AYHD Board Meeting 7thSeptember 2017

AYHD Board Meeting Report

The AYHD strongly believes in transparency. Therefore, the minutes from the three-monthly board meetings will be made available to all members. If you have any questions or comments regarding these notes, feel free to contact our secretary:

Attendance

First Board Meeting 4th September 2017 (online)

Present: Tim Riswick (president), Jeanne Cilliers, Edward Morgan and Stephanie Klages (PR-officers), Christa Matthys (secretary)

Excused: Benjamin Matuzak (vice-president)

Content

  1. Progress in the website

Nearly all pages are now up-to-date. Only the page regarding the Committee of Recommendation needs to be updated. We are still awaiting some responses of potential members, but by next board meeting, the page should be updated.

We want to follow-up on Edwards blogpost ‘from the archives’ with additional (monthly) blogs. For the coming months, the board can add some content, but the idea for future contributions is to send out a monthly call to our members as well. In addition, there will be an open call on the Facebook-page.

  1. Progress on the newsletter

We like to include new papers by members of our association. Our approach is to put one paper in the ‘Spotlight’-section of the newspaper and list all other papers that have been suggested to us. We will also present a ‘paper of the week’ on the Facebook-page.

  1. Progress of the Facebook Group and Page
  • As previously mentioned, we will launch a call for blog contributions for the website or new research articleand a weekly ‘paper of the week’.
  • Monthly reports: Benjamin has created a form to collect and present the most important statistics from our Facebook-page: members, views, clicks, etc. After some initial experiments, we will continuously collect the data from 1stOctober 2017 on and send them to the board members and ambassadors before every board meeting.

4. Progress on the Twitter Account

No account yet.

5. Vacancies for regional ambassadors + other topics regarding the ambassadors

For South-America we have contacted two professors, who might get us into contact with young researchers in the area: prof. Raquel Gil Montero and Carlos Aramburu Lopez de Romana.

For Africa we will ask Michael Chanda Chiseni, working from the Department of Economic History at Lund University on historical demography in Zambia (as a doctoral student with Prof. Jutta Bolt).

From now on, we will send the program for every board meeting, along with preparatory materials, not only to the board members, but also to the ambassadors before every meeting. Afterwards, we will also email them the minutes before they are published online. This way, the ambassadors could add to certain topics if they want to.

6. Committee of Recommendation

We are still waiting for some replies, but will have a Committee established soon.

7. Progress on getting the materials from Summer Schools

Christa will coordinate this instead of Benjamin, who is now doing the Facebook-reports. The organizers of summer schools in Cluj and the previously held ICPSR-courses in Ann Arbor have been contacted. We should also contact the organizers from Longpop (Diego Ramirez). Tim will also ask Cameron Campbell for the materials of a summer school organized in Shanghai and the materials from Nijmegen will also be put online in the near future. However, in the second half of September, when Benjamin is back, Christa and Benjamin will discuss the matter in a more detailed and systematic way.

8. Other topics: upcoming events

Tim will organize an informal event (drinks and/or dinner) at the International Population Conference in Stellenbosch (29 October – 4 November 2017, South Africa). This will be announced as a Facebook-event in the Group. Jeanne will also attend this informal meeting.

Other events will be organized by Edward at the European Population Conference in Brussels (6-9 June 2018) and by the board at the European Social Science History Conference in Belfast (4-7 April 2018).

9. Next Board Meeting

The next meeting will take place 13th December 2017 at 10a.m. CET.

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