Meeting Minutes - March 21st, 2011

8:00pm Refreshments & Networking

8:13 2nd Batch of Arrivals

8:21 Meeting Start

8:22 Agenda:

We have 3 pending projects, plus:

- Earth Hour

- Pending New Members

- Current Member Profiles

- Twestival: Twitter Festival

- Caribbean Carnival Night

- Website

For a total of 8 Topics Allocated for tonight - with a strict timetable!

8:23 Introduction of Visitors

8:25 Member Profiles:

In 2-3 minutes, selected members share:

What I do.

What I want to do.

Who I want to meet.

We had three Rotaractors share in this meeting, working in fields as diverse as Public Relations, Healthcare Consulting, and Healthcare ICT (we had two members that work in different departments of the same organization).

People that this week's members want to meet:

- Hala Gorani, (Twitter: @HalaGorani) from CNN;

- People that have volunteered for legitimate organizations in Vietnam & Thailand (where one of our members is looking to volunteer for a few weeks)

- Someone who works for the UN (for one of our members to talk to about possible career and education paths, and what it is like to work for the organization.)

- People interested in hiring PR/Advertising personnel.

Topics from the profiles included PR, 3rd party influencers (though not in the negative sense that wikipedia takes the term to mean!). The University of Arizona, their Business Economics & Marketing majors, and their NCAA basketball team which is doing great this season, and the WTO.

For the whole profiles you'll have to come to a Rotary meeting and see it for yourself:) But feel free to email us if you are in contact with any of the people listed in the "Who I want to meet" section.

8:39 Update on Caribbean Carnival Night;

This will be Rotary's 3rd annual carnival night. We've moved it from July to April-May for better weather. Location: Meydan

Rotaractors can help by organizing parts of the silent auction to benefit Senses: Last time we raised over AED40,000 for Senses; we want to outdo ourselves.

Rotaractors can bring friends, family, must RSVP before end of April so we can let Meydan know how many are coming. We can fit practically limitless amounts of people in this room, we just have to know that you're coming!

Rotaractors can also help by coming in a few hours early to help decorate.

8:49 Pending Projects:

8:50 Fashion Show Update Khadra & Sevan on 21st May (mother's day)

Met with Mall of the Emirates for sponsorship for models and advertising and tickets.

8:51 Discussion about PR strategy.

8:59 The Extraordinary Entrepreneurial Mind Update - Varun, Faiqa, Karim,

We've ALMOST got the venue. Beautiful place, and this would include Food, AV, and they know of the Senses school. We're targeting April 30th.

Next Steps: Venue->Date->Event Flow

Takeaway: We need a database of possible speakers to chose

Here's a Google Spreadsheet to start off our database: [LINK REDACTED]

An Excerpt from Cameron Herald's 2010 TEDxEdmonton talk, "Let's raise kids to be entrepreneurs"

9:07 "Wild Peeta" - two brothers, one of whom works for the RTA, came up with this concept and have been doing some awesome stuff marketing-wise, using social sites adn not paying a penny. They're doing fusion shwarmas.

9:09 'Pay it Forward' Update

We're waiting on this. Ashkay is in Switzerland, but the thing is with Rotary for now. However, we all worked really hard on this, and we'll look at other hotels.

TODO: Followup.

9:10 discussion on possibilities for the future of this project.

9:14 Pinning New Members

We're doing the go-karting on Saturday, but it's jam packed for some of our important Rotaract leadership so we'll move the Pinning ceremony to next Monday.

9:15 Discussion about membership in general.

9:17 Testival; tweet ups; a charity with a fixed day where people just get together somewhere.

This time its for the benefit of the Dubai Autism Center, a free social gathering. CISCO is donating products. People come to the venue, eat and drink, and 50% of all the food & drink prices go to charity. @dubaitwit festival 7pm Thurs. Intercon. (Twitter tag may be wrong!)

9:18 Website:

We're growing to the point where we're putting on real full-on events, raising awareness - its time we put up a full featured website with past events, photos, etc.

9:20 Discussion about Rotaract Jumeirah FB page. Mehdi volunteers to lead the Website Development.

9:22 Call for Sharing.

In this sections, members share whatever links, updates, or news they have about things that Rotaract can do, link to, or help.

9:23 DuPlays Briefing; in the US you have leagues that compete for charity; we could do that with DuPlays Dubai. They have sports on 7-10pm 6 days a week.

9:26 Final Call for Sharing.

9:26 Meeting End