General Assembly in Rotterdam, 2013

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Ewri
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General Assembly in Rotterdam, 2013

Post by Ewri »

To all the members of the Association!
The yearly General meeting of the members of Association Européenne des EuroBillTrackers is planned to be held on
Saturday 3rd August in Rotterdam during the EBT meeting there.


Agenda:
Introduction
Overview of activities of different WG
Financial situation
Election of new Board of Directors
Other matter.

May I draw your attention that this meeting can only be attended by regular members having paid their yearly fee.


In the meantime, please note that a form of proxy can be found following this link: viewtopic.php?f=26&t=18204&p=1025543#p1025543" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Karen Pace
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claudio vda
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Re: General Assembly in Rotterdam, 2013

Post by claudio vda »

Please find the report from the General Assembly :arrow: http://forum.eurobilltracker.com/viewto ... 40&t=55569" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

(the report is there since five days, but I forgot to put the link, sorry about that)

I am also going to repost the report down here: that's easier ;)
My statistics on EBTCHECK (Latest update 11.03.2024)
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claudio vda
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Re: General Assembly in Rotterdam, 2013

Post by claudio vda »

Last 3th August in Rotterdam was held the General Assembly of the European Association of Eurobilltrackers (A2E).

They were present (phyisically of with a proxy) members from the following countries: Austria, Belgium, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Malta, Portugal, Slovenia (9 countries).

Agenda
-Main events of the past year
-Financial report
-Reports from working groups
-Elections
-All other businnes


Main events of the past year

During the year 2012/13 a new statistics program developed by dserrano5 (EBT Stats Tool) was released: the program had some success among users. It was then created a web page dedicated to the association (an idea of ​​rlaurenssen) with the details about the A2E and accessible from the home page of EBT. The winter meeting was held in Rouen (FR) with the participation of about forty people. Some improvements have been introduced to allow users to enter the new series "Europa". It was made ​​active the facebook page of EBT. The official address of the Association was changed. Some WG leaders changed.
Details will be presented in the reports.

Financial report (by Klaas Klever)

During the past year the A2E had 87 members, this means 870 E, who covered the 828 E of fees for the site hosting (69 E pour months, electric power included), the postal fees and the bank fees. Putting together the rest, some donations and some rest of the previous years we have 270 E in cash. During this meeting 500 E were collected, this brings us to a total of 770 E in cash.
On the A2E bank coount there are 2500 E from the previous years.
At the moment the overall economic situation of theassociation does not allow the purchase of a new server (the current one is about six years old).

Reports from working groups

-Development WG (the leader is Nerzhul, but he is not here, so the report is presented by Avij)
Regarding the changes needed for the new Europa series notes, almost everything has been done but there aren't any statistics specifically for the Europa series notes yet; sometimes it may happens that some little bugs persist, in this case users are invited to report them to the support. Unofficial statistics tell us that approximately 60% of the fivers tracked during the last month were Europa series notes.
Software developed by third parties (e.g. apps for Macs) were not updated for the Europa serie.
Changes needed for the Estonian notes (letter D) were done and some of them were already tracked.
Some changes were introduced in the software of Babel in order to allow the group to update translations and the list of translators independently.

-Technical WG (by Avij)
This working group is quite invisible because its task is to ensure that everything is working and during the last year all the technical problems were solved, the greater interruption of service occurred in September, when the site was down for about 10 h.
The current server is six years old, then one day it will need to be replaced; at the moment if necessary we have a (private) server we can use in case of emergency; due to the frequent backups a crack of the server would result in minimal damage.
A month ago ​​a change of registrar for the eurobilltracker.com domain name was made ; this was due to security issues (hacking on the old registrar) and we went from OVH to GANDI.
Currently 26 domains related to EBT have been registered for brand protection reasons, the majority of them are just redirecting to the main site.

