Committee Posts and Roles

Executive Members:

Non-Executive Members (elected or co-opted):

Executive Members

Role of Chair

The duties of the Chair fall into two categories: presiding over meetings and representing either the committee or the organization. Neither is particularly onerous or time consuming.

There are two types of meetings at which the chair presides: committee meetings and general meetings. There are perhaps a half dozen committee meetings during the year and one Annual General Meeting. The people involved in these sometimes need prompting to move on to the next agenda item or a vote, but proceedings are generally relaxed and not difficult to run.

While there are occasionally emails from outside the organization that require a response these are rare and rarely need much consideration. The bi-monthly C Vu report “From The Chair” is a much greater burden.

The Chair is responsible for doing the work of other unfilled roles, where that work is vital to the organization. As an example, if the website editor position is unfilled, the Chair must perform that position's critical functions, such as posting the monthly magazines to the web site, and updating web advertising copy received from advertisers.

The Chair also is responsible for monitoring the content of emails sent through ACCU's mailing lists, and maintaining decorum.

Role of Secretary

The role of Secretary is to support the Chair in ensuring the smooth functioning of the Committee. The Secretary is responsible for:

  • Ensuring meetings are effectively organised and minuted
    • Liaising with the Chair to plan meetings
    • Receiving agenda items from committee members
    • Circulating agendas and reports
    • Taking minutes
    • Circulating approved minutes
    • Checking that agreed actions are carried out
  • Maintaining effective records and administration
    • Keeping up-to-date contact details for the committee
    • Filing minutes and reports
  • Upholding the legal requirements
    • Acting as custodian of the organisation's governing documents
    • Checking quorum is present at meetings
    • Ensuring elections are in line with stipulated procedures
  • Preparing a report of the organisation's activities for the year, for the Annual General Meeting

The Secretary often acts as an information and reference point for the Chair and other committee members: clarifying past practice and decisions; confirming legal requirements; and retrieving relevant documentation.

A recipe for publishing committee minutes is available on accu's GitHub account as private Gist.

Role of Treasurer

  • Maintain a record of income and expenditure.
  • Create reconciled ledger for submission to accountants for the annual accounts.
  • Liaise with nominated accountant to prepare annual accounts.
  • Liaise with honorary auditors.
  • Correspond with HM Revenue and Customs.
  • Ensure ACCU is compliant with relevent directives.
  • Pay suppliers and raise invoices as necessary.
  • Ensure the ACCU lives within its means.
  • Occasional research into fiscal matters.

Role of Membership Secretary

Responsibilities of the Membership Secretary:

  • Consult website once per month to estimate number of journals required at next printing, and notify the production editor.
  • Consult website once per month to retrieve mailing info for the journal, and forward to the distributor.
  • Receive excess journals each month, and store up to a year's worth.
  • Consult bank statement once per month and enter standing order payments into the website admin interface.
  • Chase any standing order underpayments.
  • Send journals out to members who have missed an issue.
  • Send journals out to prospective members, groups or conferences that request them.
  • Keep an eye on the stream of automated renewal and joining payments.
  • Answer enquiries to accumembership@accu.org, typically:
    • prepare invoices and receipts
    • resolve payment troubles
    • handle address changes
    • advise on the benefits of membership
  • Keep some stats on the size and makeup of the membership, reporting back to the association.
  • Prepare reports for the treasurer on the donations that members make when they join or renew.

Non-Executive Members

Role of Publicity Officer

The Publicity Officer is responsible for increasing awareness of ACCU and to extend ACCU's reach and audience.

Responsibilities include:

  • Work to increase awareness of ACCU via any mechanisms deemed appropriate by the ACCU committee.
  • Promote Overload and C Vu journals via social media and any other related content that offers value to our audience.
  • Publicise any key ACCU events to build awarenes to help increase attendence.
  • Ensure local events are publicised and well-marketed.
  • Manage ACCU social media accounts.
  • Attend ACCU committee meetings to contribute ideas related to publicity.

Role of Publications Officer

The publications officer is ultimately responsible for the ACCU publications, which currently consist of CVu and OVerload. Most of the issue-by-issue work is done by the editors, Steve (CVU) and Frances (Overload), who collect the material, manage the review process and pass the completed copy on to the production editor, Alison Peck.

The publications officer's responsibilities include:

  • Finding new editors, if and when they are needed.
  • Resolving issues with distribution - such as when Able Types ceased trading and we had to find alternative distribution mechanisms.
  • Keeping an overall eye on the direction of the magazines.
  • Overseeing the role of the ACCU website in online distribution of material.

Role of Local Groups Officer

To be written.

Role of Study Groups Officer

  • Receive suggestions for Study Groups or periodically survey the Membership for project ideas.
  • Ascertain viability of Study Group projects based on the presence of a volunteer to Lead the project, the Membership's desire to participate and their ability to commit to the project.
  • Find and allocate Leaders/Assists for Study Groups.
  • Help the Leader and Assists devise a schedule or plan for the Study Group project along with some aims.
  • Help Study Groups stay on track and provide general assistance to the Study Group Leader.
  • Arrange for Mailing Lists for the Study Group with the help of the Mailing List Administrator.
  • Moderate the Study Groups mailing list and Study Group specific lists along with the Study Group Leader.

