“Dear Network, it is my great pleasure to announce that at the recent local Agora the new board of AEGEE-…. was elected.” An e-mail with such information ticks into many AEGEE members e-mail account day in and day out and in numerous times ends up deleted.
Announcing the new board of an antenna is made on Announce-L, and contributes to the large number of e-mails entering accounts of 
young students around Europe every day. The question was raised not so long ago about why there is the need of boards announcing themselves on the Announce-L, and one might wonder if this procedure could be improved?
Some commissions would like to prefer that contact information for every board member of the different antennae to be included. This way the Audit Commission can connect to Treasurers, The AEGEEan can connect to PR Responsible and the Human Resource Committee gains the opportunity to reach out to HR Responsible across the antennae.
However, others might have the opinion that announcing the boards on the Announce-L is spamming, and a measure that should either take place in another way or simply not take place at all through e-mailing. In The AEGEEan we keep stressing the fact that anybody can publish more or less any news in our magazine. With the six different sections we reach many areas, and for people who find it difficult to compose an article we have journalists and editors happy to help out. This for example happened in the case where AEGEE-Napoli contacted the magazine, eager to announce their new board to the Network and the things that they were working on.
This made Patricia Anthony, editor of European Events section, wonder if it is possible to announce all boards through our magazine? Her idea is to separate the announcement of boards from the Announce-L and create a new list with the only purpose of announcing boards. That could be for example be named Announce-Board-L. This way commissions, committees, and people who are generally interested in receiving such news in their inbox can subscribe and still stay informed about new boards.
Some might be scared that not enough people obtain the information about the change in their antenna, but this can be solved as well. As mentioned before, there is the great opportunity to announce such information in The AEGEEan and there are many possibilities to do so. Antennae can write the article themselves, or they can reach out to the team behind The AEGEEan stating their desire for such article, or if more people are in favor of the idea The AEGEEan can create a standard form that antennae can fill in, and the creative journalists of the magazine will then put it together as an article.
What do you think? Are you bothered by the large number of boards being announced through Announce-L since it is for many useless information? Would you like to see a change? Would you like it to stay the way it is? What is your opinion?
Written by Patricia Anthony, AEGEE-København