Board meeting I’ve been feverishly working on getting a structure set up for board meetings. The survey I sent to board members produced monthly meetings on the 3rd Thursday of every month at 8PM East Coast, 7PM Central, 6PM Rocky Mtn, and 5PM Pacific. It wasn’t easy getting this figured out. Changes to the date and time may need to happen going forward. Board agendas will be posted to the website a week in advance for all members to see. Here is the permanent Zoom link for meetings which members are welcome to attend: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84359067111
Meetings will last no more than 90 minutes and start on time. Show up 10 minutes early if you don’t want to miss anything. Meetings will be recorded and transcribed by Zoom. The recording and transcription will be available on the website within 48 hours of the meeting. The Secretary’s official minutes will be available within 7 days. I will do my best to use Robert’s Rules of Order (as required by our bylaws) to conduct the meetings. I am new to this so I’ve asked Melissa Moeller a trained Parliamentarian to coach all of us on how to run meetings fairly and democratically. For this first meeting she will be an observer only. After that she’ll crack the whip on us 🙂 Members are invited to hop on the call and observe the meetings live. (For the time being members will observe only. With Melissa’s help we’ll review this for future meetings) I am looking forward to efficient, productive, well documented, democratic meetings.
Website menu change
As you may have noticed the main menu on the home page has changed. All the menu items are still there but rearranged in a way that makes it easier to navigate for phones and tablets.
Website Calendar change and Section Meetings
Over the weekend, Steve the webmaster, took the main website offline to switch how the calendar of events works. It now looks almost the same as before but each section director (plus another person from the section) can add events themselves. In the coming month I’ll work with the directors to get folks up to speed on how to do this themselves. Directors will now be responsible for making sure their section posts meeting notices early and accurately. This should give us up-to-date meeting descriptions and more importantly: require directors to talk to each other when scheduling a section meeting. I’d like to encourage folks to travel to other sections’ meetings. This can’t happen if everyone holds their meeting on the same weekend. For an example of a schedule collision check out this coming Oct 11th. I’m looking forward to helping sections be more respectful of each other and collaborate better on meeting planning.
Website Board of Directors Changes I still need to get the meeting agendas, minutes, directors reports etc onto the website. All this needs to be easily available to all members. It may take another week to get it figured out. Stay tuned for more….
Erich Moraine
President
8/4/25 Awards, Find a Glassblower, Data Access, and next symposium
Awards I’m done with tracking down awards and award recipients. It was a bit tricky this year as I managed to pull Steve Anderson out of retirement just a few months before the symposium and we had a new co-chair in Garrett Oaks. It now seems that all the awards have been found and either delivered or are on their way. One still needs replacing as it was broken in shipment to the hotel. Having been so closely involved this year gives me a new sense of appreciation for how hard the ASGS works to recognize it’s membership.
Find a Glassblower I’ve finished going through the find a glassblower pages and updating them. Most all of them were quite out of date. Having your name listed is a benefit of membership. If you’d like to be seen there please send an email to the home office or to me asking to be added. Just be aware that if your membership lapses you’ll be removed from the listing. I am hopeful that when ewe migrate to a new website the web gurus can find a way to automate this feature so it’s always current and shows the correct information.
Data Access/ Online Security The email system review is complete for now. Many old addresses have been deleted and some forwarders as well. Most importantly passwords have been changed for the first time in years. The next step is to review access to Membership Works our (member database) and QuickBooks (accounting). Stay tuned, more to come.
Symposium I’ve lost track of how many phone calls I’ve had discussing what to do for next year’s symposium. The short answer is it’s complicated 🙂 A longer answer is we are at a crossroads where there isn’t any money left to underwrite a symposium that loses money. Depending on how you want to do the accounting, the last two symposia were close to breaking even. The next one HAS to… break even or better yet make a little money. Because of how we have historically held symposia in business class hotels it’s a complicated adventure negotiating with the hotel for food and beverage and meeting space and room nights. There are some valid reasons to hold a symposium every year… this means next year, there is also a growing list of reasons to consider taking a gap year and skipping 2026, come back in 2027 with a revitalized team and new ideas. We go to the same folks year after year to organize, set up, demonstrate, present etc. The list of people willing, keeps getting smaller, which means the few left get asked to do more and more. Many are tired, more and more are saying nope can’t do it anymore.
Attendance at the symposium and more importantly those with rooms at the official hotel keeps slipping. This is what makes it so hard to plan. I’m collecting ideas for how to change these trends.
For the next symposium I’ve set three goals: 1) make it more affordable to attend 2) make it more interesting and appealing to attend 3) set a budget so that it makes money for the ASGS. In some ways these points are in conflict with each other. WIthout new ideas and new ways of doing a symposium it’s not possible to meet all three goals.
I’ve been looking to our cousins outside the scientific glass world for what they’ve done and how it’s worked for them: The Glass Art Society, The Michigan Glass Project, Art Glass Invitational, International Flame workers Conference, The VDG (German scientific glassblowers) It turns out there are lots of very interesting and good ideas out there. We don’t have to invent everything from scratch. Maybe we take the time to borrow some ideas that worked well for others and give them a try here at our symposium.
I’ve been in conversation with a core group of past symposium chairs to explore options. The big question I’m asking them: is it possible to get enough of this done and meet the 3 goals for a June event next year. BAsed on our historic pattern of planning 1 year in advance we are already a bit behind schedule with 10 months to go till June 2026. This seems to be part of the vicious cycle we now find ourselves in, running late, with too few organizers, and not enough dollars. Many conference centers book 2-3 years in advance. The Glass Art Society already has their website up and hotel locked in for 2026. The IFC is booking it’s visiting artists right now. I hope to have news to report within a week or so for what happens with our symposium next year. If you have ideas shoot me a text or an email. I’d love to hear from you.
Erich Moraine
President
