Board meeting notes from Oct. 2, 2015

# Early Career Ecologists organizational meeting

 This meeting was held primarily for the current board members to introduce ourselves to each other and to discuss activities we are planning on proposing, sponsoring, and/or supporting as a section.

 

## Attendees

 Sarah Supp (Chair); Rob Salguero-Gomez (Vice-Chair); Matt Aiello-Lammens (Secretary); Christel Kern (Blog Editor)

 

## Minutes

 Meeting started shortly after 11 AM Central Time, via Google Hangouts. We had some difficulty setting up the meeting through hangouts and may consider using Skype or Firefox Hello for our next meeting.

 Sarah laid out the agenda for the meeting:

 1. Introductions

2. Discuss events we’re planning on proposing and/or supporting

3. Opening up the conversation to other things we should/could so as a section

 Each attendee gave a brief introduction, discussed why the are interested in participating in the organization of the section, and described some of their goals for the section.

 Most of the conversation focused on planning for events at ESA 2016. Proposals are due for most events in November. We decided to add a section at the top of the planning document that gives a snapshot of what proposals are going in, who’s leading them, when they’re due, etc.

 We agreed that the Chair, Vice-Chair, and Secretary will plan to attend ESA 2016, and that at least one of us will attend each of the events that is accepted. We think it’s best if one of the authors of the proposal for the event attends, but understanding that there are many uncertainties this far out from the meeting, the primary officers will be “on call”.

 Sarah voiced her idea that any proposal that ECES supports should be read/reviewed by at least one of the primary officers. Rob and Matt agreed.

 Sarah is continuing to develop the long-range grant proposal to support the mentoring program that debuted at ESA 2015. Rob will provide feedback on this and send around a similar grant he was involved with as an officer of the student section. Matt will also provide feedback before the proposal is due.

 We discussed the idea of having additional officers who take charge on special interests. This is already started in that we have a named blog editor (Christel Kern) and twitter master (Jennifer Geib).

Meeting Notes written by Matt Aiello-Lammens on 10/2/2015