Today, the Utah Jewish Genealogical Society had its first board meeting. Ever. That’s right, this society that turns ten years old this year has never previously had such a thing. Possibly the first meetings while forming might have been considered as such, but I didn’t move to Utah until a bit later.

I had a detailed agenda to go over. We didn’t quite make it through the majority. After all, this was the first time we’d ever met as a small group to plan out what we should be doing. Our Utah membership was dropping instead of increasing and I was of the mind that we should become a local and virtual society. The others didn’t agree. One mentioned issues with recording speakers, and I’d already thought of that, but he thought it would be more difficult than I did. We didn’t really discuss raising dues, or letting members earn their dues by contributing to the society. We didn’t discuss an operating procedures manual. We didn’t go over the fine points in the bylaw changes I gave to them, but they each took a copy to read later.

We did discuss membership and our lack thereof. I’ve had and heard many ideas over the past few years at IAJGS conference management sessions, and some ideas at the Webmasters’ Roundtable, about how to get more members and where to get them from. My other board members also had a few of these ideas, or variations of them. We liked them all. The test will be getting someone to do the things we discussed. I have been wanting to do a few things for the past two years, but I already do so much extra work beyond my actual board positions, that I didn’t want to do any more.

It was a very casual meeting. We didn’t follow the agenda, there was no formality at all, no parliamentary procedures, which was fine. There were only three of us. One was given a form to keep minutes, but he didn’t write much. We’ll have to write up a summary.

No one else took the death of our society very seriously. I guess it’s good that I was the presenter at the meeting with no attendance. Had anyone else shown up to speak, that would have been an even bigger disaster. But my two other board members are on board to try to boost the membership and get more people involved.

So we won’t become the virtual JGS. But maybe we will eventually, we’re just not ready yet. We have a conference coming up in Salt Lake City in July 2