Making decisions...

The computer club saw its first get-together this evening, and was off to a good start with all 20 members making their attendance. A BIG thank you to the parents for having the members at the club on time. It was wonderful to conduct our activities without the interruption of latecomers.

We sat on the floor as I welcomed everybody to the club and we made core decisions together regarding the running of the club. A lot was said and some good ideas surfaced.

First off, some appointments were made:

The Secretary: Anschia Pauw kindly volunteered her services. She will be responsible for taking shorthand notes during the administration part of club meetings and then neatly retyping them for the club to keep a record of.

The Webmaster: Nandi Steyn took on this task. The club as a whole will lay down the format for the club’s online presence. Nandi and Myself will design the artwork but, it is Nandi who will be responsible for updating of the club’s website after every meeting.

The members decided on preliminary rules and accepted behaviour. We discussed the reason for each rule to make sure that everyone understands the importance thereof.

Since the members are representative of two languages, a mixture of both Afrikaans and English will be used by myself and guest speakers. Given the nature of computer terminology I’m sure that English would be the prevalent choice. The club members will of course communicate in their own home language.

Members were given until Friday the 6^th of August to email me with the nicknames (something directly relating to computers) they chose for themselves. It was also decided that – since we’re such a cool club – we’ll refer to these nicknames as “codenames”. We will use these codenames to address each other. Since I’m the leader of the pack, my codename will be “motherboard”. I have arranged for nice name badges which we will wear during meetings. It was also suggested that we rename the most talkative club member to something like “speaker” or “headphones”. ...Watch out Willem-Adriaan, I can just see that codename pinned to your collar. :-)

Members were also asked to come up with a logo which will represent the Sunridge Computer Club.

I guess that everything can’t always run smoothly. This was proven when we ran into our first hiccup in the form of our ThinkQuest registrations. I suspect that there might be a restriction of rights on our school servers. I’ll sort this out in this week. Just so that the parents know: ThinkQuest is a safe online portal where only myself and the club members can message, brainstorm, vote, collaborate, and Q&A with each other. I suspect that this will become the club members' primary means of sharing thoughts.

Lastly: Each club meeting will tackle a new computer term as part of our activities. As the Sunridge Computer Club, we need to get our geek talk straight. :-) “URL” was the term for this evening. It is something we use very often when surfing the net BUT you probably know it as the “web address”. That’s right, URL is short for Uniform Resource Locator and is the www.sunridge.co.za; www.google.com; www.telkomsa.net; etc which you type into your web browser.

Now that we have most of the administration and formalities out of the way, we can move on to some advanced learning with a dash of fun thrown in of course.

Till two weeks from now, this is Motherboard signing off.