Co-op Group Regional AGMs coming up
Its the season when ordinary (as if there was such a thing!) Co-op members up and down the country get ready to attend the AGMs of their Co-operative Group regions.
The idea is that this is their chance to raise issues, to formally receive the region's accounts and reports, and, of course, to ask questions about the performance - financial or otherwise - about the Society. Recent AGMs (and this year's will be no exception) have featured smaller sessions about individual businesses to allow more focussed discussions in the morning, before the mass meeting after lunch.
Here in the Central and Eastern region of the Co-operative Group, we're holding our AGM in Kettering on the 3rd of May (a Saturday), and all members who live in the Central and Eastern region can attend. So that our membership team can get the numbers right, please contact them in advance at membership.central&eastern@co-operative.coop. Free coaches are also run from various pick-up points in the region to the AGM venue - including from Cambridge train station. Again, contact the membership team to book your place on the coach. Going by coach also has the advantage of having several members of the area committee as your very captive audience for an hour on the way!
If you've never been to an AGM before, I would heartily recommend it. I guarantee that you will learn something new about the Society that you own and control.
P.S. I forgot to say that you can also watch your regional AGM on live stream - and even actively participate - on the interweb. Go to the co-op website (www.co-operative.coop) for more information.
The idea is that this is their chance to raise issues, to formally receive the region's accounts and reports, and, of course, to ask questions about the performance - financial or otherwise - about the Society. Recent AGMs (and this year's will be no exception) have featured smaller sessions about individual businesses to allow more focussed discussions in the morning, before the mass meeting after lunch.
Here in the Central and Eastern region of the Co-operative Group, we're holding our AGM in Kettering on the 3rd of May (a Saturday), and all members who live in the Central and Eastern region can attend. So that our membership team can get the numbers right, please contact them in advance at membership.central&eastern@co-operative.coop. Free coaches are also run from various pick-up points in the region to the AGM venue - including from Cambridge train station. Again, contact the membership team to book your place on the coach. Going by coach also has the advantage of having several members of the area committee as your very captive audience for an hour on the way!
If you've never been to an AGM before, I would heartily recommend it. I guarantee that you will learn something new about the Society that you own and control.
P.S. I forgot to say that you can also watch your regional AGM on live stream - and even actively participate - on the interweb. Go to the co-op website (www.co-operative.coop) for more information.
posted by Sam at Wednesday, April 16, 2008
3 Comments:
"you can also watch your regional AGM on live stream" - unless you use cooperatively-developed software, according to the invitation I received. You must be a customer of Microsoft or Apple, who are hardly outstanding cooperatives. Why won't the co-operative group follow open standards and support software cooperatives?
Anyway, I'm unable to attend or watch this AGM - I wonder whether I'll still be classed as an active member?
Fair comment. Which software would you like to use, and in what way has the Co-op Group prevented you? You might remember that I am not particularly technically minded!
I'd like to use mplayer, ffmpeg or videolan (vlc) on GNU/Linux (probably gobolinux, but I could use debian). I don't know whether the Co-operative Group prevents it for sure (because this is a future event) but the list of "supported" systems is only Microsoft Windows Vista or XP-SP2 and Apple Mac OS X. Usually if I question this sort of stupidity with webcasts, I'm told I should abandon cooperation and use Microsoft or whatever, but I had hoped for better from the Co-operative Group!
For the group national webcast, it involved some digging around in web page source code to find the stream link to give the standalone player and the slide presentation wasn't visible. I've been told the system is changed but I've no technical details, nor anything to test with, so I doubt I'd be able to get it working. Also, the group national webcast links now display "Error 404!" to me - I know that means file not found, but what are other, less technical members making of this?
It's really quite annoying. We should be saying "we will stream FORMAT with BLAH video and BLAHBLAH audio over MMS" or somesuch (preferably where those are picked from the ffmpeg lists by someone who knows more than me) and "here's some cooperative software which can play it" and "here's the plugins for windows media" and so on. Maybe as well as software cooperators, it would help Mac users too because I'm told a lot of them like to use VLC (which also runs on Mac) too and get confused when stuff won't work in it...
OK, rant over. :)
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