Unigames September Ordinary General Meeting 22/09/2025

tags: committee meeting 2025

Attending:

Gen Allen, Lucy Auckland, Anna Bailey, Jack Bariss, Connor Brennan, James Brierley, Murray Buchan, Jeremy Butson, Olivia Christiansen, Mani Dashti, Ella Dillon, Jack Douglas, Oscar Gates, Lewis Graham, Methul Gunaratne, Scarlet Hannah, Taylor Home, Alexander Knowles, Chris Leak, Nene Mars, Kynan Nguyen, Lexie O'Brien, Ash Sanctis, Jackie Shan, Zoe Wallin.

Meeting Scheduled: 2:00pm

Meeting Open: 2:07 pm

This meeting started under Committee of the Whole with 20 Ordinary Financial Members. By about 2:20pm we were over quorum with an attendance of 22 Ordinary Financial Members.

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Welcome to Country

• We would like to begin by acknowledging the Traditional Owners of the land on which we meet today, the Whadjuk of the Noongar Nation and pay our respects to Elders past and present.

General Updates

• In the past month we've run Roleplay 4 Life which was really successful, we just had Quiz Night and that was also awesome
• Financial Updates:
  • Guild Account Balance: $6,278.86
  • CommBank Account Balance: $3,006.15
  • Total Balance: $9,285.01
    • We are waiting on Quiz Night money and SPG money
• Major upcoming events: Relay For Life

