National committee reports 2017

Treasurer’s report

I’m not sure if I’m going to be making it to the AGM on Wednesday, so I thought I should really put up a Treasurer’s report online, and this seemed to be the logical place for it. So:

NZLARPS has had a relatively unremarkable financial year on the whole. Certainly not a bad one, but not an especially great one either. A number of profitable events have been run (thanks to all those who have helped organise them!), but some costs that aren’t attributable to specific events have weighed down on the net profit, meaning that as a whole we roughly broke even on that front. Fortunately, we have taken in a reasonable amount of money in memberships, a significant portion of which has been distributed to the regions. On the whole, we’re probably slightly better off than we were a year ago. I hope (and expect) many profitable events will be run in the coming year, and indeed we have already had at least one.

The only thing of real major note that occurred during the past year was us projecting that NZLARPS would soon hit the $60,000 revenue threshold where GST registration becomes mandatory. We did not end up hitting that point, probably mostly due to some events being delayed to the now-current financial year, but if NZLARPS can continue to grows its events, it is an inevitability that must be faced sooner or later. I believe that NZLARPS’ systems can be structured appropriately that this will not be a terribly big change for event organisers, though it will mean that everything will need to be done ‘by the book’ (e.g. proper GST receipts presented for all reimbursements, or better invoices issued directly to NZLARPS)

Due to GST registration being a relatively large change to the finances, and one with serious legal ramifications, we explored the possibility of having professional assistance with the process. To that end, I contacted a number of accounting firms, and met with representatives with three of them. Ultimately, what they offered was somewhat pricy for our tastes, and not really what we had been looking for, so when it became apparent we would not hit the threshold this year after all, we chose not to proceed further for the time being. This is something that will definitely need to be addressed by the incoming committee though, as we may well reach the threshold before the end of the current financial year.

There were two or three issues with Eventbrite during the year, but these all appeared to be one-off problems, and the usage of Eventbrite for Musketeers certainly reduced the workload on my end come year-end, and I believe made life simpler for the Musketeers Treasurer (outside those aforementioned issues), so it seems like overall a positive change for larger events - though I fear the fees involved might mean that for most smaller events it is too expensive an option. It is probably worth considering Eventbrite (or similar) for anyone expecting to be running a 100+ person event, and quite possibly much smaller too. As I recall, we discussed setting something up for all NZLARPS projects to use, but I don’t think anything has come of it as yet.

Otherwise, things are more-or-less ticking along as normal. I can’t really think of anything else to report. I am stepping down as National Treasurer at the AGM, due in large part to the fact that I am pursuing study that leaves me with little time for the Treasurer duties, and keeps other matters on my mind in place of them - which has meant that some things I might have had vague plans to do never happened. I wish the incoming National Committee, especially the incoming National Treasurer, well.

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Since James’ one is here, I’ll add mine:

Secretary’s Report

We have 143 members (67 in Auckland, 43 in Wellington, 12 in Greater Waikato, and 21 in the South Island), down slightly from 147 last AGM. Membership in Auckland and Greater Waikato has dropped, though this has been mostly offset by people joining the new South Island region. Long-term membership statistics can be viewed here.

NZLARPS’ membership systems are working well, though we do have a compliance problem around member addresses, which I’m gradually tidying up. As noted in the AGM notification last year’s AGM minutes weren’t passed on for publication. Hopefully we won’t have an issue with that this year.

IT Officer’s Report

This term has largely involved maintenance and improvements on our existing systems, and new websites for Saga and the Cerberus larp convention. It also saw the formation of the South Island committee, with new email addresses set up, and new forums and groups added to Diatribe.

Diatribe

Diatribe has had a few tweaks made to the design, and now has better support for self-managing categories/groups. It got a little bit of campaign use post-Embers, but is primarily used by the committees, and people who find it via google (the “How to” section is quite popular).

NZLARPS website

Recurring events are now able to be added to the calendar view. We still need to add each event manually, but this means we can support monthlies and still have a good overview for one-off and campaign events. Monthlies also appear under regional filters (e.g. http://nzlarps.org/auckland).

A resources section has been added, including a page on safety resources. There’s still a lot of work to be done in this area, but we now have a place where our collective resources can live.

Events are the most well used area of the site. With that in mind, I have started a feature to allow those with an account1. to add their own events. This should give those who run games better control over the branding and resources attached to their games and events. For now, please send us any events you would like in the calendar, along with associated imagery and/or brand colours.

Forecast

SSL
The most urgent item on the todo list is to set up SSL for all our sites. This has been on the list for a while, but has become even more urgent with the changes in behaviour in Chrome and Firefox.

Events
As mentioned above we’ve started looking into integrating with a system like EventBright. There’s still some questions to be answered around how this would work, and what level of larp would find this beneficial (vs those where the fees would be too high). Some work has been done on users uploaded there own events. These two situations could feasibly be approached at the same time.

Project process
The process of starting a NZLARPS project is currently different across each region. While this is fine, we’ve started to look at a system where we can better track the applications made, and find them more easily in the future. Paper forms aren’t a great solution anymore, and there’s no reason why we couldn’t integrate this with our website.

The full backlog of work as it currently stands can be found here: https://trello.com/b/8DprkdhG/nzlarps-websites


1. Current members, ex-members, and potentially pending members.

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