2022-01-26 University of St Andrews Students’ Association — Ents Committee Meeting

Those present Ryan Delaney, Bella Zeff, Sam Lane, Alan Chodyniecki, Andrew Barron, Kian Cross, Will Jamieson, Phil Hulse(joined 4:30pm for 10 minutes)

Absent Tala Mencej, Lucy Brook

Date 26th January 2022 4:17pm–4:57pm

The money has been approved for the Dante upgrade. Sam has obtained three quotes and passed these on. If these are acceptable, we should have the equipment by the middle of February.
Alan is waiting on a reply from the Design Team regarding photography.
A movie night is planned provisionally for Sunday 6th February.
The following points were discussed with Phil:
- We are still waiting for more barcodes — Phil will try and remember to sort this.
- The light switch in tech box is still missing buttons — Phil is aware of this.
- We need another hard drive for Ents PC — the current one is almost full and we need to be able to record video from the camera.
- Phil has emailed the Byre regarding the radios that are for sale.

Catwalk is on the 9th February, 9pm – midnight.
The runway needs to be safe and usable by 10am on Tuesday for rehearsals, so it will probably need building on Monday night.
They want to hang mirror balls in 601 and StAge, and t-shirts in 601. We might need to borrow equipment from the Byre to rig this.
There will also be projections and confetti.

Standard venue update from Andrew.
The Ents PC mouse needs taking back from the bar.
We are still waiting for an Ethernet patch from Rehearsal Room to tech box. Based on how long jobs are currently taking, it may not be done until March.

The Union has been advertising a full-time paid technical role, but so far there have been no adequate candidates.
A new job description has been written, which — compared to the previous one — was considered to be more acceptable to Ents.
In the mean time, it has been suggested by the Union's management that Ryan could take the role on a part time basis: 20 hours per week.
There were no objections to Ryan in particular taking such a role, however, there were some questions raised regarding whether this would interfere with his role as Convener. Queries were raised regarding how his work as Convener would be clearly separated from that of the paid role.
Queries were also raised about how the dynamic of Ents may be affected, with essentially one Ent being paid at an event to supervise other Ents, who are there voluntarily and doing a broadly similar job.
In response to questions raised regarding the purpose of the new role, it appears to be in order to ensure health and safety regulations are adhered to and that the venue is safe for customers, volunteers, and staff.
It is expected that the person carrying out the new role will receive some form of training in order to allow these duties to be fulfilled.
Queries were raised as to why volunteers could not instead receive any necessary training to ensure that the venue is safe for customers, volunteers, and staff. In response to this, it was pointed out that many Ents had already received such training in previous years.
It was also pointed out that there are many voluntary organisations carrying out high-risk work, and so it is certainly not unprecedented for voluntary groups to operate to a high safety standard.
Queries were raised as to how exactly a part time role could address the liability concerns, seeing as far more than 20 hours of work takes place in the venue and that therefore it could not all be supervised by the person in the paid role.
A suggestion was made that a similar structure to the University's Ambassador scheme could be used. That is, roles are voluntary until a certain level of proficiency is reached, at which point the role is paid. Still, questions were raised as to why payment is necessary at all, and how many paid roles would be available.
Ryan will take this feedback to the Union's management and discuss alternatives, such as sharing the role amongst other Ents or further training for volunteers.