Agenda Items

• Constitutional amendments
  • Please be aware that Lorenzo and Anna withdrew their submitted constitutional amendment before the meeting, so there will be no discussion or voting on these amendments during the meeting
• Taylor and Jackie's amendment is still in the agenda although they did withdraw the previous version of their amendment and replace it with a new one that includes changes made on the previous one
• General summary from Taylor about the amendment, what it's about and how it's different from the old one:
  • Part A is changes to the definition section, adding SOC and making grammatical changes
  • Part B is rewording the resignation section, says when resignation takes effect (unless otherwise specified by the person who is resigning)
  • Part C changes vacancies, there is no longer a difference between executive positions and non-executive positions, they can be appointed internally or externally for both
  • Clarification on IPP, subject to the same term limits as rest of committee
  • Making it clear that the preference for submission of absentee votes is to a designated officer and secretary is a fall back
  • Shuffling in election set up, change to wording on opening nominations
  • Clarification on how SGMs are called
  • ROs will be appointed ahead of general meetings and then be ratified at the general meeting
  • Codifying that nominations remain open until the general meeting
  • Specifying how tie breaking works in voting
  • Requiring secret ballot
  • Specifying how motions are handled by circular
  • Specifies that there are multiple bank accounts now
    • "Constitutional amendment!" - Jackie, when asked for comment
• Discussion begins on Taylor and Jackie's amendment
• Clarifying question from Oscar on point 8.5.4: is that meant as a clarification or example?
  • 8.5.4. If the tie cannot be resolved by vote, the election shall be determined by a fair random process (i.e. highest result rolling the same d20)
  • Taylor: It's meant to be an example
  • Oscar: Would e.g. work better there than i.e.?
  • Taylor concedes on this and a friendly amendment is made to change i.e. to e.g.
• Voting begins
  • For voting we have quorum at 22 Ordinary Financial Members
• Motion to enact Taylor and Jackie's constitutional amendments:
  • 24 yes, 1 abstention
• Donald Sutherland was nominated for life membership twice by five different people, you can find their reasoning below:
• Motion submitted by Connor Brennan and seconded by Chris Leak, written in part by James Taylor
  • As per 5.4.1.1 of the constitution, Honorary Life Membership may be conferred by a two-thirds majority of a General Meeting upon any eligible person who has performed outstanding service to Unigames.
  • Donald Sutherland has performed outstanding service to Unigames via his work in the creation and maintenance of the Unigames website, discord bot and the equipment for Roleplay for Life. Donalds exceptional work has provided the club with an important resource in its website which has helped to recruit and share information with new members and to help the club operate on a technical level, such as using the website to sign new members up and to manage the library borrowing system. 
  • Donald has continued to maintain both the website, the discord bot, and the equipment for Roleplay for Life which is work that has far exceeded any expectations of the club in terms of hours spent and in technical ability. Donald has done all of these wonderful things for the club without reward and I believe that no one can argue against the fact that Donald has performed an outstanding service to Unigames and thus should be rewarded with Honorary Life Membership.
• Motion submitted by Gen Allen and seconded by Taylor Home.
  • Donald Sutherland has done some incredible things for our club, and I believe that the work he has done merits a life membership.
  • Donald purpose built the Unigames website from the ground up, in a way which allows the club to function at the caliber it does. Specifically, having the ability to sign up new members and have a database of said members accessible online to committee and gatekeepers has saved us countless hours of paperwork and excel spreadsheets, and having an online library system has been invaluable. 
  • The library is the backbone of Unigames, and having a website which not only lists all our library items, has tagging functions which allow for specific search and differentiation between games and books, but also allows for borrowing of games is absolutely incredible. This has allowed for better member access to what is in our library, better committee tracking of items and has made day to day clubroom activity immeasurably easier.
  • Not only has Donald built the website and continues to help maintain it to this day, but he also has set up the infrastructure to allow for website maintenance to continue after his involvement in club, through webkeepers. 
  • This is not to mention all Donald has done for the magic community in the club, and his continued involvement in much of the club’s events well beyond his time on committee, like the provision of infrastructure for annual event roleplay for life.
  • In my opinion, and in the opinion of Taylor Homes who is seconding this motion, this is more than enough to qualify Donald for life membership.
• Donald is unfortunately absent today but he sent Nene a speech to be read in his absence:
  • Hey there everyone, Donald here. I've got a few people I want to thank. For the most part, I'm going to acknowledge particular groups, with a few individuals. Apologies if I miss anyone - if I included everyone I wanted to, you'd be here until midnight (and no-one wants that).
  • First of all, I wish to thank all who are attending today for considering me for Life Membership. It means so much to me that I was even nominated, and I appreciate it immensely.
  • I also want to thank the people who made me feel welcome in my first year of the club, and who allowed me to be on committee from 2015 to 2019. These were formative years for me that shaped me into who I am today. I am so grateful to all of you.
  • The magic community is near and dear to my heart, so I want to give a special shout out to everyone that's a part of it, and all committee members that have helped carry the torch/burden of managing the magic community. Shout outs in particular go to Winslade, Alaura, Alistair, Gibbi, and Ash.
  • Miscellaneous special shout outs I want to give go to: Taylor, Jackie, Jen, Cam, Steven, Ben Reynolds, Emerald, and Frames.
  • Finally, my last thank you goes to Gozz. The main reason for this nomination is for my contributions to the website, but the truth is that the website wouldn't exist in its current state without Gozz. While developing it, Gozz was avaiable to answer questions and troubleshoot. Despite me saying I would move the website over to UCC's servers, the website is still currently being hosted on a server that Gozz is paying (and has refused compensation) for, and Gozz has lent equipment used for every Roleplay for Life in recent memory. In my opinion, he deserves recognition just as much as me. Thank you very much Gozz.
  • Thanks again to everyone here. I hope to do a lot more with the website and with Unigames into the future.
• Everyone applauds for Donald despite his absence
• Motion to grant life membership to Donald Sutherland
  • Passes unanimously with 26 yes votes!

General Business

• No Blood Bowl League this semester, we have run three seasons of it in three semesters (starting semester 1 last year)
• It is a massive job for commissioners to uphold a league like this, committee is going to learn how to assist how to do this but we need time to do this
• Start of next year we will hopefully be running a new Blood Bowl League with more assistance from committee
• Taylor: One of the things I had in the amendment last month was taken out this month, some stuff about basically more code of conduct-y and general standards for how we run general meetings and elections, I'm hopefully going to work on putting some of that together
• Ideally how I'd like it to work is as a regulation that then gets ratified by a general meeting, this would cover things like the privacy standards and the verification standards for an electronic voting system or making sure it's clear on how to announce each election, something that would be a lot more flexible than being in the constitution but has more input from the general membership

Meeting closed: 2:37 pm