2007 November

Compiled by Tony Cheng from minutes by Rachel Langley. These notes cover some of the highlights of the OrigamiUSA Board meeting of November 5, 2007.
Wendy Zeichner, the new Treasurer, continues her training with Jan Polish, the previous Treasurer. They anticipate that 1 or 2 more training sessions will be required.
The current membership is 1573, compared with 1558 last month and 1537 a year ago. A membership survey is still in the works and will be sent out soon. The survey will address what our current members, ex-members and potential members expect from being a member of OrigamiUSA.
Jan Polish and Robert Lang have held a preliminary meeting with a publishing company to discuss the possibility of a coffee-table book on origami to be published in Fall 2009. This is still in the discussion stage and no contract has been signed.
Issue #96 of The Paper has been mailed out to members. #97 will be the Convention issue and is targeted to be in the hands of the designer around Thanksgiving. Toby Schwartz is training to take over as the new Managing Editor with the following issue, which will focus on the Holiday Tree, as well as various museum exhibits.
The Finance Committee has started to work on the budget for 2008 and will start examining the figures once the excitement of PCOC has passed.
Registration for the Pacific Coast OrigamiUSA Conference stood at 255 (at the time of the Board meeting). This figure includes companions and sorry kits. Registration was reopened for local folders to accommodate interest after recent press coverage. The committee anticipates a profit from the conference.
The Policies and Procedures Committee has been gathering procedure documents from the various committees and hopes to present a draft of all compiled procedures to the Board in January or February 2008. These documents will detail how various projects, such as Special Sessions, The Paper, Annual Gift, etc., are produced.
Kathryn Wagner is the new chair of the Archives Committee with Robert Lang acting as liaison to the Board. Our collection of Exhibition models and some archival materials have been moved into a newly rented climate-controlled storage space in Fort Lee, NJ. The committee will start to re-classify and repack the collection in December. This will ensure that the valuable collection does not deteriorate.
This year's Origami By Children will be up for display on November 8 at the Donnell Public Library in midtown Manhattan. Images of the collection will be up on the website shortly.
The next Special Folding Fun Sessions will be on December 9. Attendance for the October session turned out to be more successful than previously reported, due to last minute registrations. The committee will begin recruiting teachers for the Spring sessions to be held in March, April and May.
Flapping Dragons, by the thousands, have come into the Home-Office, courtesy of our generous members. Once sorted and packaged, they will be distributed as the Annual Gift, to visitors and staff of the American Museum of Natural History at the lighting of the Origami Holiday Tree. The tree, designed by Sok Song, will be lit on November 19. The Exhibition Department of the museum is enthusiastic about this year's design, which features a dragon, composed of "gum wrapper" units, which will encircle the tree.
The Funds and Awards Committee will be clarifying the criteria for the Ranana Benjamin Award and the Florence Temko Award as it works on its procedures document/manual. Further benefits for the awards are being considered by the committee.
The World Origami Days website has a new look (check it out). The content will be updated by the committee soon. Reports of WOD activities have been filtering in slowly but surely and will be posted.
Margaret Van Sicklen will compile the Board Notes in December.