As always, there will be different proposals discussed during Agora Patra 2014. This year, there are ten of them (and one motion). Especially for all the delegates and other interested AEGEE-members, the AEGEEan has created a ‘Proposals for Dummies’ edition, where the proposals will be shortly summarized and – if needed – explained. What are the ideas, who suggested them, and what impact will they have? You can read all about it in the AEGEEan! After explaining the proposals dealing with the CIA, this edition will focus on the proposals dealing with topics like Financial Rules, Data Privacy, Honorary Members and the name of the European Boards Meeting (EBM).
With the first proposal, Mylène Jansen, Mathijs Waegemakers and Wietske Jousma on behalf of AEGEE-Enschede, want to raise the maximum height of the membership fees. Some locals are currently nearing the ceiling of the membership fee, or have already reached it. Because it can be expected that there will be a need for them to raise their fee, Mylène, Mathijs and Wietske propose to increase the maximum membership fee. Right now locals are obliged to ask for an exception from the Financial Director if they want to exceed the limit of 50 euros each year, but it would be easier if the ceiling would be raised from 50 to 70 euros. This way, locals don’t have to ask for an exception every year anymore, and factors like inflation and high density of local activities are taken into account too. Of course, increasing the ceiling does not immediately mean that the local fee too will be increased, but it will give locals the option to do so if they need to. The full proposal can be found here.
Another proposal dealing with the General Financial Rules has been submmited by David Garcia Rodriguez, Ilona Leonova and Olga Nevmerzhitskaya on behalf of the Audit Commission. They propose a series of changes to help antennae do their accounting, ease transitions during treasurer’s changes, help keeping uniform financial reporting and ensure proper records-keeping and tracking of financial activities of antennae. In practice, this means that a two rules will be added to the General Financial Rules, namely that each AEGEE Antenna has to keep all documents that contributed to the financial reports of the previous two financial years, and the Audit Commission will do a full audit of the financial reports and supporting documents of 30 random antennae each year. The full proposal can be found here.
The third proposal deals with the topic of data privacy. During Agora Rhein-Neckar the Agora requested the Comité Directeur to investigate the data privacy of AEGEE members within AEGEE, which was done by the Mediation Commission and the Comité Directeur. Based on the results, Maurits Korse, Claudio Armandi, Thomas Leszke, Tom Simons, Diana Tupchiienko and Anna Gots on behalf of the Mediation Commission and Comité Directeur, propose changes to the Data Privacy Policy Statement. The statement is extended to explicitly define what kind of data may be public, and what data should be internal or even internally confidential. Suggestions for the way data is stored are also given in the proposal. These suggestions and the full proposal can be found here.
Pavel Zbornik, on behalf of the Comité Directeur, proposes to change the name of the European Boards Meeting (EBM). In the past years, the EBM went through a reform which changed its concept, but the name has stayed the same. The word ‘Boards’ in it could be misleading and create the opinion that the event is only meant for boards, but this is not the case. Pavel therefore suggests changing the name into European Planning Meeting (EPM), because during the event the Strategic Plan is drafted. The full proposal can be found here.
Last but not least, it is proposed that there will be a Charter of Honorary Members added to the Statutes of AEGEE-Europe. The articles in this Charter describe what honorary members are, the rights they have, who is eligible for the honorary membership, how they can get nominated, which bodies have nomination rights and how they will get awarded with their honorary membership. The full proposal can be found here.
Written by Svenja van der Tol, AEGEE-Nijmegen