided it's no longer supporting CAMRA, that should go to the chair. If a pub runs out of the newsletter, that should be reported to the media officer.

The other thing I've done is to start drawing up a list of aims for the branch, what it should try and get done in this next committee year. Most of which is organising itself, getting things done in a certain, logical way and making sure everyone knows who does what, and that they do it. Apart from that the main aim is to raise the profile of the branch, which I'm working on.

Ah well. Today's rant done with. Not too much of a rant really.