5 October 2020: It looked terrifying – the pile of books behind the learned professor seemed alarmingly too high for safety. It rather distracted the viewer, fearful that at any moment some calamity could befall the professor as he earnestly set forth on his Zoom lecture. Such are the hazards of our modern world with many activities moving online, mostly with great success.
Zooming has become the modern way and the Friends have adopted it for trustee and committee meetings. We have also used it for interviews, helping us to overcome the current restrictions. Video conferencing is not new, but the ongoing pandemic has provided the opportunity for more of us to adopt this facility to keep business more-or-less as usual.
However, video conferencing from domestic settings does throw up a whole range of different challenges that can, and do, get in the way despite our best intentions. Technology doesn’t always do what is expected, lines drop out, the Internet connections vary, power outages occur and then on top of that the senior member of the household arrives and meows very loudly demanding food, gate crashes the video call and steals the show.
Despite all the challenges we have made very good progress recently and appointed a volunteer to assist with trustee training and also a volunteer for our information coordinator role. Since my request a few months ago for extra help we have been in contact with several members who have expressed an interest in helping us with the management of the Friends. Thank you to all of you who contacted us. We still have vacancies, so the lines remain open – please get in touch. We are keen to enlarge the team and since we have moved the majority of our tasks online, loosening the geographical grip of Kew, our management tasks and responsibilities are now more accessible to more members.
I am also pleased to announce that following a series of online interviews, when I joined colleagues from TNA, we have made an appointment for our research fellowship. The successful applicant will hopefully start in November and I will introduce them to the members in due course.
And so, back to the professor and his rather tall pile of books; the reason I mentioned it is because background matters. I have paid a lot of attention to the background in the numerous online events because we are going to hold our Special General and Annual General Meetings online. I have been busy picking up tips and ideas to ensure our event runs as smoothly as possible.
The meetings will be held back-to-back on 12 November starting at 6pm. We will all be far-flung and despite the challenges of running the meetings from a domestic setting we will make the presentation as professional as possible, reflecting the importance of the occasion. That includes having an appropriate background with nothing to distract or alarm you.
With numerous items of outstanding business and loose ends to resolve the only viable option is to convene the meetings online. The official notices for each meeting and supporting papers will be circulated in the next week or so. It will seem odd holding meetings where we will all be alone together.
The SGM and AGM mark an important moment in the history of the Friends. We are on the cusp of moving into a new era in how the Charity is managed and a new beginning to develop and consolidate our endeavours, building on our heritage of 32 years supporting TNA. Please complete the voting process and join us online – the more members who attend the better.
This year also marks an important moment for me. It will be my tenth year associated with the governance and management of the Friends. I started in 2010 when I became the editor and took my first tentative steps compiling the August edition of the magazine. In those days we had three editions a year, rather modest in size and mostly monochrome.
A lot of water has passed under the bridge and quite a lot has been achieved during those intervening years. The magazine has gone from strength to strength, we have fully updated our policy and governance practices and we passed the one thousand-membership threshold along the way. We have also had some notable successes with various projects that we have supported.
To mark the tenth anniversary I’ve recorded a series of ten short podcasts, Ten by Ten, highlighting ten documents in the collections at Kew that have caught my eye over the years. They will be posted on YouTube with links via our website fairly soon. I hope you will find them interesting.
Holding our first online event will be challenging, so please do bear with us if things don’t go quite according to plan. One important thing I must remember to do before we start is to feed the senior member of the household.