-Database WG (usually known as Cleaning Girls; by ErGo)
During the past year 800.000 banknotes from around 400 users fakers were deleted, about 300.000 of these were from Petek & Co.
From about 250 fakers less than 10 banknotes were removed, the average is between 1.000 and 10.000 notes / faker.
Honest users who realize that they have made mistakes should not be afraid about the fact, that someone could think (s)he is a faker: a honest account contains about 3% of wrong banknotes due to typos and other mistakes. A fake account contains a really larger number of wrong notes and codes. The group of Cleaning Girls choosed to avoid correcting errors because it is better to concentrate efforts in the fight against real fakers, this means that small mistakes will not be corrected and the combination table, unfortunately, will continue to present a reduced number of errors easily visible by everyone.
Public serials. There are currently 14.000 notes recognized as public serials and these notes have generated 4.000 hits, which are automatically moderated. Since the public notes are true notes and at least some ot them are actually circulating, it happened several times that an user find one of them: if this happens just write to the support sending a scan of the note in order to prove that it is in your possession and we will add this fact to the commment field!
Fake location. It's a very thorny problem and the amount of work is really big. At the moment only two users have been fixed and their own notes forcibly displaced in their true locations, and it was possible to determine the true location beyond any reasonable doubt.

Work in progress. Some suspect users are at the moment under examinations and it is possible that something will happen soon.
-Communication WG (by Claudio VdA)
During the past year the leader changed from Schlauchen to Claudio VdA.
Communication is towards two directions: inside and outside.
Internal communication is based on the newsletter and on social networks.
About two newsletters are produced every year: they have a deep diffusion (because they can reach a huge number of users), but on the other hand they are asymmetrical because they are just a communication from top to bottom. Another problem with the newsletters is that when they are ready they are already old: the translation time takes about 4 weeks. Finally, about twice a year is a compromise between users who can be disturbed by an excessive number of them (spam!) and users who would like to have more of them.
Since this year, EBT is arrived on two big social networks: Facebook and Twitter. The advantage of social networks is that communication is faster and allows people to anwer or react (so it is more horizontal), but on the other hand we are compressing our linguistic variety.
The twitter account produced little more than 300 tweets in eleven months, with several users answering or retwitting. The language is English but something was twitted also in other languages.
The facebook account was fully operative since about two months, this because the FB page called "Eurobilltracker" already exists because it was created by an user. Initially he said for him was OK to give it to us, but finally cthe contacts were interrupted. So, we created a new page called "Eurobilltracking". In the past, various groups linked to EBT formed spontaneously and at the moment we are trying to direct them towards the official page.
Of course we have also another social network, and it is really horizontal: the EBT forum, but it is active since many years and everybody knows about it.
Finally, we have to consider that the between the 180,000 EBT users, only a small minority is interested in interacting with others through forums or social networks (the forum members are about 14 000, less than 10% of the total users, and for other social network numbers are even smaller).
Regarding the communication to the outside (presence of EBT on the medias), the reality is highly fragmented due to the large number of languages. In some areas EBT manages to "become a new"and local newspapers publish from time to time news about it, but in other areas journalists seem totally uninterested about the EBT phenomenon despite multiple reports.
A couple of months ago a Belgian user was interviewed by a Flemish TV and the movie is really nice.

-Support (by Turbo Tim)
There is not much to say about the topic; since the so called "ticket" was introduced the support is fast. One of the main problems are language barriers: asks in "easy" language are usually solved in less than 24 h, but for some "difficult" languages some weeks can pass. The minimum (theoretical) time is 1/s hour because before 30 minutes the request is not showed to the support team and the user may still modify it.
About requests involving changes in the time of tracking, at the moment operators can change notes only one by one, so multiple asks may require longer times.

-Translation (letter by Klapotec)
Two new translators joined the group (one for Slovenian, and one more importantly for Latvian).
Some inconsistencies in the text of the website found (and removed), complete check yet to be done.
Also to be done: better coordination with communications working group.
Latvian should be activated on the main EBT page.

Elections
Austria. Klaas Klever was re-elected.
France. No French members are present in the assembly, nor with proxies.
Germany. Turbo Tim was re-elected.
Italy. No candidates, so no representing.
Slovenia. Gergapsek re-elected
All the other countries that were vacant also during the past year. No candidates, so no representings.

All other businnes
The change of address of the association was something of long because of some bureaucratic problems and some lack in cohoperation between people involved, but luckily at the moment we managed to found the request documents.
During the pas year a sextuple hit was made, soon it will be placed into an appropriate section.
My statistics on EBTCHECK (Latest update 11.03.2024)
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