800p Most of the people have arrived.
818p Meeting start.
818p Sebastion introduces himself; he was in Rotaract for 9 years; was in Ghenna (in the West of France) and in - he's working in an office as a finance manager commuting Dubai Abu Dhabi.
819p Others introduce themselves; Habib works in Mina Corp doing Restructuring, IPOS and stuff in Abu Dhabi and working inresearch doing reports for investors. Studied in Tunisia before going to Paris, and has been here 4 months.
Hayet from Ghen; 4 years in Dubai; PR consultant for Flyshman Hellard (an American consulting company) bheen in and out in the region for the last 7 years; did all studies in Lyon and learned Arabic in Syria; been a while that I"ve been out of France. I'm a new member in Rotaract doing PR & Social Media. (We created a new committe called PR & Social Media).
821p - We have a facebook page and when you connect as an Admin you connect as being the page itself.
823p - Josh talks about himself.
824p - Karim; working with an interior design company; trained as a mechanical engineer. Q: is that work why you travel so much to Saudi? Yes - with work; purchasing, etc. etc. etc.
826p - Faica; been coming to Rotaract meetings since August, was inducted recently and is now the treasurer, works as an investment analyst, just took her CFA Level 2 exam.
828p Mathieu; professional development director for the upcoming year; doing lots of professional development right now. I was working for Total, I resigned last week to start a new job as an operation manager for a Japanese company where I will have much more responsibility.
829p - Mehdi, has been in Dubai for 4 years. Says he: "I'm getting bored. . . you might notice that I'm doing a lot for Rotaract. . . well, I'm getting a bit bored. I'm studying for my masters. working a full time job, and the president of Rotaract Jumeirah. (Officially that's the 1st of July that I will become president.) The outgoing president is on vacation, so we had an early handover, but at the end of June we'll have an official dinner with our Rotaract sponsor." (That is a lose transcription)
831p - We have a great team this year. The Rotaractors describe how awesome Khadra is in response to Sebastian asking, "Who's Khadra?" And then started talking about how awesome everybody on the team is.
Mehdi says that:
- Khadra wants us all to volunteer for anything related to community service, either helping other associations, or going to Senses school and making the children smile (well, actually, they make us smile), and Ramadan is coming up so there is lots of charity possibilities.
- Khadra is very motivated, and we need to put objectives on everything; she's thinking of an objective of a certain number of hours for our club to volunteer. The idea is to total the number of hours on the website. FOr all the committees, we need to think about optimistic objectives.
[- Josh add's a goal in his head: he wants to see all the members have LinkedIn profiles and link their names in club minutes to their Linked-In profile, as well as make it a criteria for new membership that people have a LinkedIn account. Future Opportunities in this area for ProDev include:
- Have a roundtable discussion on how to promote yourself professionally in the digital age: Should you own your own domain name? Should you use LinkedIn? Should you have a website? What is tasteful? How much information should you share, and how much should you withhold?
- Formulate a list of best (or at least, 'good') practices, and then followup with Rotaractors to ensure that everyone in the club uses best practice. (This would be great to do with Rot. Dubai as well)
- The sell is that with Rotaract, you don't just develop best practices yourself, you have the entire community helping you (and holding you accountable to using them).
- When the best practices are in a presentable form, we should post them on our website as a resource for everybody in the world. Title it something like "Recommendations for Personal Carriage online" - and name the authors, with brief Bio's (or links to LinkedIn or some other bio) so that people can see what we are doing.
- For professional development for example, we could say: "We want to have a speaker every 2 weeks." - or, we could say "Every week, one of us presents something that can give information to the members from their work." -
- Sebastien: In Rotaract Dubai we have "Discover me, discover my country." where someone presents on themselves and their country, and we have "Discover Me, Discover my work" where someone presents on their industry and role.
Mehdi: We want to work with Rotaract Dubai a lot, we want to improve our relationship with Rotary, and so on.
Rotaract Trivia: Immediate Past President is an official Rotaract role and title. The Immediate Past President plays an advisory role to the current president and administrative team, among other duties.
836p Sebastion
- On the 22nd of June we're doing a handover meeting with you guys if you want to come, and go to Jal hotel afterwards,
- On Sat. 24th we're doing a charity event in Jal Hotel. One guy is going to travel nearly all around the world in 80 days, we'll play with children, we'll go to Africa, India, Thailand, etc. It is a charity event to entertain children. We would like to come next week to present the project. It's 100Dh. per person with food, different entertainment from this guy; we'll have two sessions in the day. We already presented it to Rotary Dubai. Alex is going to play as well.
(Many of us are fans of Alex, we like his music:) He does gypsy swing:)
839: Update for the Entrepreneurship event on Saturday: we have more than 100 people registered online; 30 - we'll close it at 200. We have 28 different nationalities; the top three are India, France, and American. 4th is Pakistan.
Outline of the Extraordinary Entrepreneurial Mind event coming up this Saturday: we'll have raffles in between each speaker. We'll encourage peopel to donate to Senses, and in return theyl'll have a ticket for the raffle.
