Minutes of the meeting of the Committee of the British APL Association held on 19 May 2000 at the Royal Statistical Society
It was agreed that the order of proceedings for the AGM would be:
- Apologies
- Minutes of the last AGM (printed in Vector)
- Chairman’s report
- Treasurer’s report
- Questions to officers
It was agreed that we would not change the membership fees, though it was noted that the cost of sending Vector to the European members had risen significantly.
It was agreed that we would make 1000 or more copies of the proceedings CD which we have agreed to produce for APL Berlin 2000 and send a copy with each Vector and offer copies to other APL Associations for them to give to their members. This necessitates an increase in the budget to about £2500. The increase was agreed. It was suggested that we include on the CD the Vector archive, SAX for Linux, APL*PLUS/SE, TryAPL2, K-lite, the APL Statistics library, SigAPL free software, the Canadian utilities library, the FinnAPL idiom library, and maybe more.
The Chairman proposed that as it looked as if SigAPL/ACM might not sponsor APL Berlin 2000 the Chairman for 2000/2001 should offer further sponsorship if it was needed up to £1500 at risk. This was agreed nem con.
The committee agreed to co-opt Dave Phillips.
The Committee agreed that Anthony Camacho should represent it at the BCS technical board meetings.
The Committee re-appointed John Sullivan to audit the accounts for 2000-2001.
Anthony Camacho 20th May 2000
Minutes of the AGM of the British APL Association held at the Royal Statistical Society from 2pm to 2.15 pm on 19 May 2000
Apologies were received from Ian Clark and Stefano Lanzavecchia.
The minutes of the last AGM as printed in Vector Vol 16 No 1 were approved.
The Chairman reported as follows:
British APL Association Chairman’s report on the year 1999-2000
The APL Association survives but is still slowly shrinking. We have about twenty members less than last year. There are some things we can congratulate ourselves about and I prefer to recall these.
The jewel in our crown is Vector, widely acknowledged to be the best APL magazine, worldwide. Vector has appeared regularly and the working group is confident that we can keep up the work for some while to come. Of course we are always looking for more and better articles to print and we encourage everyone to contribute. To those members (and it is not an empty set) who wish us to print more APL and APL2 we have to say that the magazine is bound to reflect the views of its authors at least as much as those of its readers and that it will continue to do so until the Editor is in the happy position of being able to pick the best and most suitable half of the articles submitted. Only our members could put him in that position, so it is up to you.
My thanks to Stefano Lanzavecchia and the Vector working group for an excellent year’s work. In my opinion, a major reason for the success of Vector is the working group. It is a large and friendly group of people that meets four times a year. The size of the group means that the task of obtaining articles is spread among many (a sole editor might find asking continually for articles becomes tedious) and a large group has a wider ring of acquaintances that can be asked. The friendliness of the group makes the quarterly meetings a pleasure to attend – and the Association does its best to help by paying for appropriate refreshments. It is an open group and we would be glad to welcome anyone interested in seeing what it is like to come and see. If you do, you won’t be bullied into doing things that you don’t want to.
Since the Vendor Forum following last year’s AGM, we have not held a meeting. The main problem is finding a time, place and subject that will attract a large enough audience to justify the effort our speakers would have to devote to producing good presentations. If there is a subject on which you would like to arrange a meeting, please contact Jon Sandles and he will help you, if possible, to realise your plan.
Your committee for next year is as follows:
| Chairman | Adrian Smith |
| Secretary | Anthony Camacho |
| Treasurer | Nicholas Small |
| Editor | Stefano Lanzavecchia |
| Activities | Jon Sandles |
| Webmaster | Ray Cannon |
| Education | Ian Clark |
| Projects and Publicity | Dr Alan Mayer |
I thank last year’s committee for their efforts, in particular Ajay Askoolum, who is retiring as Secretary, for his three years work in that post. Unfortunately I am now going to have to do the job myself, at least until we can find a volunteer! I am also grateful for the efforts of Rowena Small and Gill Smith who are paid to look after the membership and Vector administration.
This year the APL conference is in Berlin. Your association has agreed to sponsor the proceedings: we will produce a CD and loose-leaf sheets of paper for the delegates. As the CD has enough capacity for a considerable amount of further material, we are hoping to include the Vector archive (to the extent that it is available in electronic form), one or more free APL interpreters and as much as possible of the additional and tutorial material from the conference. We are hoping to send everyone a copy of the CD with the Vector containing the conference report.
Financially, we continue more than solvent. We have assets of over £40,000. For some years we have continued to keep the membership rates steady although it has meant that our expenditure exceeds our income. Whereas this obviously cannot continue for ever, your committee has felt that so long as we have sufficient funds to cover all foreseeable needs, we might as well keep our subscriptions low and encourage people to join.
Anthony Camacho 18 May 2000
Treasurer’s report
Nicholas Small reported: he circulated a short set of accounts:
Membership report
Nicholas reported on behalf of Rowena:
Membership at 30.4.00 (previous year's figures in parentheses)
UK FOREIGN TOTAL
Number Vectors Number Vectors Number Vectors
Sustaining 4 (4) 15 (12) 4 (4) 66 (76) 8 (8) 81 (88)
Corporate* 6 (8) 37 (57) 1 (3) 10 (30) 7 (11) 47 (87)
Corp. Ind* 20 (22) 24 (26) 2 (1) 2 (1) 22 (23) 26 (27)
Individual 130 (138) 128 (138) 218 (223) 218 (222) 348 (361) 346 (360)
Non-voting 15 (17) 15 (17) 0 (0) 0 (0) 15 (17) 15 (17)
Life 1 (1) 1 (1) 1 (1) 1 (1) 2 (2) 2 (2)
Library 1 (1) 1 (1) 6 (5) 6 (5) 7 (6) 7 (6)
Russians 10 (11) 10 (11) 10 (11) 10 (11)
APL Groups 13 (14) 39 (42) 13 (14) 39 (42)
573 (640)
*Add the Vector numbers in these rows to get the total subscribed
for by corporate members
Further business
There were no questions to Officers nor any other business so the Chairman closed the meeting at approximately 2.15 pm and handed over the meeting to Jon Sandles.
Anthony Camacho, May 20th 2000
The AGM was followed by a Vendors’ Forum, with three presentations, by Adrian Smith of Causeway, Jon Scholes of Dyadic Systems and Benoit Paquin of Soliton.