Role of Standards Officer

The role of the standards officer is to keep the membership abreast of developments in the C++ standard. This is achieved by submitting a post for each edition of C Vu describing the previous two months of activity in the standard development community. On the committee the standards officer notifies the committee of anything especially pressing such as changes to the process of developing standards, or discussions that may affect the operation of the committee and the conference, inter alia.

The standards officer needs to be a regular participant in the standardisation process. This includes membership in the ISO global directory of WG21 participants, participation in the various reflectors, attendance of online meetings, attendance of WG21 plenaries where possible, online or in person. While this is not a list of all necessary activity, some of these should feature in the officer’s portfolio.

Role of Advertising Officer

The role of the Advertising Officer has three main components:

  • Maintain productive relationships with our current advertisers.
  • Ensure our pricing structure is in line with industry standards.
  • Find and onboard new advertising clients.

To support the above, a media pack of information for new advertisers is maintained by the advertising officer with the support of the committee. The media pack includes:

  • Some background information about ACCU, our conferences, and the publications we produce.
  • The expected demographics and quantity of our readership.
  • The available types of adverts we support across our platforms together with their standard costs.

Role of Website Hosting Manager

The role of the ACCU Hosting Manager is to keep the various ACCU online services running smoothly. These comprise:

  • Email server and @accu.org email addresses.
  • ACCU mailing lists.
  • ACCU websites:
    • Main ACCU website.
    • Membership website (the old website).
    • Conference website.
    • ACCU blog aggregator.
  • Git repository for main and old site, plus Gitea web interface.
  • Service configuration backups including offsite backups.

Hosting is currently a single virtual host provided (gratis) by Bytemark running Debian Linux. Familiarity with Linux administration and associated services (Exim, Apache, Mailman, WordPress, PHP) is therefore highly desirable.

Role of Reviews Editor

ACCU publishes reviews of anything that may be of use, or of interest, to software developers. The Reviews Editor:

  • Liaises with publishers, taking in lists of books available to review.
  • Posts lists of books available to review on the accu-members mailing list.
  • Takes in reviews and edits them.
  • Emails edited reviews and a cover image to the editor of the C Vu magazine.

Role of Conference Chair

The ACCU Conference is owned by Archer Yates and is currently handed over to Mosaic Events. This event management company is responsible for organizing the event. The ACCU conference programme committee provides the content of the conference and is lead by the Conference Chair.

Responsibilities:

  • Leader of the conference programme committee.
  • Serves as conference chair currently for about four to five years.
  • Leads the search for new programme committee members.
  • Performs the communication between the programme committee and the event management company.
  • Facilitates the discussion regarding the way the conference is organized.
  • Issues the Call for Papers for the conference.
  • Invites the keynote speakers.
  • Provides the proposed sessions to the programme committee for review.
  • Invites the event management company to the schedule assembly meeting.
  • Assembles the session review results for the schedule assembly meeting.
  • Creates the schedule according to the outcome of the schedule assembly meeting.
  • Handles all the communication with the accepted and rejected speakers.
  • Handles session dropouts and possible replacements until the conference is over.
  • Provides guidance during the conference.
  • Prepares the final schedule for archiving on the accu.org web site.
  • Proposes the next conference chair to the programme committee and the ACCU committee.

Role of Website Editor

The website editor, or webeditor, takes care of publishing most of the content on the accu.org website [1].

  • Update and maintain the web site content and layout files (in Hugo format).
  • Update and maintain the git repository for the website, in cooperation with the Website Hosting Manager.
  • Update the BIB files for Overload, C Vu, and reviews (monthly).
  • Update, maintain, and extend the BIB file programs (C++) used to create the indexes for the magazines and reviews.
  • Publish Overload and C Vu journal website articles and journal PDFs and ePubs (monthly).
  • Publish book reviews from C Vu (every other month).
  • Work with the journal production editor, if needed (e.g. for proper rendering of HTML, occasionally).
  • Publish ACCU Committee minutes (six times a year), unless done by the Secretary.
  • Publish ACCU AGM information packs and minutes (once a year), unless done by the Secretary.
  • Spread the news that new material is available via a news item, and via accu-general@accu.org and accu-members@accu.org (monthly).
  • Monitor accu-committee@accu.org for information relevant to the website (low-traffic).
  • Produce a report with notable information on the website for the ACCU committee, if relevant (bi-monthly).
  • Filter messages that arrive via webeditor@accu.org and take appropriate action if deemed necessary (occasionally).
  • Keep an eye on pages with more or less fixed content, such as pages for Local Groups, Study Groups, Mailing Lists, Membership, etc. (rarely).

The web editor needs to have knowledge of HTML, CSS, Hugo, git, Python, Flask, MySQL, Apache Server and C++.

[1] To note, the conference pages are generally filled by the conference chair.

Page last changed 23 March 2023.





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