844p - Matheiu explains to Sebastian about the event, since Sebastian didn't get our email about it:)
845p - We need people to help set up beforehand at 9pm on Saturday.
Josh, Karim, Mehdi Tomell, Varun, and Matheiu are in. There's not that much to do: just prepare the goodie bags, and prepare the reception welcome area. When people get in there is a registration at the entrance; and then we'll start around 10:30, 10:45; then lunchtime from 1-1:45, and then session for 1 to 2 hours.
- Tomell is taking care of logistics for the speakers.
- Varun will be MC from beginning to end.
- Josh & Mehdi will be registration.
- We want to have two other people so we can have registration on both sides.
8:49 - You can still promote the event through your friends, etc. - And we will close the registration at 200 people.
" - Hayet: I think we should invite the chief editor of Gulf News, etc., etc., Because Matheiu is in charge, they can just ask for Matheiu. And Hayet will give him the names of the media that she will invite.
- 8:50; Social media promotion of the Entrepreneurship event? - We decided not to promote it so much on facebook because we want it to stay in the business community. I created a
LinkedIn Group: Rotaract Jumeirah on LinkedIn.
Karim is the first member of the group. For the future, we can all join there and share our business contacts.
[Josh: Can we use this as the official club directory?]
852p - We continue talking about our strategy and details for the entrepreneurship event. Faiqa will come straight from the airport to the event:) (Way to be committed:))
8:53 - Regarding the email varun sent: there is another entrepreneurship event on Wednesday, the 8th of June, We need to start participating in these events.
[Josh: That's a great idea! Perhaps one of the things that a Rotaractor agrees to do is to find events in our field of interest and try to attend those. Perhaps we could make that one of the criteria for membership - kind of like you're required to attend a certain number of lectures at university.]
856p - Business Cards
We had the idea of creating business cards. Mortuza helped a ton in this event - he registered on our Rotaract Dubai website; he's a freelance graphic designer, more than 30 years old so he can't technically be a Rotaractor, he's really motivated and just wants to help; so he's been doing a ton for us! He did our flyer, and he's helping with banners and a lot of design stuff.
857p - we clap for Faiqa and Matheiu and all the work they did on sponsors for the.
8:59 - Feedback on the fashion event:
Mehdi's tale:
"We weren't many members, and this event was really big. - we sold more than 250 tickets; and including media we had more than 250 people. We had two projectors; at the end I disconnected one of them because it was messy; I was the one taking care of moving the slides and every time we have to change slides between - I switched it off and helped Karim, who was in charge of the raffle items: we have the coupons, you have to write the number, I dragged Mathieu with me; 3 people doing it: and it was already messy: the paper with the raffle items we had to write the numbers; At the end, when we finished everything people asked for the items; and fortunately Nicki & Akshay stayed late: because some people left early and came back asking for the gifts, and others left without taking their gifts."
- Then what we should do for the Entrepreneurship event is give the gifts on stage; straight away to get your gift.
908p: Back to the business cards: Mehdi did a design in Word.
If we're going to make it we have to make it on recycled paper (and we have to write it down if we do that)
- Quotations; on the back we can have it all red; - and put in "Made out of recycled paper" and a
QR code.
- Mehdi has a business card from a guy who works for Google, and that has a QR code on the back of it. They are the first people I've seen in Dubai apart from me (Josh) and Mehdi that use
QR Codes. Good for them;)
910p General Meeting End.
920p Begin Finance Meeting
Attendees: Faiqa (Treasurer), Mehdi (Upcoming President), Josh (Upcoming Secretary), Habib.
We are really happy to have Faiqa taking care of club finances. We made a "profit" of around 30,000 Dh. (Faiqa will update you on the exact figure when she has a chance to track down the accounts) that we can give to Senses from the event.
10:20p End Finance Meeting
Note on whether Rotaract members should pay for events that Rotaract is sponsoring:
Mehdi: I think Rotaractors should be the first to support the fundraising events we are going to. Our Rotary club can be counted on to be the first to donate to a good cause; we should be too.
Habib: I think it is in bad taste to ask Rotaractors, who are already donating their time, to be required to donate money as well for the charity events that we are doing. We donate time, others donate money.
Josh: It is normal practice in the non-profits I have been involved in in the USA for volunteers to get into events for free. That is understandable because they are putting in time and effort. However, at the fashion show I was really happy when Rotaractors paid for our own tickets just like everyone else.
- We don't have to do this, but I believe that by going one further than the usual non-profit organization: we put our money where our mouth is.
- If we are paying, then we are not asking anybody else to do things that we would not do. Since Rotaract is a club for young professionals, the members should generally have the means to contribute, so there should be no hardship involved. It is just a question of suitability. And I believe it is suitable for people.
- I volunteer to act as a middleman for anyone who has a different viewpoint on this subject, so that we can build consensus and so that they don't have the fiery weight of the upcoming president & his strong opinion bearing down on them in the discussion:)
"Service Above Self"
